Earlier this month, I gave a workshop in Lyon to teach people how to create Web games with the now famous Crafty.js framework. 13 people attended (out of 15 open places), which appeared to be a good number: I could really help everyone and answer all the questions I received. It was a really good experience, but a short one sadly: we only had 2 hours (30 minutes being me talking about Crafty), and it's really short to be able to actually create a playable game. I think with an hour or two more some people could have had something playable.

Anyway, I created a bunch of content for that workshop, and I wanted to share it. So here it is!

Presenting Crafty.js

I spent the first 30 minutes of that workshop talking about Crafty.js, what it is, what it can do, and how it works. As usual, slides without the actual talk are not really good, but at least you will find some code examples and links to various resources in there. And who knows, maybe someone could make good use of these slides someday?

Creating Web Games with Crafty.js

Workshop: Coding a Web Game

My plan for the coding part was to come with 3 game ideas that people could work on, to provide some help (basic algorithms, some graphic resources) and to give them a working version in the end. That's what I did: I created a simple Snake game, a kind of Fruit Ninja and a Side Runner. After my presentation, I showed the 3 games I coded and asked people to pick one and start working on it. Most people picked the simplest one (some assuming it was the snake, when it was actually the Fruit Ninja clone in my opinion), and no one picked the Side Runner which was certainly harder and mostly impossible to do in less than 2 hours.

After an hour and a half of intense coding, documentation reading and some debugging (I had a few mistakes in my slides sadly), we had some snakes moving and some fruits falling!

I made a simple page with all the resources needed for this workshop:

The Crafty Workshop Awesome Page

There you can find:

• links to the base template in github or as a zip file
• short help with algorithms
• graphics
• and my own implementation of each game

I really enjoyed doing this, and I wish I can do it again someday! Thanks to everyone who attended and thanks to the Game Dev Party association for organizing this event.

Make Games, Not War /-)