enchant.js | Fundamentals

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We’ve entered Phase Two of my game programming course, and to help support this phase, I’m putting together enchant.js | Fundamentals.

While currently not as interactive nor as descriptive as what I developed for Phase One, I’m hoping these incremental examples will make it easy for those new to programming to grok some fundamental techniques and concepts.

Again, feedback is appreciated.

Just Enough JavaScript

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I got a last-minute opportunity to teach an introduction to game programing course for people with no programming experience. I decided to base it around an open source HTML5 framework*. When I started looking around for a crash course with which to build basic JavaScript programming skills, I found none that were appropriate. Hence, Just Enough Javascript was born.

I’m creating it as a just-in-time resource for the course. There a little bad-but-expedient practice in there, but it’s working quite well for the course so far. Each page is resource-complete in itself—meaning you can download just a single HTML document and later view it without a live Internet connection.

I would love to hear any feedback about it.

* I considered enchant.js, Phaser, and melonJS. There were pros and cons to each, but I ultimately went with enchant.js because I like it’s event-driven nature (better reflects how JS “should” work) and it has a smaller (and therefore less intimidating for beginners) API.

Arduino and Bio-inspired Design

A week ago Monday I did a guest lecture on Arduino for Marc Swackhamer and Neil Olszewski’s graduate architecture course on bio-inspired design. It was an awesome experience–lots of bright and enthusiastic minds. We followed the lecture up with a studio on Wednesday, and later today I will be assisting with reviews. Many thanks to Marc for letting me participate in this inspiring process.