Game Dev House: A New Approach to Workshops

In this article, game developer Erin Margolis discusses why she feels game design workshops are still useful experiences in an age full of online courses and describes her recent experience running a game jam at Game Dev House.

In this information-filled age, there is no lack of access to articles, tutorials, and courses. However, there is a lack of human empathy and people who can listen and understand one another. Workshops are a playing ground where gamers and players can connect and practice use of what skill sets they have, but more importantly gain social interaction and share personal experiences.

Anyone can find all of the information that they need on their own online, but there is a synergy in forming communities. Community, in the truest sense of the word, is about growing and sharing.

Articles that inspire, new software that helps to guide a person’s vision, group discussions that engage where others can be heard: This is all community. It’s a place of substance and can be a powerful place for people to create alongside one another and advance to the next step.

Game Dev House ran a game jam on June 29th this past year where we had over 20 attendees. It was a free event that took place at Monmouth Mall in Eatontown, NJ and was advertised for a month. There were 2 guest speakers, lectures, game demos, and prizes. Our main event turned out great in getting people who did not know each other to work in small teams and make a project idea which they presented in front of the entire group.

After hanging out with this group for most of the day and getting to know them, I was able to assign them a role on the team and get them to collaborate and build. We had storyboard conceptions, character creators, presenters, and illustrators. It varied a bit per team.

It was really cool to see the teams working together and having a great time! This was a foundational starting point for the attendees to experience game development with other people.

After the workshop was over, the attendees expressed a wide range of interests in different aspects of the game development process. Since their interests were as varied as their experience and age, I surmised that it would be most beneficial to get an online group going where separate sects could be formed addressing each of their goals and needs. It seemed to be that this group of people liked hanging out and socializing together, but it would be easier to teach them through online coaching and or small classes.

Ultimately, it is enjoyable instructing both online and onsite classes and connecting with many different students. Game Dev House facilitates the bringing together of developers and students who are looking for more than a conventional approach to learning. The combination of international ideas, home-grown games, and student projects has proven to do more than we expected! The culture has been free to define who they want to be and been given a platform of recognition. This builds up the individual to pursue whatever goals and dreams that they have outside of conventional game development, and we support that!

Erin Margolis is a NJ resident and has been working as a game developer since 2005.  She is passionate about game development and its impact on the betterment of society.  Game Dev House was launched on 10/31/12; ironically, the day after Superstorm Sandy.

Is HTML5 Ready for Prime Time? (Part III)

In Part I, game developers Raymond Jacobs and Tom Novelli take a look at HTML5's capabilities and dispel common misconceptions about JavaScript.  In Part II, they propose a solution to HTML5's nightmarish audio problems. In Part III, they give a rundown of other issues that may be encountered when making HTML5 games.

WebGL

One of the principle buzzwords in the HTML5 movement, WebGL holds great promise, the ability to use the native graphics API for 3D games. Our experimentation however, has shown webGL is /not/ ready for prime-time today. The fact that I can run an OpenGL example program written in C++, and on the same machine fail to run the same example written in WebGL, means there are still issues. Damn those proprietary NVidia/ATI drivers! WebGL also has a steep learning curve, compared to Canvas. That all being said, if these issues can be overcome, WebGL should be a very viable option for 2D and 3D graphics middleware - hopefully by year's end.

Annoyance: WWW Baggage

Browsers support a ton of document-formatting features (CSS, HTML, XML, SVG, etc) that aren't terribly useful for Canvas and WebGL games, and are probably best avoided as much as possible. A simple game requires only a half-page of HTML as a container to load the Javascript. Unfortunately if for some reason you know nothing about web design, you'll have to learn basic HTML and CSS in order to create JS games. It's necessary for landing pages and UI dialogs anyway.

Because text rendering is awkward in Canvas and WebGL, you'll probably want to use HTML for in-game text (notifications, character dialogues, etc). The trick is to use "pointer-events: none" (CSS) to prevent the text from blocking mouse clicks.

Using CSS "the right way" can be tedious and pointless. When in doubt, use and abuse "position: absolute" with reckless abandon!

XML being a close cousin of HTML, one would think browsers would have excellent XML facilities. To the contrary, we have found them to be awkward and sometimes buggy, so we converted our old XML assets to JSON.

Also, you'll probably need to install a web server program such as Apache. You may be able to run your game by opening the HTML file on your hard drive (as a "file://" URL), but there are some arcane security restrictions that'll stump you, especially if you get into AJAX or WebGL.

Pitfall: Web Browsers are not 100% Compatible

There's always a catch; "cross-platform" is never seamless. Our advice is to support the top 3 or 4 browsers, and test your game on all of them regularly. Chrome and Safari are generally the best for games, and they both use the WebKit engine so they're nearly 100% compatible. Firefox is also good - better in certain respects - but be careful to avoid bleeding-edge features like "let [x,y] = point". IE and Opera require extra effort which may not be worthwhile for /serious/ games because better browsers are available for all devices. For simple casual games, on the other hand, supporting IE is easier and probably essential for commercial success.

If you're making phone/tablet games, beware: mobile browsers are different beasts.

Resource Packing and Loading

Unlike other platforms where you can zip everything up in an installer package, HTML5 requires a bit more effort. Atlas your sprites and sound effects, embed small HTML files in JSON, embed GLSL shaders if you're using WebGL, embed JSON files in JS, then combine and minify all your JS files. We automate the process using Make, PHP and NodeJS scripts, ImageMagick, LAME, and OggEnc.

Then, when your game starts up, pre-load all your resources (except perhaps music). We use async.js to ajax-fetch everything in parallel, then start the game loop.

