If you are having a hard time to finish your PBBG projects and if you are looking for motivation you should listen up! The bbgamezone community is organising it’s second PBBG competition.

There are no prizes to win but the competition should motivate you to code your game a whole lot faster. Your objective? Create a working game in one month! This should motivate some people to start coding their game and also to prototype neat ideas. If you check out the people that already started in the competition you will see that there are some very interesting ideas.

The use of code snippets from previous projects is encouraged. So if you have a very basic game already you can probably join in too. If you are not joining the competition you should at least follow the people updating on their progress. Very interesting!

For more information you should check out the bbgamezone forum:

Official competition 2010

Competition progress

Everybody can join but be fast since the competition has started already!

The holidays ended and school began again this week. I started working on my game map using the HTML 5 canvas element again. I posted about a very simple example before, so I just extended that piece of code. I’ll keep you updated.

In the end I’ll probably just give you the code and some sort of tutorial to explain how I did it. For now you just need to know that you have to start with something very basic and just add functionality bit by bit. You’ll have to rewrite some stuff of course but it will be easier than you think.

Here is a temporary demo: http://janne.siera.be/

If you have any questions on game maps or using the canvas element please ask. I’ll try to answer them as good as I can.

Take care,
Janne

It is an important question for all PBBG developers. The answer can show us where we want to go or give us insight in how we create our own games. It can remind us what our goal is, an image we should always keep in our minds.

Goals and motivations can differ from one person to another. Knowing where we stand is important though. That’s why I asked 9 developers to answer the following questions:

1. Why did you originally want to make browser based games?
2. Why did you choose browser based games over other media?
3. Why do you make browser based games now?
4. Why do you still make browser based games, instead of going to other media?
5. Why should, or shouldn’t, people play browser based games?

This was not a scientific survey or anything like that but rather a glimpse of the minds of some fellow developers. Some of them already have games online for quite a while, others are still creating their first PBBG.

Maybe their answers, and my view, can help you to answer those questions for yourself.

Read more…

When a friend showed me the anime “Fairy Tail” yesterday I was pleasantly surprised. The graphics style in the prologue is exactly what I was looking for as an example for General’s Map! When developing a browser based game all by yourself you need to pay attention to every aspect of the development. Asking others for help is key in making a successful PBBG, telling others what you want is the best way to ask.

Here is a nice screenshot from the anime to illustrate my map.

View the original screenshot

Update:

Here is another example, which will be very useful for my communication with illustrators. Source: The Settlers, rise of an empire.

I am very happy to announce to you a new service to bring PBBG developers closer together, PBBG snippets!

This was a collaborative project between BBGameDesign and Building Browsergames. Visit bbgames for a little bit more info.

If you have anything to share, contributing is easy, so don’t hesitate!

Visit PBBG Snippets

I have some very good ideas for some longer posts about browser based game development but I’m having a ‘time crisis’ right now!

I’m almost having exams at school so I’m not only spending my evenings on homework but also my weekends . That’s why I don’t have much for you this week (and probably the next 2 weeks) but after that I’ll have time to work on some projects (holidays!).

I’m really sorry about that, but time is limited, and sometimes not enough.

I’m focused on getting things done. Learning new things and making things. The magical ingredient is time though, and I have zero right now… but be prepared for some good content by Christmas .

Hey everyone,

For this week’s post I’m just going to share some resources and websites. You have probably heard of some of them already, but perhaps there’s still some interesting stuff to check out.
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I am happy to present to you the renewed BBGameDesign Blog.

Welcome Back

A while ago I decided to move my blogger blog to a self hosted wordpress site. I haven’t been able to post there since I was working on this blog, but now I’m back again and even more motivated.

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Intro

This post will explain some “game mechanics options” for General’s Map, the battle engine.

I hope to built GM so that I can – easily – enable and disable certain game mechanics. With the purpose of testing various mechanics, and combinations. Each option is labeled with one or more categories.

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Intro

Hello there. This post will hopefully give you a better sight on my new working title “General’s Map”. In an earlier post I procided a littler description of the game, now I will dig deeper into the design?

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