Summer of Hacks: Game Dev Day

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As part of the JS Oxford-organised Summer of Hacks (http://summerofhacks.io), I
co-organised the “Game Dev Day” hack day in Oxford. This is the second time I’ve
held an event during the Summer of Hacks
(the previous event being SusHack #3 (https://sushack.github.io/) last year!).

The hack day didn’t have any specific theme, but Pete and I were encouraging
people to use either Phaser.js (http://phaser.io/) for creating 2D games, or
A-Frame (https://aframe.io/) for easily working with Three.js and making VR
games.

[IMAGE: https://blog.omgmog.net/images/gdd/gdd.png]

The gamedevday.club website

I whipped up the gamedevday.club (http://gamedevday.club) site using A-Frame.

I hadn’t considered this initially, but the website proved to be a nice piece of
learning material, as it includes:

* entity grouping
* animation
* event-based animation triggering
* the use of a templating language (jade/pug) to generate A-Frame markup
* using a taskrunner to build/deploy

You can view the source for the site on Github here: omgmog/gamedevday.club
(https://github.com/omgmog/gamedevday.club/tree/master/src)

Introduction to the tech

People of all skill levels attended the hack day, so I created some simple
“getting started” guides to introduce people to the ease of using A-Frame.

I used Deckset (http://decksetapp.com) to create a set of slides as a quick
introduction to A-Frame. You can find a PDF of the slides here: Intro to A-Frame
(https://github.com/omgmog/gdd-2016/blob/master/Intro%20to%20A-Frame.pdf)

I also distilled some of the key concepts of A-Frame down in to this micro-site:
https://blog.omgmog.net/gdd-aframe-guide/. You can find the source for that site
here (https://github.com/omgmog/gdd-aframe-guide).

[IMAGE: https://blog.omgmog.net/images/gdd/IMG_20160723_111304.jpg]

These are some of the projects that were created during Game Dev Day:

* adam-thomas/gdd-spore (https://github.com/adam-thomas/gdd-spore) - The
  beginnings of a Spore-like planet eating simulator.
* gfwilliams/PainRun (https://github.com/gfwilliams/PainRun) - A bad (but
  ad-free!) copy of Death Run 3D… and in VR!
* edent/aframedemo (https://github.com/edent/aframedemo/tree/gh-pages) - A quick
  hackday project to make an immersive VR art gallery.
* adjl/CryingAngels (https://github.com/adjl/CryingAngels) - The idea is to have
  the Weeping Crying Angels pursue you in a maze; they stop when you look at
  them. This repo focuses on the implementation of the latter mechanic.
* lpmi-13/privateRepository (https://github.com/lpmi-13/privateRepository) -
  Word breakout, where the words change to their plural form

Overall the day was a success, and more importantly great fun. I’ve collated a
bunch of information about the day in the following repository: omgmog/gdd-2016
(https://github.com/omgmog/gdd-2016).

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Published July 24, 2016

Generated from the original post:
https://blog.omgmog.net/post/summer-of-hacks-game-dev-day/


Max Glenister is an interface designer and senior full-stack developer from
Oxfordshire. He writes mostly about front-end development and technology.

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