On October 27th, Nintendo published half year results for the fiscal year ending in March 2012. Management stated that the company lost over $900 million with a negative outlook. Nintendo cited weaker than expected sales of Nintendo DS hardware and 3DS software and Yen appreciation as the main reasons for the miss. Is this the end of Nintendo?

If Monday night was anything to go by, the future of Open Web Gaming is well and truly bright! Over 150 gamer geeks packed out Bar Music Hall in Shoreditch, London on Monday – braving the cold to enjoy an evening of talks, demos and general chit-chat about gaming on the Open Web.

Speakers, talks, videos, slides and more…
The audience were provided with an awesome lineup as our speakers delivered cool gaming talks, demos and discussions:

Christian Heilmann – ‘The Why of HTML5 for Games Development’
Blog post | Slides | Audio

Rob Hawkes – ‘Rawkets. Massively multiplayer. In space. Using the open Web.’
Blog post | Slides | Test drive Rawkets

Ernesto Jimenez – ’5 Tips for your HTML5 Games’
Slides

Rik Lomas – ‘The Open Web & The Broken TVs’
Blog post | Slides

Paul Truong – ‘Control Inputs & Canvas Outputs’
Slides

Kornel Lesiński – ‘Demo: ‘Enterprise – A clone of Amiga/MSDOS game “Syndicate”.’
Demo | GitHub source code

Seb Lee-Delisle – ‘Pixel Pounding’
Source for Demo 1 | Source for Demo 2

Other post event coverage
There has been a stream of online post event commentary. Some of the discussions, tweets and pictures can be found below so be sure to check out:

Twitter ~ #GameOn10 activity
Flickr ~ pictures on the public group
YouTube ~ All #gameon10 London videos | Paul Truong’s motion sensor demo

Support & Thanks
A massive thanks to our co-hosts Six to Start for their fabulous support throughout the organisation off this event, with special kudos to Matt Wieteska & Adrian Hon.

A shout out as well to local champions, Nick Smith & Paul Brannigan for the shooting of all the video on the evening.

<GAME_ON> 2010 competition
There’s just over a month to go before submissions close on January 11, 2011. Remember individuals or teams of developers from all experience levels are invited to participate in the competition.

Start creating and enter your game today!

Keeping updated
Finally, be sure to follow @MozLabs & #GameOn10 on Twitter as well as the Gaming blog for latest news and updates.

Yesterday I went to London’s Old Street to talk about HTML5 and the web at the Mozilla Labs Gaming Special. Here are the slides, the audio and my extensive notes of what I had to say.

You can find the slides of my talk on Slideshare and embedded here:

The why of HTML5 for games development

The audio recording of the talk is available at archive.org:

Notes and background
When I grew up there was a big discussion about what the coolest toys are – Playmobil or Lego. Playmobil was already built for you – cars, ships, planes, houses and so on – whilst Lego needed assembly first. This resulted in most of the cases in Playmobil being much sturdier – ships actually swam rather than gradually sink because of the gaps in between the Lego bricks. It also meant though that you were limited in what you play with. It fired the imagination of kids to come up with stories that the final product plays a part in but it meant that the kid did not get the satisfaction of building something from more or less nothing.

The benefit of Lego over Playmobil became apparent when the new toy got boring – we’ve played a lot of scenarios where the police motorbike can be a part of. In the case of Playmobil this meant the kid wanted a new toy and the parents had to buy a new one. Good for Playmobil – bad for the parents. Also, bad for the toy as it got discarded and last but not least bad for the kid as it learnt from the get-go that life is about using and throwing away things rather than re-using.

Building with smaller, easily available components
And this is where Lego is awesome – when you are tired of the truck, dismantle it and turn it into a ship, a lamp, a race car, a dinosaur – whatever you can come up with. Much like open web technologies are. Instead of having an application that is a packed executable binary you build your systems from smaller, reusable components that can be mixed and matched to allow the system to mutate and cover different needs.

Lack of access to cool features
One argument against open technologies is that native code and closed systems give us more access and more systems to play with. You can access the camera, the address book and the compass of systems when writing native code and in HTML5 a lot of the things are still beyond your reach.

