Matt Rosenzweig – Midnight Oil Creative GAMES

What We’re Covering  HTML5 WTF?  A Brief History of Timewasters  HTML5 Games Today  Going Native  The Future  Examples  Q&A

HTML5 WTF?  The next evolution of HTML; last major update was HTML4 in 1999  Lots of awesome new features ,, and other new multimedia goodness  Richer semantics via,,, etc  Offline storage, web workers, geolocation, forms  Not officially part of HTML5, but CSS3 brings a wealth of new features to enable greater styling of HTML content  HTML5 = HTML5 + CSS3 + JavaScript  Support: Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, IE9 (sort of)

A Brief History of Timewasters  Casual games: simple rules, no required long-term time commitment, low production & distribution costs (Boyes 2008)  Analog: Checkers, Solitaire, Beer Pong  Early Digital: Pac Man, Duck Hunt, Tetris  Early Online: Bejeweled, Kongregate, Y! Games  Early Mobile: Snake, N-Gage

A Brief History of Timewasters  Current Casual Gaming Trends  Hybrid: Geocaching, Alternate Reality  Advanced Mobile: Angry Birds, Doodle Jump, Cut The Rope  Social: Farmville, Mafia Wars  Console: Wii Classics, LittleBigPlanet

HTML5 Games Today  Promising proof-of-concepts  HTML5 Game Libraries: Impact, Akihabara, Rocket Engine, LimeJS  They help with the heavy lifting: Asset management, animation, physics, keyboard / mouse input, processing of sounds and graphics  Hybrid model: Open Source with commercial licensing = free to use / experiment with, cheap to commercialize

HTML5 Games Today  Pros  Cross Platform: Any device with an HTML5-enabled browser (including about 160 million iOS devices)  More CPU-efficient than Flash  Frictionless distribution: Put it online and the entire world can play it  Client-Server / Network functionality: Just like building any other online application

HTML5 Games Today  Cons  3D (via WebGL) is only in an experimental state  Cross-browser complications due to differences in HTML5 implementations  Discovery: No central repository store for HTML5 games  Game development is hard, and we gotta put food on the table (monetization)  Hampered by committee-driven standards formulation (the W3C), proprietary solutions have already solved most of these cons (iOS / App Store is the best example)

Going Native  Generally speaking, native game solutions are kicking HTML5’s ass  iOS: 3D, monetization via purchase, ad-supported, in- app purchases, licked the discovery problem too  Android: Large install base, ad-supported games generate upwards of five-figure monthly incomes for developers  Console / Desktop: Far more advanced graphics capabilities, support for hardware controllers, decades-old industry ecosystem to support future advancement (retail / dev / marketing / consumers)

The Future  3D support coming via WebGL (soon-ish)  IE9 brings HTML5 support (but IE6 – IE8 are still out there and hard to upgrade)  Advancements in hardware acceleration (better graphics faster)

The Future  The Takeaway:  In the next several years, HTML5 will probably have all the technology required to make great contemporary games. The problems that still need to be solved are largely business-related: Distribution, discovery, and monetization. HTML5 developers should embrace what makes the platform unique and create games based on those qualities, but it will probably require a fundamental shift in how we think about both creating and playing games for that to happen.

Examples  Roundball Roundball  Biolab Disaster Biolab Disaster  ZType ZType

Q&A  Questions? Ask away!  If we run out of time, you can contact me here: Matt Rosenzweig Sr. Front End Developer Midnight Oil Creative