Mozilla Labs - Open Web Gaming recap - Part 1
This past Thursday I went to an event Mozilla Labs which happens to be down the street from where I work. The theme of the event was HTML5 gaming and there was lots of food and refreshments (and beer). The format of the night was a several main speakers, a break and then lightning talks.
The first presenters talked about Scrabb.ly, a massively multiplayer online crossword game. While it uses the game board from Scrabble and uses the rules unaltered for the most part, the twist is that you are playing this game in a MMO environment but you are playing against yourself. Scrabb.ly is kind of like being dropped in the middle of a game where the tiles can't be cleared once they are placed. To start place, you must use a current letter on the board as your starting point. With players coming and going, you have to think ahead if someone builds off your word blocking a move you planned. You also have to place your letters in such a way that gives yourself more options for words because you don't have a competitor to help you out. Each new word has to build off the graph of words you have already placed. I really hope the creators keep it up and maybe even create some form of tournament server for Scrabb.ly. Scrabb.ly was a competitor in the Node.js Knockout and uses ExpressJS for its backend. ExpressJS is a web framework for node.js that appears to be Sinatra inspired.
The next demo was Agent008Ball which began its life as a HTML5 project commisioned by Microsoft. In hindsight, it seems very prescient given Microsoft shift from Silverlight on the web. Agent008 is a game of 8 ball with different power-ups and booby traps. We were shown a video of how they came up with the concept including pre-game materials and source images. I really appreciate it when devs/designers talk through their flow rather than just showing the final project. One of the tips the presenter offered was to thing about adding debugging tools to your games from day one. They also made a more gentler and modular JavaScript port of the Box2D physics libraries leveraging Google Closure.
That's it for now, I'll cover the other speakers and lightning talks in an upcoming post.