AppCache (AKA Offline Mode) is a fairly easy way speed up pre- and re-loading (even for an online multiplayer game) if you keep it simple. Beware, it can go horribly wrong; read the highly entertaining Application Cache is a Douchebag article before you get too excited.

In the beginning, when you're running your game from your own machine, none of this matters. Do whatever works. Just be forewarned, if you finish an HTML5 game, resource loading issues could delay your release by a few days or weeks.

Summary

The potential of making games in a single language that can seamlessly blend with existing web services, have all the trappings and simplicity of web development in free and open platform makes HTML5 very attractive from both development and availability angles.

Raymond Jacobs is the driving force behind Ethereal Darkness Interactive (EDIGames), a western Massachusetts indie developer focused on the Action/RPG genre. Their most notable game is Morning’s Wrath, a fantasy RPG released in 2005. 

Tom Novelli is a game developer and musician in western Massachusetts. He is currently porting Morning's Wrath to HTML5.

October 2013: Story Frameworks

Recently, game developer Kaolin Fire posed this question in the Game Writers Facebook group:

Do you think there's value in adding a story to a dead-simple puzzle/arcade game (a la Tetris)? If so, where/how would you put it? An optional menu link? A "joining our intrepid adventurer" before the game starts that's skippable? Maybe just in advertising copy/the game description?

To which Altug Isigan responded:

If you have a strategic system that frames the tactical gameplay, then you have already something that functions similar to the frame story technique. İmagine that after every round of Tetris you gain a Tetris token which you use to complete a puzzle, lets say building sort of a key that lets you escape from the Tetris universe. In that sense, many games tend to use multi-layered gameplay architectures in order to achieve a frame story effect. 

I've played several casual games where the story seems to be sandwiched between some gameplay.  Or seemed somewhat ludicrous. 

• What kind of techniques do you have for stories in casual puzzle games? 
•  Do these stories feel fulfilling to you?  
• What's the best way to tackle this issue?

Kaolin Fire is VP of product development at Blindsight. He's been developing software independently since the days of DOOR games, not counting hours entering machine code from the back of COMPUTE!'s Gazette. He's had fiction and poetry published in Strange Horizons, Crossed Genres, and Murky Depths, among others; has taught computer science at high school and college levels; dabbles in cover art and cover design; and obsesses about the human brain.

Altug Isigan is a scholar at the Eastern Mediterranean University, Department of Radio-TV and Film, in sunny Famagusta, Cyprus, where he is writing a dissertation on narrative in games. You can read more of his work at his blog, the Ludosphere. 

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

Is HTML5 Ready for Prime Time? (Part II)

In Part I, game developers Raymond Jacobs and Tom Novelli take a look at HTML5's capabilities and dispel common misconceptions about JavaScript.  In Part II, they propose a solution to HTML5's nightmarish audio problems.

Audio

So I’m gonna come right out and say it, audio in HTML5 sucks. There is no reason to dance around the issue. Before I go any further, let me assure you, you can get a decent audio experience in HTML5, but here are some issues you’ll face:

• Audio format issues: 

Certain browsers can only play certain audio formats, this means you will have to deploy at least two audio formats (currently .mp3 and .ogg). Blame software patents.

• Bad Information: 

There is an API to ask a browser what kind of audio formats it can play; sadly this API is horrible with such decoder support responses as “maybe”. Across the myriad of browsers, we’ve also found the API to outright lie about what it can and can't support.

• Cruddy Implementations: 

Some browsers, even though they swear they can play a format; their decoder/stream implementations are just broken. High start latencies, bad audio quality, incorrect timing. Some browsers (or operating systems) seem to implement the bare minimum just so they can say they support a format.

• High start latency: 

If you load a sound file via http and hit play, by the time the sound has downloaded the moment has passed. This is okay for background music, but it's unacceptable for sound effects action games.

This all sounds really hard!

Audio is the #1 problem with HTML5 today; thankfully a lot of smart people have come together, and technology is emerging that makes HTML5 audio at least functional, if not feature-rich.

Audio Sprites to the rescue!

Just as the Atlas is a 2D packing solution for images, to reduce loads of http calls and nominal overhead; the Audio Sprite is a 1D solution for sounds. We took our lead from the ground work done by Remy Sharp. The basic idea is that you pack your sound effects into a single audio file, with a half-second of padding (silence) between each sound to allow for timing irregularities. An accompanying .json file lists all of the files contained in the audio sprite, and their start and end positions.

With audio sprites, you only need to convert one file to ogg and mp3, and you only need one http request to download it.

• Latency b-gone! 

The main benefit of having one large sound file is that we avoid streaming issues with small audio files. The browser preloads the single audio file, then seeks to the beginning of each sound effect when called for, with minimal latency. Our only issue is that we need to monitor and stop the stream after the sound ends but before the next one begins.

• “What about bad format detection?” 

This is still somewhat of an issue; we’ve found that you can favor MP3 and get coverage on most browsers; but at the time of writing it would not be a bad idea to include an MP3-or-OGG setting in your options menu. Also, make sure you're doing it right; a lot of people cut corners in format detection.

• “This all sounds like a bit much to handle!” 

Yeah it’s a pain; it took us weeks to develop the necessary tools and tricks. If you’ve got a project in the works and need some help, drop us a line at this e-mail.

By the way, there is hope. Most web browsers already support the new Opus format and/or the spiffy new OpenAL-based WebAudio API. It's probably just a matter of time before they all do.

Raymond Jacobs is the driving force behind Ethereal Darkness Interactive (EDIGames), a western Massachusetts indie developer focused on the Action/RPG genre. Their most notable game is Morning’s Wrath, a fantasy RPG released in 2005. 

Tom Novelli is a game developer and musician in western Massachusetts. He is currently porting Morning's Wrath to HTML5.