Gamedev.js Weekly #59

Articles

9 rare and underused game genres ready to explore
There are lots of game genres that haven't really been explored, save for maybe the one or two games that pioneered them. Each underused genre offers a niche and a lot of possibilities to developers experimenting with it — especially for indie developers.
Matthias Zarzecki at Tuts+ Game Development

2015 will be the year of HTML5
This year started with lots of great news about HTML5!
GamePix

PlayTech buys GameMaker creator YoYo Games for £10m
Online gaming and sports betting software firm PlayTech has bought GameMaker tools firm YoYo Games for £10.65m ($16.4m).
Craig Chapple at Develop Online

With GameMaker under new ownership, some devs have long-term concern
In a surprise move on Monday, Yoyo Games - the company behind the popular GameMaker Studio game creation tool - said it would sell off everything to a developer called Playtech, known best for its online "gaming" (i.e. gambling) software.
Kris Graft at Gamasutra

Unsung Heroes: player co-creation is the secret to winning for Yellow Monkey
Indie developers Yellow Monkey Studios triumphed during our Unsung Heroes event at Casual Connect on 4 February.
Scott Johnston at Spil Games

Why a Game Development degree?
Recently there was an article published on GameDevNet which basically advocates students aspiring to enter game design or programming career are better off pursuing a traditional computer science (CS) degree.
Reza Nezami at GameDevNet

Phaser 3 Development Log – w/e 14th Feb
I asked Pete Baron, who is doing the core work on the new renderer to sum-up each week of development.
Rich at Photon Storm

Steam EA release ignored by press. What did we do wrong?
My small indie team recently released our first game, Grimoire: Manastorm, on Steam EA but have been ignored by all mainstream press.
OmniconnectionBrent at Reddit

Bringing asm.js to the Chakra JavaScript engine in Windows 10
Support for asmJS has been one of the top 10 most-requested items at the IE Suggestion Box on UserVoice since we launched it in December.
IE Blog

The current status of browser-based virtual reality in HTML5
The SFHTML5 group recently had a meeting discussing HTML5 technologies for creating virtual reality experiences – WebGL, WebVR, ThreeJS, GLAM –, and the current development status for implementing support for them in Firefox and Chrome. The idea is to bring the entire web into the VR experience.
Abel Avram at InfoQ

Tutorials

SceneJS – creating a JavaScript controlled, animated 3D character (part 1)
In this article we will show you how to use 3D models made in Blender to create a 3D character inside the SceneJS 3D environment. There's part 2 of this tutorial already.
Tizen Developers

Create an HTML5 game like Timberman in a matter of minutes with MightyEditor
This tutorial, courtesy of MightyFingers will give you an example on how to use MightyEditor – an online level editor based on popular game framework Phaser.
Emanuele Feronato's blog

Kickstarter

Learn how to make 15 mobile games with Phaser and Cordova

Events

HTML5 Game Jam in Paris

Tools

Font generator and FontGenPro for ImpactJS

Panda.js 1.13.0 released

Resources

KiwiJS Examples

Demos

Crowd simulation

Videos

Introduction and deploying to WebGL 3D with HTML5 and BabylonJS