Summer of Hacks: Game Dev Day

As part of the JS Oxford-organised Summer of Hacks, 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 last year!).

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

The gamedevday.club website

I whipped up the 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

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 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

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.

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

• adam-thomas/gdd-spore - The beginnings of a Spore-like planet eating simulator.
• gfwilliams/PainRun - A bad (but ad-free!) copy of Death Run 3D… and in VR!
• edent/aframedemo - A quick hackday project to make an immersive VR art gallery.
• 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 - 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.