Gamedev.js Weekly #32

Articles

How An Indie Nobody Raised $40,000 On Kickstarter
My name is Will Dubé and I’m the creator of Jotun, an action-exploration game for PC and Mac that takes you on an epic journey through Viking purgatory.
William Dube at Gamasutra

What you should know before starting node-webkit
Last weekend, Teahour invited Roger Wang, the creator of node-webkit to talk about the stories behind node-webkit and the use of HTML5 in desktop app development.
Yedingding's blog

How This Indie Developer Fixed his Game by Doing Nothing
Hunter Hamster’s HTML5 game Snail Bob gets around 1 million game plays a month. But, Andrey Kovalishin, a co-founder of Hunter Hamster doesn’t have time, staff or much interest to spend time thinking about that.
Scott Johnston at Spil Games

The Snowball Effect (and How to Avoid It) in Game Design
We play games to have fun. Most (but not all) games use some sort of competition to drive this fun: from chess to Street Fighter, players enjoy pitting their skills against each other.
Darran Jamieson at Tuts+ Game Development

WiMi5 in GameSauce: The next 4 billion gamers
This week WiMi5 CEO, Raul Otaolea, has published an article on GameSauce. In the post Raul discusses how HTML5 and WiMi5 will help developers reach out to future gamers.
WiMi5's blog

Developing the Prism game
Prism is a 2048 clone, using colors instead of numbers. It was created by Austin and myself in about a day.
Zolmeister's blog

Programming games in the browser
A programming game is a computer game where two or more programs compete with each other. What are the basic requirements for programming games and can they be realized in browsers? With JavaScript?
Stefan Trenkel at Mozilla Hacks

Tutorials

How to Minify Your HTML5 Game for the Js13kGames Competition
This article should be a great starting point if you want to learn how to generate the assets, and minify and compress the code, so you can meet the requirements for the competition.
Andrzej Mazur at Tuts+ Game Development

Arcade Audio for js13kGames
Including images and audio eats up a huge portion of your available size. However, if you generate them with code, you can get a lot more bang for your buck.
Jack Rugile's CodePen Blog

Introduction to pixi.js
In this chapter we go through a really simple introduction to using pixi.js. We’ll draw a baby zombie image to the screen to show basic usage of the renderer, stage, sprite, and texture functionality of pixi.js.
Seth Vincent at Learn.js

Beat Detection Using JavaScript and the Web Audio API
This article explores using the Web Audio API and JavaScript to accomplish beat detection in the browser.
Joe Sullivan at Beatport Engineering

Adventures in Phaser with TypeScript–Handling Mouse/Touch Input
In this tutorial we are going to look at handling mouse and touch events.
Game From Scratch

How to create an HTML5 RPG physics driven game with Phaser
The prototype is vaguely based on a game I played on my iPhone, One Tap RPG.
Emanuele Feronato's blog

Competitions

js13kGames 2014 just started!
See the panel of judges, list of prizes and official rules.

Tools

js13kGames boilerplate repository on GitHub

Games

Triskaidekaphobia - run away from the vicious Thirteens
You can also read the short making of blog post about it.

Hextris - tetris on the hexagon