Tomorrow morning I’m once again flying to San Francisco for another week-long, life-changing experience that will be called the “Game Developers Conference”. It will be my fifth GDC, yet in some ways I feel very strongly that it will be another “first GDC” for me in the sense that I feel I’ve started a radically new era in my life. I actually do the things I talk about, even the stuff I consider to be crazy-awesome like community building and making games on a regular basis with with friends new and old.

In Boston Game Jams I have a strong focal point for my personal work. It gives me a central fire around which all my other passions can burn. This in turn gives me a hook for showing my passion in what I talk about and helps me explain who I am to new people whom I meet at GDC.

I hope this will make it easeir to form and develop meaningful connections with people at GDC this year. The main reason I go to GDC (and I’m sure I speak for many others in saying this) is to meet really creative, open-minded, and motivated people who will inspire me to stay in the driver’s seat on my journey through life and with whom I can share my own inspiration.

In a way, this is the first GDC where I feel confident that I can give back to others as much as they can give to me (at least individually). I’m really looking forward to a finding out how that affects my GDC experience. I suspect this may be an important part of this new era in my life, and I approach San Francisco with open arms and the intent to embrance the unknown wonders that GDC has in store for me (and vice versa) this year.

Update:
Here are the slides, which I’ve posted on my Boston Game Jams site: HTML5 Game Development with Akihabara

I’m presenting Akihabara and a quick tech overview of HTML5 technology (as it relates to game development) at the August Boston Indies meetup tonight at the Asgard in Central Square, Cambridge, MA (starting at 7pm, in the back room).

When Boston Indies started last summer, I told Scott Macmillan (the event’s coordinator) that I’d love to give a talk at Boston Indies some time when my interests and knowledge set matches well to the interests of the BI crowd. So a few months ago, as Darius and I started learning and using the Akihabara HTML5-based game-engine, we signed up to give a talk about it because we see Akihabara as a good first step for understanding the relevance of HTML5 tech to game developers and because we think Aki can be a great tool for prototyping and game-jamming, which are both strong interests in the Boston indie game-dev scene (as well as great passions of mine).

It’s been quite a challenge putting this presentation together. For one thing, it’s been many years since I’ve given a presentation to peers, so my base confidence level (from familiarity) is somewhat diminished. What’s more, this is the first time I’ve ever presented anything like this to my fellow game-devs. It took a lot of thought revision to (hopefully) find the right level of details at which to show of HTML5 technologies and to find the right balance between focusing on Akihabara and explaining the big picture of HTML5-based games and their development.

I think it’s turning into a pretty good talk, though. My hope is that people will at the minimum be more curious about or open-minded toward the potential of HTML5-based games. With any luck, three or four people will want to know more — a *lot* more — and thus will begin their great trek into the wild world of web-based game development. At the very least, hopefully more folks will consider using Akihabara for their next prototyping project or game jam (possibly this weekend, even).

Pre-show notes

Here are a few pre-show notes, for those of you who can’t make it tonight or like to read up a bit before you hear a talk about a new technology:

HTML5

• HTML5 is a new generation of web standards that are being actively adopted by all major browsers. Many of its features are already available in Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera.
  • IE is trailing behind, but IE9 promises to be a big catch-up, and Google’s ChromeFrame IE extension can be installed by users to make their IE act like Chrome (which has excellent HTML5 support) when a web page says it wants IE to render it like Chrome.
• HTML5 is a combination of new HTML (the core building blocks of web pages), JavaScript (the runtime code that browsers run to add custom dynamic behavior to web pages), and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, for visual layout and graphical design)
• Most HTML5 features are focused on allowing rich applications that run through native browser features alone: no plugins needed!
• A few key features:
  • Offline support (advanced caching, local database storage, and more)
  • Advanced CSS allowing for rich graphical styling without an over-abundance of graphics, which allows for rich graphical display via HTML tech, even on modern mobile devices
  • Canvas: a 2D drawing plane that allows for arbitrary graphics to be drawn quickly, via Javascript
• HTML5 is not supported by a single, large company — it’s more of a social contract
• HTML5 canvas element (which drives Akihabara — more on that below) works on:
  • Desktop: Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera
  • Mobile devices with webkit-based mobile browsers, such as Android and iPhone
• Read more (and play!):
  • Here’s a great presentation (built solely on HTML5 tech, no less): http://slides.html5rocks.com/
  • The overall-coolest site I’ve found to learn about and play with HTML5 technology is http://www.html5rocks.com/

Akihabara

• Akihabara is an all-Javascript game engine that uses the aforementioned HTML5 canvas element to draw 2D games
• Key features:
  • Animation, based on sprites
  • Simple image spriting – efficient for loading
  • Sound
  • Camera control (great for easy scrolling implementation)
  • Super-simple ASCII-based mapping
  • Simple image spriting
  • Animation, based on sprites
• Akihabara runs on all browsers with HTML5 canvas support, as listed above
• Read more (and play!)
  • Akihabara homepage (includes links to demos)
  • Akihabara beginners’ tutorial, written by me and Darius Kazemi

Want more?

