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Enclave Games in 2019, and plans for 2020

Tradition of laughing while comparing what I wanted to do with Enclave Games in a given year versus what actually happened continues. Let’s recap the past year and prepare some plans for the upcoming one that probably won’t happen anyway.

W3C workshop

If you have too much time on your hands feel free to check the summaries of: 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. Let’s start with the plans from last year and see how they ended up:

  • Code more - I started 100 Days of Code on April 15th and ended up with 47 of them on September 12th
  • Finish and release a bunch of games - big NOPE
  • Try to update some of my websites - NOPE at all
  • Organize a few events if time permits - that one kind of worked out

Now onto the bad, ok, and good things in the past twelve months.

Bad things

No new games, at all - it’s now more than 2,5 years since the release of Flood Escape. I have a whole bunch of unfinished prototypes. At least I’ve coded a bit though: Meditations project, Enclave Phaser Template now uses Phaser 3, and NSHex Counter was published.

Still way too much time spent on js13kGames, roughly six months out of the whole year. This needs to be optimized as a lot of work is still manual. New backend or no competition in 2020.

Some projects are dead, buried deep down the TODO list. OpenHTML5Games is nothing more than a placeholder, Gamedevjs.com sees new posts once every time I recall to publish something. A bunch of ideas is just that - plans only, for years now. About 15-20 of them are there, but I’m not even gonna write them down in this blog post. Not yet.

Ok things

No client work. Would be cool to get some quick money, but on the other hand it would take the time I’m using for my own projects. Not actively looking for clients, so it’s cool.

Written GDevelop tutorial. The final result was good, but it didn’t go according to plan and we had a lot of last minute crunching just before the deadline - it’s not how it should have been completed.

The Gamedev.js Weekly newsletter is alive, posted every Friday, although I didn’t do much for it to grow, or rather - did absolutely nothing. Still missing the mobile, responsive template.

The js13kGames 2019 went great - we had brand new Web Monetization category, WebXR one got three Oculus Quests as prizes, and the overall quality of the submitted games went through the roof, another year in a row. Why in ’Ok’ then? Because the changes in submitting and validating entries, accepting them, voting, and picking winners were done partially as external systems, and partially as ugly hacks to the existing backend. If we won’t have an entirely new backend this year, then I’m not sure the 2020 edition will happen at all.

I did my share of Tech Speaking, but there’s probably a whole lot of other people more active and visible than me, talking about something more Mozilla-aligned than games. That’s cool, and I’m fine ith it.

Good things

Ewa is now focusing her time on Enclave Games, at least more than in previous years, so some things will move forward faster.

The Gamedev.js events are going just fine: we had GameJam.js hackathon, five meetups (#10 at Warsaw IT Days, #11 and #12 with meet.js, #13 about js13kGames, regular #14), and a workshop about ECS.

JS Poland 2019

I’ve given a solid amount of talks at: GameJam.js, Warsaw IT Days, W3C Games workshop in Redmond, Fullstack in London, js13kGames Hackday in Berlin, BBDays4IT in Bielsko-Biała, Tech Speakers meetup in Amsterdam, Gamedev.js Warsaw #13, WebBR in Sao Paulo, JS Poland, ConFrontJS, and WRUG meetup all in Warsaw.
Twelve talks in a year, distributed rather evenly. I was mostly talking about the past, present, and the future of HTML5 games, which started at the W3C workshop with indie perspective on Web games topic, and continued as the evolution of them over the next months. It was also a year when I had my first keynote ever, and broke my record in the number of people in the audience.

MozFest 2019

My involvement with Web Monetization started in 2019. Because of meeting with Dees at the W3C workshop, the js13kGames competition had Web Monetization category thanks to the support from Coil, I decided to web monetize all my Enclave Games creations, and started giving talks about that, run a booth at MozFest, and overall promoted it wherever possible.

Plans for 2020

Plans for this upcoming year are similar to the ones from 2019, but I hope I’ll do better this time. So: refreshing websites and building new games are the two main things to focus on, but not the only ones.

It would be good to keep the Gamedev.js events going, and have at least 3-4 meetups, maybe some workshops. Warsaw community is small, but those events provide great opportunity to meet with like-minded folks locally.

Gamedev.js is also a global initiative, but I didn’t have time to do much around it - starting Gamedev.js Jam or running Gamedev.js Survey will probably have to wait. Or maybe not?

I’d like to write and publish at least one ebook, perfectly two (I already have details of both in mind) this year, but I know the chances are slim, so I don’t expect much.

Grant for the Web fund was announced - I’m gonna try to be as involved as possible. Implementing Web Monetization in our games and other stuff will be one of the top priorities this year.