16 posts tagged with "event"

PlayCanvas has now completed the 3 month long Techstars accelerator and to mark the occasion, a glitzy Demo Day was held at an exclusive theatre in London's Victoria.

Will took to the stage (to the sound of Gangnam Style!) to present the technology to a 350 strong audience of angel investors, venture capitalists and the press.

The feedback has been incredible! After the pitch, the PlayCanvas demo booth was bustling with people hungry to know more about our plans to shake up the games industry.

We were also incredibly flattered by the reaction from the technology press. First up, we have TechCrunch:

Techstars London First Cohort: Our Three Favorite Startups From Demo Day

And there's more! The Next Web ranked PlayCanvas second out of the 10 companies that presented:

The 10 startups from Techstars’ first ever London Demo Day (and our 3 favorites)

No wonder we're all smiles! 😊

On Wednesday, 18th September, I flew out to Warsaw to run a workshop for onGameStart, the world's most awesome conference for HTML5 game developers.

Seriously, if you've never been, you're missing out. It's fun fun fun! The workshop broke down into three parts: a crash course on how to use PlayCanvas, an exercise reproducing a simple PlayCanvas game, and then the main event, a freestyle game jam!

There were 22 participants, so I was kept very busy answering questions and helping the teams make progress. Considering almost everybody was new to PlayCanvas, the results were fantastic! Here are a couple of highlights. First up, we have a great use of physics in this local multiplayer football game by Krzysztof Wieczorek (plus friend). Controls are WASD for player 1 and arrow keys for player 2.

Next up, we have procedurally generated plants written by Ivan Popelyshev and Wesa Aapro. Simply press space a few times and see how your garden grows!

Congratulations to everybody who took part on the day. So much creativity for only a 3-hour jam!! We can't wait for the next one.

Yesterday, at PlayCanvas we hosted our first physical Game Jam. By physical, I mean we had all the developers in the same location, not that we made them run around and do push-ups!

The PlayCanvas Game Jam Dungeon

Based out of the 80s sci-fi haven that is the Virgin Media Game Space, a group of 9 of us spent the day hacking on brand new games, modelling manga robots, and techno beats.

Yes, I know you wish you were there.

nebulousflynn making strange noises

For us this is an excellent opportunity to see developers at work, using our tools together to prototype ideas and build stuff.

Your feedback is what makes PlayCanvas great.

roseninja and jellycakes working on platformer "Squeaky Wheel"

Go check out users roseninja, jellycakes, wilbefast, nebulousflynn and balkango who were all building games yesterday. It's early days for Flying robots of Death and Squeaky Wheel, but terrific work for an afternoon of coding and modelling.

wilbefast concentrating on make robots kill each other

We've got more Game Jams coming up. Will is at onGameStart in Poland next week.

Here's a little vine of Flying robots of Death for those who don't have two GamePads to plug-in and play.

[iframe class="vine-embed" src="https://vine.co/v/h1FUVHi3mmK/embed/simple" width="600" height="600"]

Last night I presented at the London HTML5 Game Dev meetup. As usual we had an awesome time and if you're based in or around London then you should definitely try and get along to the next one.

It was an overview of the ammo.js the physics engine we use internally for PlayCanvas and should be an interesting read for anyone who isn't totally familiar with what a physics engine is or does. It gives a nice overview of the different parts that make up a full physics engine and includes a bunch of demos about what is possible with PlayCanvas.

[iframe src="http://slid.es/davee/introduction-to-ammojs/embed" width="576" height="420" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen>]

In case you didn't know, PlayCanvas is based in London in the UK. There is a thriving game dev scene in London and the rest of the UK, but there was nothing specific to growing HTML5 game development scene. So we decided to help kickstart one.

I started the London HTML5 Game Developers group on meetup.com to meet other people who saw HTML5 as playing a big role in the future of game development. And it didn't disappoint. The first meetup had 50 people sign up in only a couple of days and we've now got over 200 members in our group. It's a great crowd of smart devs creating interesting things in 2D and 3D, for both mobile and desktop. If you are based in London or just in the area, you should definitely sign up and come along to one of our nights.

Presentation Night​

This month we held or first Presentation Night. Mozilla kindly hosted us at their space in London and we saw some great demos, including Unreal 3 running in the latest Firefox, and of course PlayCanvas courtesy of Will.

Here are a few pictures:

Great turnout, practically a full house

Max and Maciej showing off their game-hack games

Chris from Mozilla demoing Unreal 3 in the browser

Thanks to everyone who came along, in particular Chris from Mozilla who stayed late after work to host the event.

If you didn't come this time, you should come next time!

A massive thank you to everybody who took the time to swing by our stand at Google I/O last week. We had an amazing time and hope you did too. If you weren't at the conference, here's our space in the Developer Sandbox:

We were really excited to be showing our latest game/demo: a networked multiplayer, third person shooter. We were running MacBook Pro and a ChromeBook connected to a node.js server. We think we did a great job of showing just what's possible with HTML5 (and WebGL) with only moderate hardware. Expect some more info soon on the near-term plans we have for the demo...