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→Building a Commercial Game Using Processing.js for Cross-platform Delivery
Jeremy Friedburg, one of the founders of [http://www.spongelab.com/spongelab/main.cfm/ Spongelab Interactive]introduced the company and the project of dragon breeding game. He told that the mission is to educate students in the sciences by building content-rich immersive teaching tools designed around discovery-based learning that are accessible to educators and learners at school and at home.
[http://dhodgin.wordpress.com/ Daniel Hodgin], the project manager and [http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/User:Dperit/ David Perit]David Perit, the game designer of the team gave the background of the project. Both the developers talked about Processing and Processing.js and the development of the game and why these languages were used for the game. Both projects are Open Source and free to use and contribute to. Processing was originally developed at the MIT Media Lab by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. Processing.js is a port of the Processing language to JavaScript using the HTML canvas. Processing works on Windows and Mac, where as Processing.js works on Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari and mobile browsers that support the HTML5 canvas element. Processing.js does not require a plugin to be installed. This allows it to run in environments where plugins cannot be installed like mobile, business and public. As it is open source it has the ability to change things to work the way you want. There is full control and access to the development community to contribute and there is no licensing costs.
Daniel also talked about moving away from Flash as it will not work on Apple devices and the company Spongelab wants to reach the mobile iOS audience and its instantly portable. Then Daniel talked about developing the game. When Spongelab delivered a game design document outlining features of the game and how the game would progress and play, they started creating the storyboards of what screens would look like and how they would tie together. Then they programmed the screen structure and navigation and once the basic screens were put together they began programming game play mechanics and features. They wrote code to mimic the JAVA interaction with audio for the HTML5 Audio element. He told that when the game came together they began testing for bugs and performance issues. From this, they optimized load times and animation speeds. Once optimizations were made they did basic play testing to further improve the game play mechanics and the beta release of the game went out in early October. Lastly David showed a demo of the game which showed how it works and its different features.