I’ll provide more context and some discrete examples and demos of all of this tonight at Boston Indies, and of course, I’ll post an update with a link to the slides after the talk, probably tomorrow morning. It also occurs to me that it’s about time I start writing about HTML5 technology and game development on this blog, since it’s something I’ve been doing a lot of work with lately. So ping me if you don’t see more of that anytime soon.

I’m throwing a game jam with Alex Schwartz at the end of this month. We’re calling it the Immigration Jam, as the jam is meant to help raise community support for a good friend of ours’ immigration struggle.

We’ve seen a lot of excitement for the jam already from friends and other members of the local game-dev/hacker/artist community, so we’re looking forward to a great event. You can sign up here, if you’re interested in joining us. Anyone who’d like to try making a game from start to finish in a little over a day is welcome to come. Learners and beginners are most welcome!  =)

Read more about the event on its official page or in the original announcement email on the (relatively) new Boston Game Jams website.

At GDC this year, I had a chance to catch up a bit with a friend of mine, the amazing, multi-talented Elonka Dunin, and in doing so told her a bit about a game project I was in the early stages of developing. I also asked her to follow up with me a few months later to see how the project is going. I did so for a few reasons:

1. I figured in a few months I’d have a better idea of what form the project will take: web-based game? A series of prototypes? Single-player? Multiplayer? etc.
2. I know that sometimes when I stall on a project, simply knowing someone else is/will be checking in gives me a good kick in the pants to get back on the horse
3. It’s nice to keep in touch with friends. Duh.

We often call this kind of quick friendly status check-in a “ping”. Last weekend she kindly “pre-pinged” me to remind me that the official check-in would be happening today. Factor #2 is already in play, since that pre-ping (and today’s impending check-in) has prompted me to write in my blog again, which I’d been procrastinating for quite long enough!

Well, the short story is that the project I talked with people about at GDC is back-burnered, but the feedback and ideas I got from everyone with whom I talked about it was very helpful, and in part inspired me to look in different directions for my next steps as a game maker. So with that intro aside, here’s an update of what I’ve been working on.

Akihabara

At the game jam I co-hosted with Emily Daniels in April, I had the chance to try out the newly-released HTML5 game engine, Akihabara. It was a lot of fun to work with, and I’d love to see truly open tools like this used more often for game jams and eventually all forms of game development. Darius Kazemi felt much the same way, so he and I have teamed up to write a series of tutorials to teach people how to use Akihabara.

We’re targeting the tutorials at those with a working understanding of programming in general, but we’re trying to assume no prior knowledge of common game programming techniques. As such, we hope the tutorials will be useful to those looking to program their first game as well as those seeking to learn Akihabara, specifically.

The tutorial series starts here. We’re planning to write several more tutorials — mapping and camera concepts are next and coming very soon. By the end, we should have a full-functional (albeit simple) game, which we’re calling 8by5 (because it’ll be an “8-way shooter” build on HTML5 tech).

Game Jams

As I mentioned above, Emily Daniels and I co-hosted a game jam at the Sprout space in Davis Square (Cambridge, MA) back in April. The event was quite successful, and I think everyone enjoyed participating and seeing the interactive experiences that resulted as well as hearing about the process each team/participant went through to get there.

I’m currently planning another game jam, tentatively scheduled for some weekend in this coming July, but there are no details to announce yet.

The jams have their own official blog/website, too. We’re also hosting the Akihabara tutorials there and plan to add more tools resources there as time goes on, especially those that are useful for game jams.

Ruby/Rails

I still love working with Ruby on Rails as much as ever and it (along with some related Ruby techs like Sinatra) remains a really awesome way to build web apps large and small. The full release of Rails 3 is imminent and among other things it plays nicely with multiple Javascript frameworks right out of the box and allows for nigh-trivial integration with lightweight Rack apps.

I’m baking up a concept for a card-game-styled, data-driven, client-server game that uses Akihabara libraries and other HTML5 tech to demonstrate some of the awesome things we can do these days with these technologies to make good-looking, data-driven, Flash-free web games. Ideally, it’ll culminate in a set of tools (CSS + Javascript libraries + some nice example Rails/Sinatra code) that can be used to make stuff like this in 48 hours at a jam.

