Leanpub: Publish Early, Publish Often

Preface

I’ll be honest and get this out as early as possible: I’m not a “professional” game developer. Looking at my other Leanpub books will tell you that I’m more into web development. Heck, if you told me a few months ago that I would be putting out a game development book, I would’ve thought you’re crazy.

This book was a result of three things that happened to occur around the same time:

First was the problem that came up with our HTML5 workshop. The original lecturer bailed at the last minute and we had problems with finding a replacement. We even considered the worst case, cutting out the hands-on portion leaving us with a morning “workshop” consisting only of talks from people in the local gaming industry.

Coincidentally, I was playing around with Phaser a few weeks before the event. While I am not a game developer, I had just enough knowledge to make a simple workshop to introduce basic game concepts via the said HTML5 game framework. In the end I volunteered to take over the workshop less than four days before the actual event.

Normally I would have prepared a hundred or so slides and go through them during the workshop. But earlier that week I had the rare opportunity to talk to the first person who gave me advice when I started out teaching, and one of the things we talked about the not-so-recent trend of lazy college professors making only slides leaving a big gap between them and textbooks. This convinced me to switch things up with the workshop – instead of giving the participants a link to SpeakerDeck, I would point them to Leanpub.

It took a few sleepless nights to write the original 36-page workbook, but it was worth it: I had a much easier time conducting the workshop than I would have if I went with slides.

The positive response from the participants also convinced me to spend some more time to improve this book and get it out there for anyone interested in learning the basics of game development.

License

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

You can find the complete source of this book at https://github.com/bryanbibat/html5shootemupinanafternoon.

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Introduction