2015/09/25 — issue #90

Gamedev.js Weekly #90

Articles

Procrastination is complete failure
Unconscious Procrastination is one of the single greatest obstacles hindering productivity and success.
Daniel Goldstein at Path to Game Dev

What makes an indie hit? How to choose the right design
Only a minuscule fraction of indie games break even, so what are the odds of developers like Jamie Cheng, Edmund McMillen, and Cliff Harris stringing together a number of successful games? The odds are low.
Ryan Clark at Gamasutra

A marketing perspective on the gaming industry
A two part post that talks about monetization and gaming in the video games industry. This first post will focus on the developers.
TheOGM's Thinking Space

Public vote validates Unsung Heroes: they’re games worth playing
The public has picked its favorite five of the 22 Unsung Heroes semifinalists with over 6,000 mobile game players voting.
Scott Johnston at Spil Games

Considerations for developing a gamepad virtual keyboard, part 1: the interface
When working with gamepad controllers, it's general practice to present users with a virtual keyboard to enter text information.
Chris Dolphin at CrypticIO

Learn to create awesome HTML5 games powered by Phaser with Interphase
Coming with 400 pages of pure fun, here it is the ultimate guide to the creation of HTML5 games: Interphase.
Emanuele Feronato's blog

The secrets to scrappiness: fighting to survive as an indie studio
When we were starting Kitfox and talking to business mentors, we would often receive a lot of conflicting advice.
Tanya X. Short at Gamasutra

7 great JS13K 2015 games
Feats of clever coding and stellar game design - in under 13kB.
Indie Game Hunt at Gamejolt Fireside

Jobs

SidePlay Entertainment make immersive and engaging instant win games for leading lottery and gambling operators. Based on the beautiful island of Jersey nestled between the UK and France the team at SidePlay have launched more than 170 industry leading titles on desktop and mobile over the past 14 years.

HTML5 Developer
The successful applicant will join our experienced team of HTML5 developers, building elegant, engaging and exciting games before setting them free for the world to play.

Full Stack Software Engineer
The successful applicant will join our experienced team of developers delivering new tools and features for our gaming platform. You will work closely with our development teams to help deliver a best in class product while working in a fun, collaborative environment.

Tutorials

“Trick Shot” HTML game prototype part 2 – jumping into the box
We saw how to create a predictive trajectory, now it’s time to make the ball jump into a box. There's also the third part available: handling collisions.
Emanuele Feronato's blog

Making a real time multiplayer online game in NodeJS (part 1)
Having never built an online multiplayer game, I wanted to make a very simple, real time game using what I use every day at work: NodeJS. And so I did. I built a game called: QuadPong. The source code is available on GitHub.
Jason Carter at Wakeskater Studio

A* pathfinding for 2D grid-based platformers: adding one-way platforms
We'll extend our platformer pathfinder so that it can deal with one-way platforms: blocks that the character can jump through and also step on.
Daniel Branicki at Tuts+ Game Development