Gamedev.js Weekly #44

Articles

Understanding Licenses, or, "Can I Use This Asset In My Game?"
Asset licensing is serious business. In a multi-billion dollar industry where thousands of hands come together under a single banner to create a single product, there should be no doubt as to who owns the art, code, and sounds associated with a game.
Sonny Bone at Tuts+ Game Development

Ex-Blizzard frontman Rob Pardo shares his approach to game design
Former Blizzard designer Rob Pardo explains a facet of his game design philosophy: encouraging offensive strategies makes for more interesting play.
Alex Wawro at Gamasutra

Game Idea vs Game Product
It’s okay to create a game that’s just for you or your friends. But when thinking about sharing it with a wider audience, one very important question to ask yourself is: am I designing an idea or a product?
Mark Major at League of Gamemakers

The Web as a Commercial Platform for Games Gathers Momentum
Mozilla has helped pioneer technology that has set the Web up as a serious platform for distributing and developing games.
The Mozilla Blog

5 Tips For Designing Great Game Characters
monument valleyFor developers, game characters are key to a game’s success. Players relate to well-designed characters which makes the game experience feel real.
Scott Johnston at Spil Games

The javascript physics engine behind the HTML5 game FootChinko
Today we have a great guest post on our blog: we are going to talk with Enriqueto from the Ravalmatic studio, who developed one of the best HTML5 games out there: FootChinko.
GamePix

The Lone-wolf coder in a basement in Minsk
I have a growing fear that the games industry, specifically the way indies are handled, treated, and reported, may be leaving a group of people behind.
Cliffski

Violence, Part 2: Game Design Ramifications
In this part, I'll be discussing the mechanical ruleset issues that tend to arise as a result of working with violent themes and settings.
Keith Burgun at Gamasutra

Solo home videogame development as meditative practice
There are simple routines and comforting rituals to making games alone for $0 that become a great deal more complex and inconsistent as soon as people get added to the process.
Hobby Gamedev

Tutorials

Adventures in Phaser with TypeScript – Loading and Using Tiled Maps
In this tutorial we are going to look at loading and using Tiled TMX maps.
Game From Scratch

Generating sound effects
When creating games, specially in jams, we often don’t have a specialist on sound effects. Fear not, here are a few simple tips that should help you get by!
invrse blog

Competitions

Procedural Generation Game Jam 2014

Resources

Canvassing - book about developing games and apps using Canvas

HTML5 Game Development resources by Andre Antonio Schmitz

Demos

Circles - physics minigame

Chrome Experiments: 100,000 stars

Games

Best Firefox OS Games - Part 2