This weekend, Emily Daniels and I are co-hosting a game jam at the DINO/Sprout space in Davis Square. I’ve been really excited about this event; I am confident it will be awesome and will become the start of a great series of events for the greater “open, creative development” community. Details below:

About: Attendees will have approximately 22 hours to create, running 10am – 11pm on Saturday, April 24th and 10am – 7pm on Sunday, April 25th. Demos start at 7:30pm, and are open to the public.

Location: We are hosting this jam at the Sprout/DINO Space, located at:

339R Summer St.
Somerville, MA 02144
Google Map

It’s just outside of Davis Square on the Red Line, a couple blocks past the Rosebud Diner. It’s set back from the street, down the driveway to the right of 339 Summer Street; the “R” means “Rear.”

Equipment: We have free wifi, projector and screen, and a plethora of outlets/tools/junk to make stuff with.

Food: We’ll also we can take up a collection for whatever food people want to order, like burritos/subs/pizza. One of the attendees will also be “food jamming”, making tasty foods for us to eat! We’ll also have a small refrigerator, microwave, and toaster on location (maybe a toaster-oven, to

We’re also going to write about all the cool stuff people work on and post the resulting software on a blog after the event — more on that once it’s set up.

The event space and equipment comes courtesy of Emily Daniels and her startup, DINO Interactive Studios.

The event is open to whomever it appeals to — hope to see you there!

So… GDC 2010.

Every year, I find it so hard to write about GDC. It seems ironic, because I can think of few things that I could ever write more about. But I run into two problems each year: first, so many people already write about GDC, it can feel difficult to meet my desire to write something unique. Second, GDC is a place where a lot of ideas are thrown around, and I usually feel that for me they are the kinds of ideas that sit in the back of the mind and take a while to process. As such, it’s hard for me to know what I want to say about what I experienced at GDC.

But this year I realized that what I think about most after every GDC are the people I met and reunited with each year. I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: GDC is all about the people. Of course, all the ideas transferred at the sessions are delivered by people, but I’m thinking even more about what happens outside of the sessions.

When I think back to any given GDC, my memories are predominantly of the time spent between sessions: meeting new people, exchanging ideas informally, and developing our own kind of culture. GDC is a place where, as a new friend of mine said, (I have to paraphrase here) “Everyone is judged simply for who they are as an intellectual/artist/craftsperson and what they have to contribute to a conversation.” In many ways, that says it all.

At GDC, people just want to learn about what their peers are doing, to understand the nature of their work better, and to know what’s happening in the greater realm of game development beyond what they’ve seen from their own work in the past year or two. It’s a place where we can all challenge each other to think smarter, broader, and deeper about what we do.

And it’s also a time to form strong bonds with others. We bond quickly because we’re in a very particular kind of environment: it’s simultaneously a place where we’re surrounded by people with supportive viewpoints (they also love making games) and also a place where it becomes starkly clear just how special — or even alien — our pursuit is. After all: just outside the bounds of the conference and the many venues it overtakes, the world is still full of the normal mix of people. It’s a place where it isn’t normal to run into a stranger and have a two-hour conversation that forever changes your viewpoint on a major project or your entire profession.

But that all enhances the sense that GDC forms a magic bubble where even for the shy and/or introverted it’s okay to talk to strangers. It’s a place where others are interested in what we have to say and want to have a real conversation about it. For me, that’s a very important thing about GDC: it provides a golden opportunity to learn how to reach out to more people and broaden your perspective at the same time. I’m a somewhat shy extrovert, which means I love talking with people — and seek to do so regularly — but I often find it hard to initiate that interaction.

So for me, each year GDC is a great exercise for that skill of sucking up my long outdated emotional habit of feeling like no one will want to hear what I have to say or will understand me if they do. As Darius has often said, GDC can be a real confidence-booster, but that’s only true if you challenge yourself and persevere when things don’t go quite the way you hope they will. I’ve learned a lot about that in my four years of going to GDC, and I love that each year the conference provides both a great chance to grow that skill and a good measure of how far along my development has come.

For another perspective on GDC, I highly recommend this great series of posts that Matt Burns (aka Matthew Wasteland) wrote about GDC. He wrote them during the conference this year, which was his first GDC, so they provide a very raw and fresh perspective on the conference.

I feel the time has come to re-birth my blog anew. I’ve renamed it “Arty Ponderer”, a name I chose because it’s an anagram for my name, Darren Torpey, and because it seems a suitably ironic name for a blog where I intend to talk much more about what I do than what I merely think about. (I really love irony; I can’t help it.)

