2016/02/26 — issue #112

Gamedev.js Weekly #112

Articles

Smooth game animations in React
As words fall down your screen from outer space in the form of “asteroids,” you race to type the answer before they hit the planet.
Jen Liu at Medium

Google's Artificial Intelligence solves riddle used in Google interviews
Could Google’s artificial intelligence system be smart enough to get a job at Google? It’s certainly not impossible.
Tom Hale at IFL Science

Firewatch developer offers classy response to Steam refund request
Last weekend, one Firewatch player was having a monetary dilemma.
Patricia Hernandez at Kotaku

Superhot review
For all the ways in which it's undeniably familiar, Superhot is quite unlike anything else I've played.
Philip Kollar at Polygon

Finding the fun
This is a written-up, non-verbatim version of a guest lecture I gave for Playcrafting NYC’s 2015 8 week game design course.
Jane Friedhoff's blog

Game development for kids
Recently, my four-year-old son asked me, “Daddy, can we make a game together? Can it be a kitty game?”
Christer Kaitila at Tuts+ Game Development

85 year old grandpa makes video games in his attic for fun - he creates all the music, storyline, and 3D models for his games
Tomhung's 85 years old grandpa has developed some (3D) games all by himself. His works are amazing and well done (not flappy bird or something simple like that).
Alsatian-studio at Reddit

Tutorials

Retro, crisp pixel art in Phaser
The trick for the pixel art look was to draw the graphic assets in a small size and then scale them up with a near-neighbor algorithm.
Belén Albeza's blog

How to use state machines to control behavior and animations in Phaser
There is a structure called state machine, which can efficiently model what we want in our game: an object that may assume different states during its life.
Renan Oliveira at GameDev Academy

Simple Augmented Reality with OpenCV, Three.js and WebSockets
Augmented reality is generally considered to be very hard to create. However, it’s possible to make visually impressive projects using just open source libraries.
Martin Sikora at Smashing Magazine

HTML5 prototype of iOS game “Perfect Square!” made with Phaser using only tweens in 100 lines of code
Fit the square onto the platform so that it’s aligned perfectly. Touch it to grow and release to let it fall.
Emanuele Feronato's blog