I am proud to announce the publication of HTML5 Game Development with GameMaker, the book I have been working on for the last 8 months. I would like to give a shout out to Bert Dennison who helped me with some of the art for the games and to Brian Werst for all the excellent music he provided. Also, a big thanks to everyone at Packt Publishing who helped make this book happen.

Writing this book was an incredible experience and I will talk all about it in a future post-mortem post. For now, let me just tell you a bit of what this book is all about. HTML5 Game Development with GameMaker is unlike many other books on the software (that I have read at least) in that it focuses almost exclusively on utilizing GameMaker’s powerful scripting language: GML. There is plenty of material elsewhere on the internet about the drag and drop method and I wanted to jump right past that and into writing code.  The first few chapters are really meant for people that are new to the software and I cover all the basics you need to know, including scripting a side scrolling shooter. The book then ramps up into more complex projects, designing systems and writing efficient code. There are chapters on using Box2D physics, particles, and integrating the built in Flurry data analytics and Facebook functionality. I even included an appendix that covers the DnD to GML conversion, which is a special online only chapter. (The book was bit too long to get it in the print edition). I tried to make sure I had a little something for everyone and I think I achieved that.

If you want to purchase the book you can get it directly from the publisher here or you can go to Amazon and other various online retailers of books. I should also mention it is available in print as well as epub, PDF, and other digital formats you may like.

I really hope people enjoy the book and get something out of it. Please feel free to ask me questions and send me your comments (both bad and good, I like feedback).

Well it has been another year and once again I haven’t posted in months. In fact, I have almost completely dropped off the social media landscape all together. What really hurts most, though, is I spent so much time and effort to rebuild this website and then I did nothing with it. So what are my excuses this year?

Let’s start with a soon to be classic with “I have been really busy being a father”. Having a baby definitely does impact one’s life. I have seen my daughter Pixel grow from a cute little ball of fun to an incredibly energetic, walking, talking automaton of fun. It’s hard to get anything done while she is awake as I am her playmate and she wants to do stuff. This of course has led me to learn a lot more about what is going on in the neighborhood. I know all the local parks and what type of playground equipment they have. I’ve been to the community centre and library more than I ever thought I would. I have also met a wide range of people I would likely never have known. It has changed my outlook on life in many wonderful ways.

A bigger and possibly better excuse is something that I didn’t see coming at me this year. I am writing a technical book on Game Maker Studio: HTML5. I just happened to stumble across this opportunity and jumped on it without realizing how much work it was going to take. I know the software very well and I have been teaching it for years, so I proposed an outline of the things I would like to incorporate. They approved it and asked if could I write a chapter every two and half weeks. That seemed like a lot of time for about 30 pages including images, so I said yes. What I didn’t think about was that I also had to code each of the games, build the assets, bug test it then rebuild the game step by step in order to write it. On top of that, Game Maker Studio has been rolling out builds every week with the occasional major change, making some content already outdated. Needless to say, this has taken up way more time than I expected.

2012 turned out to be a fantastic year even if it was on a completely different trajectory from where it started. At the end of the day, however, there is no “good” excuse. Looking ahead to a excuse-free 2013, I will be taking all my new found focus and will be applying it to new projects. This site, and all my social media outlets, will become more active as the book winds down and if things go right, this year will be a breakout year for me.

Here’s to the future and no more excuses!

I finally got off my ass and finished the redesign for this website. As you can see it is quite a drastic change from the previous version and I thought I would give some insight to what went into the last two developments.

The previous theme was honestly something I threw together fairly quickly. I had just started using WordPress and I wanted to see how it was built so I dove right in. Of course, as always happens when you rush things, I didn’t really put in any thought as to what I wanted it to look like. The design was mainly inspired by my iPhone case and it meant I didn’t have to think much. Almost since the start I have regretted not spending more time on getting it right. There were several issues that drove me insane when looking at the site. First, I never did set up the single page CSS correctly, so the sidebar slid all over the place. Second was that I used rounded corners even though I knew that Microsoft doesn’t support it. Every time I saw my site in Internet Explorer I shut the browser down as I couldn’t stand to look at it.

About a year ago, I came up with a kernel of an idea of what I wanted to do with the look of the site. My inspiration comes from old blues and jazz albums of the 60′s. I really like the monochrome photograph look as it sets a mood while showcase the artist. I worked on several variations of this, experimented with logos and the like, but nothing stuck until I started playing with some CSS3 transitions. I went with a more modern look with a nice large font for the title and a semi-transparent background. The background photo is of me in my office working on games as that is where I spend a lot of time (maybe too much). I added the film grain to it to make it a bit more of a memory, which is how I see the content of the site.

Going forward I plan on making some further changes, but most of that is waiting on content to be created first. For that, you are going to have to wait a bit.

Thanks for checking out the refreshed website!