HTML5 Game Development Workshop

We recently co-organized a HTML5 game development workshop at one of the most prestigious technical universities in Asia: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).

The lecture + workshop ran for 3 days, with 100 students extremely interested to learn about MarketJS, and how to build cross-platform games.

The students hailed from all disciplines, from arts to engineering, spanning different countries such as France, Hong Kogn, China, Japan, Thailand and Russia.

Figure 1: a candid shot of the event

Figure 2: EnchantJS code in action

Figure 3: Spritesheets made for the workshop

Figure 4: The enemy class

Material

Here's the first lecture slide prepared for the students. It explains the high-level concept of a news-themed game (called 'newsgame'). Students got first-hand knowledge, of how games were developed in an extremely short cycle.

View Lecture 1 on SlideShare

The second lecture explains social elements in a game, and cross-platform issues when developing with HTML5

View Lecture 2 on SlideShare

The final presentation is the killer one, with 75 pages. Students spent 2 days creating a prototype of a tower defense game:

View Lecture 3 on SlideShare

Performance and Metrics

The results of the workshop were fantastic. Two weeks later, we had over 10 highly qualified HTML5 game submissions for our university-level competition. The winner was awarded with a hefty cash prize.

I'm personally very grateful to the folks at HKUST's Social Media Lab, for being given the chance to inspire young minds. There's hope in this world for young developers!