There are many reasons I’ve re-launched the blog. First and foremost: I needed to make what feels to me like a clean break from my blogging past. I’m proud of what I did on my old blog, The Designer’s Scroll, but in many ways I feel I never quite managed to crawl out of my shell with that blog. I never wrote exactly what I wanted, how I wanted. I didn’t show the whole me; my posts didn’t span all of my core interests.

I want Arty Ponderer (hereafter referred to as ArtyPon) to reflect all of my core interests: philosophy (a mix of “Western” and “Eastern”), people (developers, players, and other awesome folks), and games (of all types, though I am ever so fond of those new-fangled videogames). I also expect that I’ll throw in a dash of web-development-specific topics here and there, but much more so I will focus on the core problems, questions, and quandries that I’m struggling with as I explore the known and uknown worlds of games and game development. (Truth be told, I’m just not quite nerdy enough to want to dig too deep into any particular topic, anyway. I’m more of a sythesizer: I try to put ideas together to create great new things.)

I hope that others will join me in these journeys: I’m really not much of a do-it-alone kind of guy. Discussion, feedback, coordination, and cooperation are all intergral to how I work on creative projects. I’ve learned to not try to do anything truly alone, save for holding only my vision: that’s one torch I’ve got to hold onto myself. For everything else, including just how in the world I can make that vision a reality and how that vision will grow over time, I look to others both individually and as a community to help guide the process and to grow ourselves as people as we go along.

I hope that with this post I’ve already surpassed my old (relatively low) standards of personal-ness and geniune self-expression that I’ve put out there in my The Designer Scroll past. I hope you enjoy this journey that I’ll be sharing through ArtyPon. I look forward to seeing what kind of responses I might get, and I hope to hear from you who read my writings here and contribute to the discussions.

Welcome, enjoy your visits, and please, please, please let me know when I have piqued your interest, when you have something to contribute, and when we can help each other explore these topics further and farther still.

I’m really looking forward to GDC this year, my fourth. My second GDC was in some ways a little bit of a disappointment, but the more I think about last year (my third), the more I realized I had a really good time and I know I will again this year.

As Darius recently posted, we’ll be kicking off the fun before we even land at SFO. We’re having our first “plane jam” on the way to GDC. We’ll be hacking away at a few games of ours during our plane flight with discrete (and small!) goals for what we can accomplish by the end of the flight. He lays out all the advantages in his  Going to GDC Jam post. It should be really interesting to see if it turns out as well as we expect it will. We’re hoping others try the same concept as well!

Darius started a Twitter hashtag, #GoingToGDC, for those going to GDC to chat about what they’re up to. I made a Twitter list of my own so that we can see all of the chatter from people who’ve said they’re going to GDC this year. Hopefully people will find this useful.

Last night, we also created http://twitter.com/GameConfTweet, a joint Twitter account that we’ll use to live-Tweet from sessions and other noteworthy and stimulating conversations and goings ons at GDC this year, and at other game development conferences we go to from now on. Should be fun!

There are a few reasons why my attention to AngelXNA has picked back up lately:

• Jeff has been actively developing AngelXNA
• The Global Game Jam is coming up in just a few months! (more on that very soon)
• I was asked to give a presentation on game prototyping and AngelXNA at WPI for the Game Development Club’s New Developer Track (which I’m very happy they still put on), and… I did.

The talk itself wasn’t stellar. I made several “newbie speaker” mistakes (like not introducing myself and not explaining more of the background of AngelXNA) and I didn’t have a chance (I was asked to give the talk very last minute) to get to know my audience better, so the emphasis and aim of the talk may have been a bit off.

Regardless, it was a good experience, and it demonstrated to me that AngelXNA could really use some more love in the documentation and specifically the “getting started” departments before it’s ready for Prime Time (Global Game Jam 2010).

So I’ve decided it’s time for me to revisit the ol’ girl and see what I can do to help. Immediate tasks are:

1. Go through the existing documentation and clarify some of the particularly unclear parts
2. Write up a few significantly more detailed pages on some of AngelXNA’s key features (Actors, Messaging, and Input come to mind)
3. Create a few one-week games to test out just how well AngelXNA meets its goal (of making such a process easy and fun) to jog my mind through new ideas for AngelXNA and new insight into how to make it super-easy to pick up

As always, I draw inspiration from Ruby on Rails, which is the web development framework that completely reinvigorated my love for web development and made it fun again. In particular, the official community Rails Guides are, in my opinion, a Gold Standard by which to judge all other documentation. I’d love to have just a few guides to AngelXNA that approach a Rails Guides-level of quality.

If any of you have used AngelXNA, I’d love to hear your feedback on how we can make it easier to pick up or just friendlier in general.