The question however is if you really need all these features or if it isn’t a better idea to concentrate on what makes most sense for the end users. I for one am spooked out by a lot of games wanting full access to features of my phone they don’t use but may need later on and want to avoid having to renew the question of access. A Tetris clone really doesn’t need to access my address book.

Of course things are cooler if you can access the physical features of a phone – many a time in Angry birds for example I tilted my phone backwards when I didn’t want the bird to fly too far. In essence though this would be cheating physics and the Angry Birds developers didn’t want to allow me to do that.

You have to ask yourself though – if you build a game is it important to use a lot of cool new features and have a short-lived “Ohhhh” effect or is it more beneficial to build a solid, long-lasting game. Making things complicated doesn’t make them good.

Take Canabalt for example. A simple, fast-paced, pretty addictive game that was built for the web first. The developers then ported the game to iPhone and wrote a great write-up how they tuned it to run smoothly. This game needs one button to work – that’s it. Later on adult swim took the same feature and wrote Robot Unicorn Attack which has the same idea but quite a different style.

Perceived simplicity
Some games appear amazingly simple – take PacMan for example. If you peek under the hood though as Jamey Pittman did in the PacMan Dossier then you will find that the original PacMan had quite an amount of artificial intelligence in it – the way the Ghosts (which all have quite a back-story and personality) behave. I am not sure if this logic was included in Google’s HTML5 version of PacMan – would be good to find out.

If Angry Birds were web-based
Which brings me to the phenomenon Angry Birds. An amazingly addictive game (I solved all levels once and then bricked my Nexus One so I had to play them again) and already a viral and social web phenomenon. There are Angry Bird meetups, people dress as them and there are viral videos of peace treaties between the pigs and the birds. Talking of videos, when you get stuck then there are lots of YouTube videos of how to solve a certain level (which saved me quite a few times).

Angry Birds is not a complex game – there are some physics involved but nothing too amazing. It works though – it leverages the quality of touch interfaces and it looks just great. The pigs laughing at you when you failed to bash their forts make you go on. Freeing more and more bird species with different skills (Boomerang birds FTW!) makes it interesting and the designers have done a wonderful job keeping the pig forts hard to crack and visually pleasing. Most importantly – there is no text in the whole game – as everything explains itself.

However as I expressed on Twitter wouldn’t it be cool if you could edit your own levels? This could blossom into a big community of Angry Birds designers. Rovio answered me they have been thinking about it for a while but are not there yet. However, as you can’t stop the signal some people already decompiled the game and wrote an own level editor in HTML5 – something that could have happened with the consent of the company, too. Here are a few other things a web/open tech version of Angry Birds could have that would make it even more engaging:

Multiplayer – one player builds fort with pigs, the other plays the birds.
Comments and hints – explaining how to solve the level the best way
Voting and indexing levels by frustration level – you could sort the levels by complexity and give people a quick one to solve on the train between stations or a brain teaser to spice up a boring meeting
Fan-built levels – with prizes and official endorsement for the best ones
Simple re-use across platforms – just compile the web version to native code

HTML5 for truly open gaming
HTML5 is not about having some cool new tags. It is about having higher fidelity of interfaces with web technologies and still not sacrificing the ideas of being open, reusable and modular pieces that work together. We can have audio and video for our games without having to bend over backwards to access parts of them or modify them. We have a canvas which is like a stage in other systems.

If you use HTML5 on the web you already get the viral and linked experience of systems for free. People can also learn from your games by looking at the source but even better would be to write a blog post sharing the information on how you tweaked and scaled your game. All this information has been assembled at least five times before. Old school game development on low spec platforms (Commodore 64, Spectrum, 286 PCs, Gameboys) and especially Flash games had exactly the same issues to face. Now we can take all this knowledge, put it in a very promising and supported new technology and make everybody a potential game designer – not only big companies who charge you for building something with their SDK. The hacked level editor for Angry Birds shows that people can create what they want already – why not harness that energy and do good together?

Another benefit of the web is that upgrades and fixes are easily deployed – no need to upgrade an app or remove/install a new one that you have to download as a whole. This should be the normal case, but right now if you are out of the range of your free data plan on a mobile you have to download quite an expensive chunk – not a nice experience.

