The annual Game Developers Conference is back in full swing in San Francisco. It was at last year’s GDC that Mozilla first demoed their collaboration with Epic on the WebGL port of the Unreal Engine 3. The demo was made possible by Mozilla’s Emscripten compiler and the JavaScript machine code hybrid that is asm.js. The collaboration continued this year with both showing off the Unreal Engine 4 running inside Firefox. Future plans are to focus on optimising asm.js for mobile.

The speed of the technology is impressive (close to Java or C++) but setting up the toolchain required to generate asm.js is not for everyone. Mozilla’s second GDC announcement addressed that through a new collaboration with the popular game dev toolmaker Unity. A WebGL export target has been predicted for a while but it is now confirmed as an “add-on” in the forthcoming Unity 5.

I like to think that most, if not all people have read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Fewer, however, will have whiled away many a frustratingly-enjoyable hour being hammered time and time again by Infocom’s HHGTTG text adventure in the ’80s. Here’s your chance!

The BBC have remade their Flash remake of the original Infocom game using JS, and you’ll be glad to hear that it’s just as mean as the original.

Their Technical FAQ is a fun read, too

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy – 30th Anniversary Edition

While not a new project it’s the first time I’ve seen Ironbane, a 3D MMO that’s been under development since 2012.

The chunky pixellated graphics work well and despite being a little glitchy in places it’s still quite polished and fun to play

Ironbane appears to be updated quite frequently, so definitely one to keep an eye on!

Ironbane via /r/javascript
Assets and server source are on Github.

Take one of gamings most loved franchises: the Super Monkey Ball series, swap out the monkey for a Chicken McNugget (yes, really), add a fair share of McDonalds branding and you’re left with an incredibly enjoyable if not slightly surreal game.

Created by http://www.goodboydigital.com/ for Razorfish as part of a new McDonald’s campaign the game involves rolling your McNugget down a set of winding, twisting, hair-pinned tracks across various environments. As you roll you collect items and can jump to bump into power-up chillis as well as avoiding the dangers on the road.

The game runs at a beautifully fast pace, utilising pixi.js under the hood with a whole new set of custom render objects to handle the road. It works on mobile but is pushing the pedal to the metal, so cheap Android tablets will suffer under the strain, but it certainly played smoothly on our iPad and Nexus 7. It’s a really fine example of a global brand adopting an HTML5 game for a major promotion to hit as many platforms as possible.

Play with your chicken balls on the Super Spice Dash site.

Radius Raid is a sharp little javascript + canvas game made by designer & developer Jack Rugile (@jackrugile) for this years js13k games competition.

Reminiscent of asteroids, as well as the more modern geometry wars, radius raid has you flying a small ship, defending your self from hoards of spherical enemies, and performs more than admirably (a consistent 60fps for me) for a javascript based game, built entirely on the canvas.

The controls are a little tricky to get a handle on at first, but once you’ve got them down, the game plays fantastically.

Radius Raid by Jack Rugile (@jackrugile)

As remakes of Mario Bros. goes, it doesn’t get much better than this. The description straight from the site says it all:

Full Screen Mario is a purely HTML5 remake of the original Super Mario Brothers. You can play the original levels, play through some of literally millions of possible random maps, or create your own using the level editor.

Best of all, the source is available on GitHub for forking and learning from.

I find the controls just a touch slow on my system – either that or I’m losing my Mario skills in my old age. And it’d be great to see this work on mobile and tablet. But let’s be honest: It’s Mario. Who couldn’t lose hours here, especially designing your own level? All I need now is Full Screen ExciteBike.

Full Screen Mario
by: Josh Goldberg

The UK town of Guildford has long been a hotbed of game development. The town has had a close knit community of developer talent ever since Les Edgar and Peter Molyneux setup Bullfrog Productions there in the 1980s. These days it’s also home to Wonderstruck Games, makers of the Turbulenz powered Polycraft – a multiplayer 3D tower defence game playable entirely in the browser. We spoke to Lead Developer Adam Langridge about the project.

CJS: Can you tell us a little about Wonderstruck games and your relationship with Turbulenz?

WS: Wonderstruck Games is Turbulenz’s first party team. We’re a team with a lot of experience in big game development, with people from Lionhead, Sony and EA. Wonderstruck is wholly focussed on making innovative, cutting edge browser Gaming experiences.

CJS: How did the PolyCraft project come about?

WS: Polycraft combines a few passions very close to the team. We wanted to combine strategy gaming with arcade action, but also wanted to give the player a compelling, persistent world that they were invested in. Polycraft is the ambitious, happy hybrid of these ideas.

CJS: A lot of your team have a console development background. How have you adjusted to working with JavaScript in the browser?

WS: Migrating to Javascript was a very easy step from other coding languages. There was an adjustment period where we had to learn some new habits and drop a few old ones, but we were up to full speed pretty quickly.

