A brief presentation given on Friday February 18th, 2011 at Midnight Oil Creative in Burbank, CA. Presented by Matt Rosenzweig, Senior Front End Developer at Midnight Oil Creative.

1. Matt Rosenzweig – Midnight Oil Creative GAMES

2. What We’re Covering HTML5 WTF? A Brief History of Timewasters HTML5 Games Today Going Native The Future Examples Q&A

3. 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)

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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)

9. 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)

10. 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)

11. 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.

12. Examples Roundball Biolab Disaster ZType

13. Q&A Questions? Ask away! If we run out of time, you can contact me here: Matt Rosenzweig Sr. Front End Developer Midnight Oil Creative mrosenzweig@midnightoilcreative.com