Writing in open environments like HTML, JavaScript and CSS also allows you to re-use the code in closed systems by converting it with PhoneGap and other systems or re-using the JavaScript in Flash Actionscript. This also works the other way around – if you look for it you will find a lot of great Flash Actionscript tutorials which can now be used without the plugin and a bit of conversion.

The best thing about HTML5 is that the documentation comes for free and there is currently a massive community forming based on the principles of sharing knowledge rather than charging you for information that is outdated by the time you get the printed book.

So, pick your bricks, connect them and play!

Mark DeLoura, developer advocate at Games at Google, has announced that he's leaving the company after just 5 months there. DeLoura, a veteran of the gaming industry and past lead engineer at Nintendo for five years at the end of the 90's, hasn't revealed his plans yet for what he'll do next. "I enjoyed working with many of the people there [at Google]," he wrote, "but it was not the perfect fit for me."

In announcing his departure, DeLoura wrote in a blog post about the progress Games at Google has shown to date in building apps in the browser and enabling greater developer flexibility.

Sponsor

DeLoura is the second high-profile developer advocate Google has lost this Summer. Last month, Android developer marketing lead Sun Hu Kim jumped ship to join Twitter.

The loss of DeLoura seems particularly notable, though, as Games at Google is still a big, unfulfilled promise. From a social software, developer community and technical perspective, not to mention profit, Google is getting ready to make a big push in gaming. Google invested more than $100 million this Summer in Zynga, makers of Farmville and other mind-numbing fare, for example. Rallying and supporting a thriving developer ecosystem, the job DeLoura was hired for, will be key to the larger gaming effort.

Discuss

Habbo Hotel, one of the world's largest virtual communities, turned 10 today. Starting as "Mobile Disco," an interactive chat for a friend's band, it has become a leading teen community and social game site.

In 1999 Sampo Karjalainen and Aapo Kyrölä started Mobile Disco in their native Finland. The next year, as it grew in popularity, they ginned up what has since become a popular element of online environments, the micro-payment model, and launched Habbo Hotel. Since then 172 million folks have churned out a character, grabbed a room, thrown up decorations, chatted, played games and whatever else it is kids get up to these days.

Sponsor

Now, 10 years later, micro-payments and "virtual goods" (buying and selling make-believe furniture and clothing and so on) is big business. Sulake (the company Karjalainen and Kyrölä created to develop Habbo) the best quarterly sales results in its history, $20 million.

Of course it hasn't always been roses. Only a year ago, things weren't looking great for Sulake, which had to lay off 40 employees due to a revenue decline of $14 million from the year before. In 2007, the Dutch police arrested a kid for stealing $5,800 worth of make-believe furniture. (No I'm not kidding.)

Here's a little numerical snapshot of our Finnish friends.

172 million characters created
40 million monthly user hours
15 million monthly unique visitors
120 million active user-created rooms
Users from over 150 countries
11 languages

Happy birthday, Habbo Hotel. We've sent you a lifetime supply of umlauts. (OK, it's no Kalevala, but it's better than a poke in the eye with a broken Nokia.)

Discuss

Casual gaming powerhouse Zynga has bought Challenge Games. Challenge is well-known for games offering strong "virtual goods" elements.

Zynga has built up its estimated $5 billion in worth and with 200 million users, largely on games like Farmville and Mafia Wars, popular on Facebook. But it has been going to town in an effort to extend its popular franchises. Challenge may provide it with a means of turbocharging its in-game economies.

Sponsor

Recently, Zynga has announced a "five year strategic relationship" with Yahoo, which seeds Zynga's games throughout Yahoo properties. It has also announced that it will stay with Facebook, despite plenty of rancor with the social media site on which it thrived, but which also kept taking bites out of the company's profits.

Virtual goods and virtual currency provide a major avenue for online gaming revenue. Challenge being folded into Zynga may help shore up that aspect of its business model. Staying on Facebook, Zynga must use that company's "Facebook Credits." Outside, there may be additional opportunities.

Backed by Sequoia Capital and Globespan, the Austin-based Challenge Games launched in 2007 to focus on immersive, virtual goods Web games. The company has already been renamed Zynga Austin. Challenge CEO and Co-Founder, Andrew Busey, has been named general manager and vice president of the Austin studio and Zynga said its 35 employees will be retained.

Zynga's SEC filing indicates a "total offering amount" of $20,571,454.

Discuss