Quick "How did you get into HTML5 game dev?" poll

[rich]

Hi all,

 

I'm curious to learn a little more about the reasons why you all get into HTML5 game development in the first place, so I've set-up a little poll and based on the results will follow it up with some more mini polls. Hopefully building up an interesting and public picture of the development community.

 

Cheers,

 

Rich

[Mike]

Lol - 

Why did you learn to make HTML5 games?

 

There is only one reason so far

[FLAG]

I did it to meet accessibility needs at my job

[Daikrys]

okay first, i missing the construct 2 note, you would combine this with the gamemaker if you want

and second how about you? always nice to start a poll with telling how you get there/find it etc.

 

personally i bought construct 2 when it was on discount cause the crossplattform engine i used was abandoned

it was really nice and build with my favorite programming language (object pascal)

the author was just tired with the broad different mass of android devices and apples attempt to make developers life harder with every sdk/os release

 

i had already read alot about construct 2 and when i bought it i start reading how to make money with html5 games, i found some interesting stuff (marketjs, matts site, rich site and other resources) and i digged deaper and deaper and now im here

 

still have problems to think easier then android games and try to make perfection, also got some bad habits, but i bet soon anything will be fine

[Lowren]

I did Game Design studies from 2009 to 2012. The last year, we had a guy who did an intervention about HTML5. He told us how wonderful this language can be, the opportunities that can give us, and he gave us some websites or services to encourage us to learn how to become self-employed. He told us about Construct 2 and I was interested, so I started to learn how to use it

Then, after my studies I was hired in a video games company, but I was tired about having a regular job and I wanted to leave Paris (this city is a real nightmare, believe me). So I decided to create small games in C2 in order to sell them to publishers / portals.

 

Before using C2 I experienced RPG Maker (I was 14 - 15) and Virtools, a buggy, terrible, horrible french 3D game engine. It was not updated since 2005 but my school forced us to use it for our projects

[Daikrys]

how nice we got to use virtools too in my studies but it was not suited to build games in my opinion

 

btw. forgot to tell that i actually learned programming back when i was 13 years old and someone teached me the "old" javascript in school, back to the roots!

[Lowren]

how nice we got to use virtools too in my studies but it was not suited to build games in my opinion

Yes, I agree too. This software is made for industrial apps, not for games. I aslo hated it, it crashed everytime and ergonomics was desastrous I'm surprised that you know this software, it's not so well known. Plus, the company that owns Virtools, Dassault Systèmes, is very tendentious and his owner, Serge Dassault, is a very controversial politician in France. It doesn't helped me to love its software.

 

The only professionnal game I know that used Virtools is a point'n'click that had pretty good sales for this type of games. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syberia

[soybean]

Besides flash/AS3 and webtech, I've also worked using ShiVa3D, for about a year or so. It's a pretty good engine, but unfortunately it seems its currently having financial issues.

 

@Lowren: have you tried ShiVa3D? It's made by a France based company as well..

[KyleNau]

I'm not surprised the majority of people took it upon themselves to learn HTML5. I had to fight my employer to let me take the time to learn it. Then I had to fight them to use it and go mobile. To this day, it's still a bit of an uphill battle, which surprises me.  There isn't the groundswell of developers yet that I was expecting to happen when I started back in 2011 and the resources to help people learn are still inadequate.

[joannesalfa]

I believe HTML5 is good opportunity to deploy in the web market instead of native apps. No limits.

 

I met some C++ developers told me HTML5 sucks because of source code, I didn't think anyone can rip off and change the graphics, However it takes a lot of time modifying the game than creating a game from scratch, I guess no one could do it.

[jucarave]

I was a programmer in Game maker and i was moving to more powerful technologies, so i was learning c++ when HTML5 started to sound as a good new oportunity for the web gaming (since i don't like flash) so i decided to give it a chance and after a couple of days of learning Javascript i started making games.

 

Until recently i have made games for the company i work, but now i want to go for my own.

[rich]

okay first, i missing the construct 2 note, you would combine this with the gamemaker if you want

and second how about you? always nice to start a poll with telling how you get there/find it etc.

 

I did. The first votes are mine

[Dream Of Sleeping]

The reason I choose html5 is I want to make games and stick them on my website. I had made one game as a java applet but that's not very well supported now. I considered flash, but the IDE is very expensive, and I know there are free ones but after trying to google tutorials it became unclear to me what was actionscript3 and what was the IDE.

 

When I looked at javascript and realized I could just type it into a text file and load it straight away in the browers without any IDE i was hooked. The only problem is  I feel like if you are making html5 games you expected to make it work on everything. That is a hassel I just don't need. I don't even own a mobile phone. I have an ipod touch but a horrible phobia of wifi so no way of testing on it. Now i'm thinking of learning lower level languages like C.

[mrspeaker]

I remember when I was offered are very lucrative relocation package in 2006... to do JavaScript. Just JavaScript. To me the idea was ludicrous... I mean, I love JavaScript but I couldn't believe it had come so far that I could get a *good* full time job doing just doing what I love!

 

With JavaScript games I'm having that same feeling allllll over again. I don't have the lucrative job offer yet, but it's only a matter of time

 

[edit: not that there wasn't already awesome JavaScript games in 2006: see DHTML lemmings from 2004, for example!]

[Daikrys]

Yes, I agree too. This software is made for industrial apps, not for games. I aslo hated it, it crashed everytime and ergonomics was desastrous I'm surprised that you know this software, it's not so well known.

