New Game 2011: HMTL5 Gaming FTW

Last week, the IE team co-sponsored the first ever New Game Conference, an event focused on building games using HTML5. The event brought together Mozilla, Google, Opera, and us, along with a few hundred developers, framework vendors and other members of the gaming community. It was an awesome conference with great sessions and discussions?Big thanks to Bocoup for organizing. If you weren?t able to catch the event in person, the sessions will be posted in the next week or two at the conference site.

HTML5 Gaming on the PC and Phone

One of the big themes at the event was building games that span multiple devices. HTML5 gives developers a way to create games that work across PCs, Macs, and phones, and that get solid mobile performance through the use of hardware acceleration in the phone?s browser. Games built in HTML5 also give developers more flexibility in distribution?either through an app distribution platform like the Apple App Store, the Android Market, or the Windows Phone Marketplace, or simply by deploying the game to a website and pointing people to an URL.

To illustrate the cross-device capabilities of HTML5, we built a little demo called Antarchy. Antarchy makes use of the popular Box2D physics engine, and shows some of the basic concepts of game development, including character and object movement, collision detection, gravity, and sound. The demo renders well on PCs, Macs and phones, and maintains a nice frame rate of 22 fps on Windows Phone 7.5 (?Mango?) through the use of hardware acceleration. You can find the demo here.

We also showed how developers can use PhoneGap for Windows Phone to package an HTML5 game like Antarchy into a Mango phone app for distribution in the Windows Phone Marketplace. PhoneGap also lets you hook into native components of the phone like the accelerometer and camera using simple JavaScript APIs. With Antarchy, we showed how you can use the accelerometer to move the anteater?s head up and down.

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Free Stuff and a Great Party

No conference would be complete without SWAG and a great attendee party. New Game had both. At our booth, we gave out some limited edition 8-bit IE logo t-shirts and stickers, along with a drawing for one of nine HTC Radar WP7 phones.

After the first day of sessions, we sponsored the attendee party and served up a special concoction called the Blue Cocktail. The Blue was a velvet hammer of a drink made from gin, blue curacao, lime and lavender bitters?I have a feeling it?s going to become a staple for us at future conferences.

You can check-out more photos here.

It was great connecting with developers, with the folks from Mozilla, Google, and Opera, and with other members of the web and gaming community over the two days we spent at New Game. HTML5 gaming is an area we?re really excited about, so you can expect to see more of us at other HTML5 gaming conferences in the months ahead.

Thanks again to Bocoup for an awesome conference!

?and speaking of conferences, if you?re in the Seattle area next week (11/15 - 11/16), you should definitely check out W3Conf 2011. This is the W3C?s first developer conference where you can get the latest info on HTML5 standards and development from some of industry?s top speakers. We?ll be at the event and would love to connect there.

Source: http://windowsteamblog.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2011/11/11/new-game-2011-hmtl5-gaming-ftw.aspx

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