HTML5 Game Jam
Last week I participated in the HTML5 Game Jam, an initiative of SPIL games and Google. The contest was held in both SPIL games in Hilversum, a ten minute bike ride from my house, and simultaneously at Google’s office in downtown San Francisco. It started saturday at 10:00 am and ended sunday at 6:00 pm. Who wanted could stay during the night.
The day started with a couple of talks by people experieced with html5 games. Then we had to form teams. I quickly formed a team with Peter van der Zee and Kornel (pornel). We decided to remake a classic from the eighties: Syndicate. Since we all knew our JavaScript and html5, but also were bad designers, we had a little problem. Design is a crucial part of a good game. I offered to do the design.
While Kornel and Peter were working on the game engine, I made some characters and rockets with my best design I could, which isn’t much. I spend most of the time creating isometric tiles. These could be used in the freeware Tiled Map Editor. I also wrote a JavaScript utility to convert the xml output of the editor to json, which could be used in the game. At around 3:00 am I went home for some sleep. Kornel and Peter kept working and slept a couple of hours at the SPIL office.
At 3:00 pm we had to wrap up and with twelve other contestants, demo our game. One hour later, the winners were announced. It was quite exciting because many people who’ve looked at the game were impressed (especially when we turned on wave mode :-). We ended up third place. The winners were:
1. MonkeyFortress by Tom Hastjarjanto
2. Multi-player social tetris by Peter Nederlof and Jelle
3. Enterprise by Pornel, Peter, Edwin
Since it’s a html5 contest, you have to open the pages in a modern browser. At this moment, the latest Safari or Chrome browsers work best.
We could each pick a book or analog game from a stack.
Here are some photo’s people took at the event: Our team programming, giving the demo, another one giving the demo, our team with prices and the winner with his price, a Samsung Galaxy tablet.
Peter also wrote about the event. The game is still in development, please take a look: