Gamedev.js Weekly #67

Articles

The key design elements of roguelikes
Once a relatively obscure sub-genre that appealed to a hardcore fan base, roguelikes have been enjoying a recent renaissance. Let’s take a closer look at their central design elements, and see how different games are making use of the same underlying architecture.
Alexander King at Tuts+ Game Development

Bloodborne: You are the experience points
Do the Souls games have a Secret Design Formula? Well, yes.
Tim Rogers at Gamasutra

A brief overview on 2D Game Development
Or the things you probably want to learn before start making 2D games.
Ellison Leão at Medium

10 simple mistakes indie developers should avoid
Keep an eye out for these ten easy to spot mistakes that you should try and avoid to guarantee the success of your studio!
Daniel Doan at Black Shell Media

No one reads text in a tutorial
A common feedback we got during this first playthrough was that there was just too much text in the tutorial, so a lot of players did not bother to read it and would just rapidly tap through the tutorial.
Abhinav Sarangi at Gamasutra

Minimum sustainable success
Let’s dream for a moment about sustainable game development.
Daniel Cook at Lost Garden

The big list of 2D HTML5 games engines
We received tons of emails from HTML5 game developers asking info about some 2D game engines. For this reason we created this list and we hope it will be useful to all the game devs out there.
GamePix blog

Reverse engineering WipEout
In 1995 one of my all time favorite video games was released: the original WipEout for PlayStation.
Dominic Szablewski at Phoboslab

Videos

Unsung Heroes introduction
Unsung Heroes is a campaign to give great mobile games the chance they deserve — for the benefit of developers and of gamers.

Tutorials

Create an HTML5 game like Boom Dots in less than 100 lines of code with Phaser
Did you play the iOS free game Boom Dots? It’s a quick and simple one-button game we are going to create with Phaser in a few lines, using mostly tweens.
Emanuele Feronato's blog

Introduction to JavaScript: performing math equations
Welcome to part four of our five part series on learning JavaScript for game developers. In this post, we dig a little deeper into how to perform math equations in JavaScript.
Jesse Freeman at Amazon Mobile App Distribution Blog

A beginner's guide to coding graphics shaders
Learning to write graphics shaders is learning to leverage the power of the GPU, with its thousands of cores all running in parallel. It's a kind of programming that requires a different mindset, but unlocking its potential is worth the initial trouble.
Omar Shehata at Tuts+ Game Development

Indiegogo

CrossCode, a retro-inspired 2D Action RPG set in the distant future

Tools

PlaygroundJS framework v2

WebGL GLSL Shader Editor Extension for Google Chrome

O₂ Engine - HTML5-based Visual Novel Engine

Music Albums

Saturday at Work by Rezoner

Games

Superhotline Miami - little experiment, a mix of Superhot and Hotline Miami