Jesse Freeman

5 Simple Techniques To Add Polish To Your Game

Jesse — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 20:00:30 +0000

Building games is not really that difficult once you have a few under your belt but it’s the last 10% that will usually give you the hardest time. So many games have probably been abandoned simply because the list of things needed to get it ready for publishing seem monumental. Usually this comes down to cleaning up the artwork, building out UI and performance issues that are hard to track down. To help you get over that hump I wanted to talk about 5 things you can do to add some extra polish to your game.

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Redefining Console Games With HTML5

Jesse — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 12:40:08 +0000

For almost 2 years now I have been talking about HTML5 gaming. Every event and talk I do on HTML5 gaming helps raise the awareness of its potential a little more but few are seeing how big it can eventually be. To help spread the good word, I went to San Francisco last week talking about my own games, what I have learned and where the technology is going in the future. I started the week by giving a talk in Mountain View and by the end of the week I was doing a demo during the keynote of O’Reilly’s Fluent conference. This is a recap of my week, what I talked about, and where I see HTML5 gaming going.

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Intro To Making Sound Effects For Games

Jesse — Thu, 30 May 2013 05:19:47 +0000

If you are like me, you dread adding sound to your game. Not because you don’t want to but because making sound effects is difficult. Most people don’t know where to start or even how to get them into their game. In this post I will cover some techniques I use to make sound effects for my own games while covering the basics of some free open source tools I rely on.

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Intro To Math For Game Development

Jesse — Sun, 19 May 2013 17:37:19 +0000

At last weekend’s NY Game Makers Meetup I covered 10 simple math examples that are critical in any game. These example range from handling layout to simple collision detection. While I am no expert at math, I have learned and collected the following examples over the years as I built up a library of reusable code that can be easily ported to different programming languages. To make demonstrating these examples easier to run, I wrote them all in JavaScript, posted them to JSFiddle so you can see them in action and also play around with each one on your own. While math in gaming may seem intimidating, especially if you are like me and come from an art background, I hope you will find the following examples easy to use and useful in your next game. Let’s get started.

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Intro To Programming For Games With JavaScript

Jesse — Tue, 14 May 2013 02:24:13 +0000

I have been running my Game Development workshops in NYC now for a little over 3 months and one of the most common problems I run into are people who have never coded before or have coded and are interested in getting into game development. So last weekend I figured I would take a step back and start with a blank slate to teach people the fundamentals of game programming. The lesson was a great success and I wanted to capture it here on my blog to help ease the fears of others learning how to program their first game.

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Porting Heroine Dusk to Windows Phone 8

Jesse — Thu, 09 May 2013 14:32:23 +0000

Earlier in the week I posted an in depth walkthrough of how I ported an HTML5 game called Heroine Dusk by Clint Bellanger to Windows 8 in less than 10 minutes. I used NodeJS and Grunt to create an automated workflow that allowed me to work in Visual Studio to test out the Windows 8 build but also generate a deploy folder for the web. Shortly after doing this I realized I should give it a try with Windows Phone 8 since there is a rudimentary HTML5 app templates that comes with the Windows Phone 8 SDK. I’ve talked about it a little before and since I had a general” idea that it was possible I decided to give it a try. This process took me all of 5 minute to do and I immediately had a playable version of Heroine Dusk without any code changes running on WP8. Here is how I did it.

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Porting Heroine Dusk To Windows 8 in 10 Minutes

Jesse — Mon, 06 May 2013 23:22:53 +0000

Last week I read about this great HTML5 game called Heroine Dusk by Clint Bellanger which was featured on IndieGames.com. Two things go my attention, first I am seeing more and more HTML5 games get featured on IndieGames.com and also this game was a perfect candidate to see how quickly I could get it up and running on Windows 8. I’ve talked a lot about the great opportunity the Windows Store offers HTML5 game developers to monetize their games so after contacting Clint he sent me a link to the source code on GitHub and I got to work. The entire process took less than 10 minute and I documented it here for others to check out. In addition to showing how I got it up and running in Visual Studio I also was able to add some of the Grunt workflow stuff I have been talking about lately which allowed me to keep both a Windows 8 and Web build in sync which is key for anyone looking to get the most out of their investment HTML5 game’s code base.

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Phaser Project Template

Jesse — Thu, 02 May 2013 15:50:33 +0000

The other week I wrote an introduction to Phaser and I wanted to follow up with a short walk through on how to get a project up and running with Phaser, TypeScript, NodeJS and Grunt. I have talked about a similar workflow in the past as well but figured I should come up with a basic Phaser Project Template to help get others started. Here are some instructions on how to use it.

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ECGC, NY Game Makers and Ludum Dare 26

Jesse — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:44:23 +0000

Last week was a busy one for me. I was away most of it in North Carolina at a great event called East Coast Game Conference. When I returned I ran another great NY Game Makers meetup with two guest speakers, Betsy Aoki and Michael Pugliese, on Saturday. Finally I had just enough time over the weekend to also knock out a quick game for Ludum Dare. Here is a little summary of my week’s events.

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Ludum Dare 26

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Building A HTML5 Game With Phaser

Jesse — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:54:14 +0000

Phaser is a new TypeScript/JavaScript HTML5 game framework created by Richard Davey. Richard is at the forefront of HTML5 game development and Phaser has captured my attention since he first mentioned working on it a few months back. Not only does it take advantage of TypeScript, which I already really enjoy, but has been designed to be incredibly easy to pick up and quickly prototype games with. It’s actually heavily based on Flixel, a favorite game framework among Flash game devs, so with Impact’s typing and Phaser’s Flixel based API it should be very easy for Flash devs to pick it up. Let’s take a look at a simple demo I wrote that will cover the basics of using Phaser.

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