 

yeah it was quite hard to do the virtools exam cause of the bugs x)

a tutor of mine used it in his company to create realistic simulations for various clients, the last one he did before quitting the company was a supermarket simulation where anything the customer did was collected (like which product they watched while walking etc.)

[Paul-Andre]

"What did you make games in before you made HTML5 games?"

 

In a lot of things, but nothing serious. In Visual Basics, in the online game Roblox using some LUA (good times), and in the Blender Game Engine. I also tried using PyGame, and I tried using different C++ libraries (SDL, Allegro, SFML), but no "games" came out.

 

"Why did you learn to make HTML5 games?"

 

I wanted to make games that could be easily played in the browser. At first I thought about using Flash, but the price-tag of the oficial program from Adobe turned me off, and all the alternative programs (and compilers) seemed really obscure. That was two and a half years ago. I then found out about HTML5. Being an open-source fanboy at the time (Blender 3d, Ubuntu, etc...), I rapidly embraced it and was impressed by how you just needed a text editor and a browser to make a game!

[mgutz]

Cuz I suck at everything else why not suck at making HTML 5 games too j/k We play board games at our startup every couple of weeks.Tried Settlers of Catan online and it sucks balls in a Java Applet. One of the worst gaming experiences ever. Shouldn't be that hard. Hope to build something like it as my first game.

[logicking]

We got into the HTML5 with Spil's  HTML5 Game contest. We won the second price and then sold Spils few more of our games.

Currently we are not only selling games to different portals but also doing some outsource task for different platforms (Firefox OS, Tizen OS) and porting our games to native platforms.

[TheHermit]

For me trying to do professional game development is pretty new in its own right. I've been (and am currently) in academia, and I've been looking more and more at wider options for my upcoming job search including making the jump to a non-academic job. For that kind of thing you often get questions like 'have you ever released a product' or 'tell us about your experience meeting deadlines', so I figured, what the heck, I'll write some games, get some experience, and see if they make any money. And if they don't, I can find that out before I make the jump to depending on it as my only source of income.

 

For HTML5 in particular, it was the idea of writing one game that would then be quickly portable to a bunch of platforms. I've done dual Linux/Windows development in C and its not too bad, but the idea of doing that plus ObjC plus Java plus ... for all the different mobile devices gave me a headache.

[iikii]

i been a freelancer for 6 months and i feel that i want to work for myself. I made a few games with flash before, i plan to setup a business with html5 games.

[MikeHart]

working with Monkey for almost 2 years, wrote a book about it and now want to concentrate on targeting HTML5 mobile devices. Mainly to license the game sout and to make some income via ads.

[Felipe]

working with Monkey for almost 2 years, wrote a book about it and now want to concentrate on targeting HTML5 mobile devices. Mainly to license the game sout and to make some income via ads.

 

I got a similar story, I've been doing games with monkey for about a year and a half  then moved to just pure js+html5. I still do most of my games with monkey.

[MikeHart]

I got a similar story, I've been doing games with monkey for about a year and a half  then moved to just pure js+html5. I still do most of my games with monkey.

Why don't you use Monkey for HTML5 anymore?

[Felipe]

Why don't you use Monkey for HTML5 anymore?

I use it a lot. Almost every html5 job I make is made with monkey. The javascript this is mostly for fun and testing some stuff.

[Rudrabhoj Bhati]

My first major project was to a bunch of programming tools like implementation of few mid and high level languages and engines. This get me into learing about miracles of artificial intellegence. I took OCW classes on Prolog but easily got really bored. I quit those OCW classes and did my own research. I took inspiration from ancient Sanskrit Grammar of Panini to define language.

Now a question came into my mind! Machines are to serve our human civilization, they are to make our life easier and entertain us, but me as a programmar should minimize my work to the creative aspects of project and keeping materializing that into reality the computer... So that while I have coffee and enjoy learning ancient languages (Vedic Sanskrit, Middle Egyptian) my computer do the work for me.

As we can see in evolution of job of a programmer, from manually assembling his code to today when tools like Construct and Game Maker are reality- it is indeed a progress!

One comment from which many of you wouldn't agree is, I believe that wider adaption of C family was utter disaster which history of human civilization would always regrat. I really feel like that. Making people use notation required by C family is not best thing to make programming widespread and widely understandable. Well personal criticism aside... So question is again, are we really at the point where we should have been? Should getting your work done as a programmer should be the manual job as it is?

Good programmers enjoy that. Medicores cry as they do everywhere, but question is it is helpful to get best out of your assets? Thinking on that question I realized a program with limited conciousness  understanding a language, for start a sub-set of Sanskrit (as it is language I best understand xD) implemented in that program which it use to understand and communicate with self and user.

A limited intellegence to analize what is asked to the program and its ability to not only do it successfully but also create the decent application with no bug in microscopic fraction of human time.

Now, the learning material should be the language which it could understand. Implementing English language and making is understandable by machine is total nightmare! Lojban is easiest but then I consider this language not really good for 'human language' which defeats the reason of the project. In future I would try to implement full Classical Sanskrit as defined by Panini but for timebeing, I am developing my sub-set of sanskrit usable to make it understand both major concepts it have to learn to program like memory management, algorithms, UI, etc.

 

And now how it all got me to HTML5 game development... This project took too much time than I had thought, resources started drying and there was a need to do something to raise enough money to keep the project going with final aim of developing detailed understanding of Artificial Intellegence and automating our work to complete the various programming tools we want.

HTML5 game development is very interesting and rewarding which I just recently come to know about. I wish I had known it is profitable before. But nonetheless, late is better than never.