Lots of things happened in January: we’ve summarized 2023 and made plans for 2024, published Gamedev.js Survey 2023 results, I’ve prepared the first four weekly issues of the Phaser World newsletter after revival, W3C Games group had a meetup about generative AI, the NSHex Counter app got two armies (Merchants Guild and Partisans) added, and I published ten different news posts on NeuroshimaHex.pl.
Games
No games in particular, but I did some coding, finally (even if just a little bit) - the NSHex Counter app made with Phaser had two Neuroshima Hex armies added: Merchants Guild and Partisans.
Writing
I wrote the lenghty Enclave Games in 2023, and plans for 2024, a summary of what we did in the past year and our hopes for the one that just started.
The Gamedev.js Survey 2023 needed summarizing comments to the answers of all 35 questions, so that took me a considerable amount of time in the first half of the month. The Report on the current state of Web Game Development in 2023 was published in the middle of January.
I wrote ten news articles for the NeuroshimaHex.pl site, including two editorials of logner posts by other folks from our community. There was also the “famous” drama one about the board game standing at the edge of oblivion, or something along those lines.
Plus the published job offer for a Senior WebGL Graphics Engineer at Phaser Studio, which was quite popular in our community.
Design
Ewa focused on preparing the charts for the Gamedev.js Survey 2023 results, did the graphic assets for the NSHex Counter updates, and worked on the new online t-shirt shops we’re going to launch soon.
Events
We’ve published 11 new pictures of people wearing js13kGames 2023 t-shirts on Facebook in January, some of them really impressive.
I’ve given a short talk on the Gamedev.js Survey 2023 results during the bi-monthly W3C Games CG meetup where Georg Zoeller was talking about generative AI in games.
Also, two FireDEV podcast episodes, with me and with Ewa, were published recently.
We’ve also considered participating in Global Game Jam this year, but after learning the theme is ”make me laugh” we’ve skipped it entirely.
Other
I’m now managing two newsletters: beside my very own Gamedev.js Weekly since January 2014, now I’m also part time helping with the Phaser World newsletter since the beginning of January this year.
My Dropbox is constantly full, so I’ve made a backup for some work related stuff and setup Box.
A new Studios section in our Gamedev.js Discord was created, with two channels already: #emc23 and… #enclavegames. It’s mainly for small indie studios not having their own Discord, but still wanting to interact with the web gamedev community, so if you’d like to have yours just let me know.
Even my TataDeveloper parenting blog (in Polish) got a few new posts - so far I did four in a row, three in January, one per week.
Plans for the next month
Publish a few more blog posts, and then WRITE SOME CODE FOR A GAME. If that won’t work, then what’s the point in being a game developer?