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 <video>, <audio>, <canvas> and other new multimedia

goodness Richer semantics via <header>, <footer>, <article>, 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

Biolab Disaster

ZType

Q&A

Questions? Ask away! If we run out of time, you can contact me here:

Matt RosenzweigSr. Front End DeveloperMidnight Oil Creativemrosenzweig@midnightoilcreative.com