Regarding browser development – I love it. One of the most important factors to the quality and progress of a game is how small and quick the iteration loop is – the loop between making something and seeing it work (or not) and back. When I first started in the industry, I remember waiting for compile times of more than 30 minutes! With Javascript and browser development, the time between editing the script, and seeing it in game is a matter of seconds. This means that it is much quicker to experiment, improve and tweak our code and has resulted in faster progress that I’ve experienced at any other time in my career. I hope this progress is evident in Polycraft, which has a comparable feature set and polish to games with much larger teams on other platforms. The Chrome debugger, and real time script editing is the cherry on the cake. It’s the stuff of dreams to be able to tweak and test code while the game is running.

CJS: The Turbulenz engine relies heavily on WebGL. How are you handling mobile devices?

WS: The great news is that Turbulenz’s tech already supports mobile devices that support WebGL with very little work from us to get it working. Releasing to mobile devices is a matter of us deciding which experience to focus on first, and absolutely nailing that before we adjust the experience for mobile gaming. Very often the challenge of a different platform isn’t just the hardware, but also about how well the design fits with peoples habits with that specific device – a straight port may not do the project justice.

CJS: In April the Turbulenz engine transitioned to Typescript and became open source. Has this any impact on development?

WS: For any game developer, open sourcing code is very liberating. You have the ability to pick and choose what aspects of the code you want to use, and are able to modify it in any way you see fit for your game. As we were already fully on board with Turbulenz’s technology, the transition was very smooth. It’s great being able to build upon libraries that continue to grow and improve.

CJS: What do you have planned for PolyCraft now it has left private beta?

WS: We’ve some big plans. Due to the influx of players, we’ve discovered areas that we want to work on even more, and the fans are a really amazing driving force for this. They’re great. What’s been really special for me as a developer has been the comments feed that sits beside the game on the Turbulenz Game Site. We all read the feed daily, which contains crazy suggestions, words of appreciation as well as complaints and this really informs us on what to focus on. We’re still discussing some of the larger features, but we’d love to make the game even more social, and to give your islander the appreciation he (or she) deserves.

It’s a well known fact that lots of great game ideas are born from Ludum Dare contest entries and Qb Qb Qb (pronounced ‘cube cube cube’) is no exception. The first version was conceived and created over a caffeine fuelled 48-hour stretch during LD26 and at the end of it, after lots of positive feedback and comments it was obvious a great concept had been hit upon. Over the following weeks it was nurtured and grew into the final release available today.

Qb Qb Qb is a match-3 style game but played around a planet that you can rotate. The pieces fall from outer space, sucked down to the planets surface and if you can stack 3 of the same colour they explode in a pretty chain of particles and butterflies. As you can imagine things start to get hectic. Bricks pile up and fall faster. And it only takes misjudging one rotation of the planet before your carefully orchestrated brick laying falls apart. But that’s the whole appeal of it.

What sets this apart from other similar games are the variety of planets you can unlock. Later planets see curved bricks, much smaller bricks, multiple bricks falling at once and all of this is perfectly synced to a lovely ever evolving soundtrack. Each planet has a different audio style and the hook between the game play and music is very much in the style of the Bit.Trip Saga of games.

Obviously we wouldn’t be featuring this game on CreativeJS if it wasn’t for the fact it’s 100% JavaScript, Web Audio and Canvas powered. The desktop version is playable across Windows, OS X and Linux thanks to being bundled with node-webkit, making for a seamless desktop experience like any other commercial game. Gamepads are fully supported too, and frankly make for a much better gaming experience. iOS and Android versions are planned for release, packaged into native apps by CocoonJS once Ludei fix some outstanding bugs in their wrapper.

So enjoy the playable demo, enjoy the music and if you feel inspired pay the small amount the developer is asking for the full version and enjoy it in all its glory. Here’s hoping he follows-up with his promised ‘making of’ tutorial soon.

QbQbQb is available now for Windows, OS X and Linux.

[UPDATE] Einar Öberg just sent more information – his company North Kingdom made this with the help of Dinahmoe. There’s also this very cute promo video – this project has very high production values!

Even if this latest game from Google’s Creative Lab (Ursine Diversion Division) didn’t showcase the kinds of things you can get up to with WebRTC and even if this game didn’t have some extremely addictive little tweaks, you’d still want to play Cube Slam simply because Bob the bear is so darned cute. Seriously.

The first few times you play, you might find yourself deliberately losing points just because Bob gets grumpy and a bit sad when you win a point. Lose a couple of times and he’s okay.

If you keep playing, though, you’ll find a nicely implemented variation of possibly the most classic of classic games, Pong. There are a enough power-ups, handicaps and obstacles to keep you playing for as long as you can stand making Bob the Bear sad. And that’s not even mentioning the fact that you can play two-player across the Internet allowing you to slam the cube into your opponents face via webcam. Throw in the fact that the sound is generated dynamically using the Web Audio API and there’s hardly a new API not covered.

Find out more at the Chrome Blog or play at cubeslam.com, made by North Kingdom

I’m a sucker for clever uses of technology as much as I am crazy/complex code. And while I’m as tired as anyone of long scrolling web sites, this latest one is fun to play over and over. The 100 meter scroll by Mom! Look What I Made and I Like To Play is a simple racing mechanic built on top of scrolling. Hit start, scroll to 100 meters as fast as you can and then share. Simple and bright.

Bonus points because it is especially fun to play on mobile devices.