Gamedev.js Weekly #163

Articles

Valve is removing Steam Greenlight this spring
And replacing it with Steam Direct.
Jeffrey Matulef at Eurogamer

Russians engineer a brilliant slot machine cheat — and casinos have no fix
In early June 2014, accountants at the Lumiere Place Casino in St. Louis noticed that several of their slot machines had—just for a couple of days—gone haywire.
Brendan I. Koerner at Wired

Making an indie game about indie game making
Everyone who makes games has their own unique perspective on the process, but we can generally all agree that it’s nebulous and fraught with peril.
Matt Hackett at Gamasutra

Steam just made it HARDER to find new releases
In a battle to hide every unknown new game released on Steam, Valve have updated the Steam store to make it far, far harder to just see a list of new releases on the platform.
John Walker at Rock Paper Shotgun

ManifoldJS is becoming PWA Builder, to simplify building Progressive Web Apps
As the web platform gains new capabilities and device types continue to proliferate, the industry’s collective vision for the future of web apps is evolving.
Jeff Burtoft at Medium

As a Muslim video-game developer, I no longer feel the US is open for business
My mother used to only check on me when I visited unstable countries for work. Now she does it when I am in Trump’s US.
Rami Ismail at The Guardian

The importance of sound in games
A portion of new players experience the game as if there was no sound implemented. I am hiding any sound controls from them and reduce the volume to zero.
Rezoner at Medium

Tutorials

Getting started with Crafty: introduction
You will learn about game engine called Crafty. It is very easy to use and supports all major browsers, including IE9. See also: Entities.
Monty Shokeen at Tuts+ Game Development

HTML5 Drag and Match engine updated to Phaser 2.6.2 with masks and a lot of custom options
Now it’s time to update – and improve – the drag and match engine. The improvement has been made over three main features. See also: Adding tweens.
Emanuele Feronato's blog

Competitions

BLUR launch jam

Resources

Dwitter - 140 characters of creative JavaScript on Canvas

Demos

Drifting simulator in a shader

Pool ripple

Games

Retris