Gamedev.js Weekly #77

Articles

Writing a book for a publisher vs self publishing a book – ten differences
What I am going to write is about programming book niche, but I am sure the market is not that different in other topics.
Emanuele Feronato's blog

The difficulty of creating difficulty
I’ve been analyzing myself as a player to figure out what I like and why, because as a game-maker I need to understand the player for whom I am creating a game.
Rahul Sehgal at Gamasutra

Traffic jams in Javascript
Building bigger roads can make traffic worse. The usual explanation for this counter­intuitive and counterproductive outcome is that bigger roads attract bigger shopping malls, which in turn attract more cars. But that’s not the whole story.
Brian Hayes at Bit-Player

The music system 15 years in the making
In sharing with you the experience of designing the sound and music for Defect, I feel it is important to share challenges and how they were overcome, or not, as a critical aspect of the development journey.
Stephan Schutze at Gamasutra

Finding a way to take on the whole world
Neil hasn’t seen the success his game deserves and he believes that’s because it doesn’t have a global reach. He realises it isn’t enough to be great at creating games.
Scott Johnston at Spil Games

Apple removes all American Civil War games from the App Store because of the Confederate flag
If you've been watching the news recently, you'll know of the huge debate in the US over the role of the Confederate flag in contemporary America.
Tasos Lazarides at Touch Arcade

The big list of sound and music assets for your HTML5 game
This week we are publishing “The big list of sound and music assets” that are necessary to make a great HTML5 game.
GamePix

Jordan Mechner encourages developers to accept their dark sides
Game designer and filmmaker Jordan Mechner explains the origins of his own "shadow" and its influence on his career.
Alex Wawro at Gamasutra

Exploring game space
Game designers adjust game parameters to create an optimal experience for players. We call this high-dimensional set of unique game variants "game space".
Game Innovation Lab

Tutorials

Making music in the browser – Web MIDI API
In this introductory article I’m going to take you through the basics of setting up your MIDI keyboard / controller to interface with your browser.
Andrej Hronco at Keith McMillen Instruments

The basics of double jump concept in an endless runner game like Spring Ninja
Here we are talking about Spring Ninja prototype again. What about adding a double jump feature to the final HTML5 prototype I showed you in the previous post?
Emanuele Feronato's blog

Manage different screen sizes in Phaser
Handling various screen resolutions for mobile game is frequent topic. I will present method that works for me and is quite easy to implement.
Tomáš Rychnovský at SBCGamesDev

Introducing Phaser and Box2D
It’s time to publish some tutorials about Box2D plugin for Phaser, and we start with the most basic tutorial, that is a “click to create, click to remove” script.
Emanuele Feronato's blog

Tools

Acid Machine - a web audio tool

Resources

ScalableGFX, a home of scalable images for games

Demos

WavesurferJS: audio waveform visualizations using Web Audio API

Games

Sticky Goo demo

Sudoczku, a sudoku game for kids