So I know that theres more than a couple of you out there that have been very patiently awaiting the next post in my Building the Game series for the last couple of months. It's probably been a little frustrating to have the first 6 posts come out fairly quickly and then just abruptly cut off. For that I apologize.
The reality is that I've been buys with plenty of other, non-blog-related things lately and simply haven't been able to spend the time working on it. During the holidays I made a conscious decision to focus on family rather than code, and immediately after that I've been pretty swamped with a project from work (you know, the guys that actually pay me!) that has left me with little desire to do even more code when I get home. On top of that, I quickly realized that the where I wanted to take the bog series next would require some research into areas that I've never really poked into before (generating visible sets and such) and it's been difficult to find the time and resources to really dig into it.
In other words, I've been feeling a little burnt out. I think all programmers go through this from time to time, and I'm simply allowing myself to recover and gain back some of that all important enthusiasm.
Don't fret, this isn't my "well that was a failed experiment" post where I leave things forever unfinished. I'm going to continue the series soon, but I think I'll be back tracking a little bit and hitting some other aspects of it first before getting back into the whole level loading thing. Better animation management and player input feels like a good place to hit next, along with some retrospective tweaks to the model formats. I don't think I can give dates on when we'll see the next post, but rest assured it will be sooner than later.
Beyond the blog, however, there's been a couple of other developments worth mentioning lately. Since the contract is now signed I think it's safe to announce that I'm currently co-authoring a WebGL book! I was asked to help Diego Cantor complete a WebGL Beginners Guide for Packt Publishing, which has proven to be no small feat. I don't know anything really about potential release dates or anything like that, but rest assured that I'll be tweeting and blogging about it once I know more.
Also, I've been invited to attend Mozilla's HTML5 Games Work Week this February. Essentially, Mozilla is reaching out to people who have been active in game-related HTML5 tech (like WebGL) and is bringing them together for a week to ask "How can we make the web an awesome game platform?" This is a goal I think we can all support!
For my part, I want to try and address several concerns from the development community that I've run into either through this blog, via email, or that I've seen talked about on various other online resources. These include:
- Synchronizing game logic and rendering
- Considerations for reducing power consumption of games on mobile devices
- Content protection
- Content delivery
- Robust input handling
- High-performance audio
But I'd also love to hear what the rest of the HTML5 game dev community is concerned about! I can't promise that everything that I hear about will be addressed but if I'm hearing similar concerns from multiple people you can be sure I'll do my best to bring it up.
That's about it for now. There's a couple of conferences on the horizon that I may have a chance to speak at but nothing is confirmed right now. I'll let you know if things solidify. There's also some exciting new and upcoming bits of web tech that I'm itching to play with and do some little demos for, so expect to see some quickie proof-of-concept stuff in the coming months as well. In the meantime, I'm always available for questions by email, on twitter, or through this blog, and I've made a habit of trolling StackOverflow for WebGL questions.
