As you can see the countdown started later than usual, only one month before the beginning on August 13th, but now we’re focusing all our time and energy into making the tenth (!) edition of the js13kGames online competition even better than the previous ones.

The countdown to 2019 blog post was published April 30th, countdown to 2020 on June 26th, and now it’s July 13th already. The delay was caused by many things: from the pandemic in general, through our heavily delayed Grant for the Web work, to health issues, but now I hope everything will go smoother.

We’ll…

We’ve focused on completing our Grant for the Web project and publishing the final report through the first half of June, and spent the other half of the month catching up on the rest of the work.

Games

Forest Cuties game was finished and published. We’ve released NSHex Roulette, Body Guard, and Forest Cuties recently as part of the Grant for the Web grant - that was quite the effort given the time was limited, but we’ve managed.

Wait, what? Yes, you read that right: there’s going to be a one-day Forest Cuties tournament where the main prize is 50 NEAR.

It starts today / tomorrow depending on the time zone: June 28th 9:00 PM EST is June 29th 1:00 AM UTC or 3:00 AM CEST (GMT+2). The tournament will run online during the following 24 hours, so make sure to visit alpha.outplay.games if you’d like to join. There’s no buy-in needed when the tournament starts.

The very first Grant for the Web program community call was happening last week, on Thursday June 24th, and I was lucky enough to be presenting about our very own project that we completed recently.

This is the beginning of the Community Next approach - connecting grantees with each other and turning a buch of random people into a living community. That include community calls, demo parties, skill shares, and more. The first event focused on introducing the upcoming events, and presenting some of the projects.

The 5x5 Project Share-Outs are about having 5 slides and 5 minutes total (so…

This time during our bi-monthly W3C Games Community Group meetup we had three presentations: Godot’s and Pixi’s history and future, and an update from Coil about the upcoming Web Monetization Workshop and the Rafiki project.

Our meetup started with Fabio Alessandrelli talking about Godot: the history, current state of the engine, especially around HTML5, and the plans ahead.

Something I was hoping and waiting for - Richard Davey, the author of Phaser, is currently working on the fourth version of the framework full time.

I don’t want to put any pressure on the development of Phaser 4, which might, or might not get released this or the next year, but the work is currently ongoing. That’s great news, especially since previous effort was delayed by a huge Phaser 3.50 release.

Next version will bring a whole lot of changes, way more than you could imagine: from an organization’s repository on GitHub and a totally new website, through modularity…

It’s been almost a year since our Web Monetized HTML5 Game Development grant project was announced in July 2020, and even though we had quite significant delay of four extra months on top of original six, I’m really happy with how the project went for us.

Progress on objectives and key activities

We had six smaller projects making it into a big Web Monetized HTML5 Game Development one, that’s why the name is somewhat generic. Those were:

• Web Mometization category in js13kGames 2020
• Gamedev.js Survey 2021
• eBook about Web Monetization in HTML5 games
• NSHex Roulette expansion
• Body Guard game
• Forest Cuties game

This game’s story started a couple of years ago on a wall above our daughter’s bed as a cute poster, only to evolve into a physical card game, and then a mobile one that implemented Web Monetization’s receipt verifier service, and even offered an NFT to the mix.

Play FOREST CUTIES now!

It is quite similar to NSHex Roulette’s making of, as it also started as an analog prototype and managed to turn into a mobile experience. Here’s how Ewa explain the origins: