1 – Web games, HTML5 and Jangaroo

In this inaugaural episode, Iain and Seb discuss casual gaming and choices between Flash, HTML(5), Unity3D and iOS. We also discuss Jangeroo, the ActionScript to JavaScript compiler, and why JavaScripters are cuddlers.

Follow Iain Lobb on Twitter
Follow Seb Lee-Delisle on Twitter

Links :

Flash Gaming Summit
Mozilla Game-on
DHTML Lemmings
Seb’s What the Flux presentation
Unity3D
Mika Mobil – OMG Pirates, ZombieVille
Corona
Blurst
Kongregate
Miniclip
Shockwave.com
Sean Cooper – indie game developer
Nitrome
Ben Olding
WHATWG
W3C
Jeremy Keith discussing HTML5 terminology
Paul Bakaus, AVES engine
FlashGameLicence.com
mochimedia.com
Seb’s blog, HTML/Flash discussions
jangaroo
Keith Peters’ SWFSheet (generates sprite sheets)

Music : Modfunk – Texmex

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34 Responses to 1 – Web games, HTML5 and Jangaroo

  1. Ringo Moss says:

    Well done chaps,

    As if you didn’t already know, I am really pleased that there is a podcast for us creative developers / coders.

    I like the phrase “digital chip wrappers” and will be trying to shoehorn it into my next meetings soon.

    A lot of the points that get discussed in our studio were echoed in the podcast and I was pleased that Keith Peters was mentioned a couple of times, he has been, and continues to be part of the furniture in the creative coding community.

    Wil lyou be doing guest interviews do you think, that would be really great? Would love ot hear from Keith / Soulwire / Andre Michelle / Piercer etc.

    Looking forward to the next one.

    Cheers,

    Ringo

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  3. adam says:

    good work fellas! But I think you need to invest in a better mic!!!

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  5. Rob Hawkes says:

    Excellent first episode guys! You don’t know how excited I am to hear that there is a podcast in this area of programming. In fact, I’ll tell you; I’m very excited! =p

    Adam: Baby steps. I co-host a podcast called ExplicitWeb and we only considered upgrading the mics after 10 months. The most important thing right now is the content and gaining a listener base, which I’m sure Seb and Iain won’t have a problem doing.

  6. karim says:

    Thanks for the podcast, really enjoyed it. Looking forward to seeing where it goes.

  7. ruedaminute says:

    Hey dudes, first of all, loved the podcast. Conversational style is brilliant, I learned a lot.

    I am a bit confused about one point though. In the first half of the podcast, you guys seem to maintain that Javascript is not ready for iOS dev. Too slow. You suggest Unity is a better idea for development on these platforms, else go native and use Obj C. But then at the end, Seb is saying that it’s important to start learning JS… however if it’s not really useable yet for iPad or iPhone dev, then why learn JS for game dev now instead of just using AS3 for desktop games and learning Unity/Obj C for Apple mobile dev?

  8. Ted says:

    Hi,
    it’s always interesting listening to opinions on emerging technologies. Maybe for next episode you could get in on one tech that for some reason haven’t been as much talk about, WebGL. It’s enabled on all upcoming versions of all major browsers, but IE, and it’s a good candidate to be included in next gen iOS.

    Cheers!

  9. Haven’t had time to listen yet (will tonight) but my mic recommendation is the Røde Podcaster (//rodemic.com/microphone.php?product=Podcaster). It’s easy to work and I’ve had stellar results, always.

  10. felix says:

    It’s the new Peter Cook and Dudley Moore!

  11. Iain says:

    Thanks for all your lovely comments everyone. We know the sound wasn’t too amazing this time – it’s not our mics, it’s because we used a grab of a Skype feed for my voice. Next time we’re going to “double end” it (oooh err) and it should sound a bit better.

  12. Great podcast! I love the idea of platform agnostic creative coders. This is exactly what the community needed. Please keep them coming.

    Thank you

    J.

  13. Ryan Hill says:

    Very much enjoyed the discussion. Been playing around with Unity much more lately and it seems to be popping up much more frequently in various discussions online.

  14. Hudson Ansley says:

    Congratulations on a great first podcast!
    One small point, you mentioned that JS devs probably only declared variables in one var at the beginning of a function to save some characters. This is probably more because minify routines (at least yuicompressor) give a warning if you do not do this. And this warning is based on the fact that JS does not have block scope. Crockford recommends declaring variables together at the top of a function for this reason in the highly recommended book “Javascript: The Good Parts”. The main reason I bothered with this post is this was a bit surprising to me when I got this warning, then found this was actually JS best practices…

  15. wildcard says:

    hey guys, nice podcast! 🙂
    however I think you’re not exactly right about reasons why JS devs use certain patterns.
    for example, using ‘new Array()’ is considered a bad practice, but not because it’s longer, but because it’s inconsistent. Try running in the console: ‘new Array(3)’, ‘new Array(1,2,3)’, and ‘new Array(-1)’.
    also, I think you mentioned single var pattern (‘var x, y, z’) – it also has nothing to do with size of your code. It’s done to make it clear to the developer that the variable exists in that point (because of hoisting and lack of block scope in JS – I don’t know if this behavior exists in AS too).

    • seb says:

      Hi wildcard! This was a classic case of me using a bad example to illustrate a point, even Iain called me out on it during the recording. I was trying to make the point that sometimes JSers prefer a certain code style to save characters. Albeit very badly 🙂

      Re the var x,y,z : an actionscripter would usually use :

      var x;
      var y;
      var z;

      So it was more about style rather than scoping (unless I’m missing something!) We’ll try harder next time I promise 🙂

      cheers! Seb

  16. jared says:

    Awesome podcast.

    I think its important to note that the primary means of making money in flash games is by sponsorship. This includes site-locking, portal hosting, and other things. This is currently not available for HTML/Javascript. I don’t imagine it will be and a new business model will have to emerge for me to want to create games on another platform. I imagine the Chrome web store could fill this gap if it starts attracting the hundreds of thousands of users flash portals get.

  17. cole says:

    Awesome! Jangaroo is hard to set up, but it is great once you get past that. it took me 4 hours to figure out how to compile. 🙂 but now it is no problem.

  18. Michael says:

    I really enjoyed it, too. Keep it up fellas!

  19. zenbullets says:

    Great work gents.

    Is this going to be a regular weekly/monthly gig? And are you going to tackle a different subject area with each episode? Keep ’em coming…

  20. Already said I love the podcast, but does anyone know of any other podcast similar to this? Already listened to it three times. Want more!!

  21. oh very cool. Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for the links.

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  24. Great first episode guys. I’m learning web programming, well just javascript, but it’s great to hear from some guys with experience. Keep up the good work and thanks for putting all the links in the show notes. Very handy.

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