Tag: HTML5

Free HTML5 Game Programming Book (almost) Out

Two months ago we had an HTML5 game workshop. Weird stuff happened and I ended up being the substitute instructor for the Phaser workshop. Also decided to use Leanpub for handouts instead of my usual slides.

I got a positive response out of it and went on to spend a couple of weeks fleshing out the book.

Last week, I released a heavily updated book and started spreading the word. The book ended up getting to top 3 of the most downloaded books for the past 7 days:

Here’s the link to the book: HTML5 Shoot ’em Up in an Afternoon

Any feedback about the book and helping spread the word would be greatly appreciated. :D

Building Wooga’s Pocket Island in Windows

Last week, social/mobile game developer Wooga released the code of one of their HTML5 games as open source.

Unfortunately for Windows users, the whole application was built in a Mac. Because of this, a lot of Unix-y stuff they put in won’t work even if you install minGW e.g. #! executables and egrep/printf.

Normally, I’d just suggest a Windows user to just install Linux on a virtual machine but that would be too easy.

Taking these problems instead as a challenge, I tried to get around them by playing around with the code. After tweaking tasks/build.rake for a bit, somehow things just worked. Yay!

screenshot

screenshot of the game on windows

So for those interested, here’s how to build the game on Windows 7 (haven’t tried it on XP but it should work):

  • Install Ruby + DevKit + msysgit. Or just get RailsInstaller to install all of that for you.
  • Install Node.js
  • Add msysgit’s minGW and Node.js to your PATH. e.g ;C:\RailsInstaller\Git\bin;C:\Program Files\nodejs\.
  • Clone my fork and use the win-kludge branch:

    git clone git://github.com/bryanbibat/Pocket-Island.git
cd Pocket-Island
git checkout win-kludge
  • Download and extract the images to the images folder.
  • Follow the installation normally.

    npm install -g less jslint
gem install spritopia
rake
  • (optional) Start the simple static server then open http://localhost:4567/ipad.html.

    gem install sinatra
ruby -rubygems server.rb
  • (optional) Install Java and run the rake all.

    rake all
cd build
copy ..\server.rb .
ruby -rubygems server.rb