Last week, I attended a game development workshop presented by Vancouver Polyglot {Un}conference, Startup Weekend Vancouver and Microsoft Canada. I check out Eventbrite frequently and this workshop caught my eye. With a donation of only $10 to the Vancouver Humane Society and the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre, we get into a full day workshop to learn about using HTML5 for game development.


Tommy Lee Lewis (@TommyLee on Twitter), a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft, was first up to introduce the fundamentals of HTML5 games. He showed us Atari Arcade which is built using HTML5 then went onto some of the techniques and tools we can use when doing our own development.





We took a brief lunch break with food catered by Nuba in Gastown. Yummy! It was a buffet lunch insisting of salad, humus, olives, falafel, lamb, chicken and beef skewers.







As an added perk, we got t-shirts!


 They even set up a lounge area where we would play Halo 4 or Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.

Robert Evans, Senior Premier Field Engineer and the world-wide Technical Lead for Windows 8: Windows Store App Labs, then took the reins of the presentation after lunch with some more technical stuff and an Q&A session.


Then we were left to our own devices to do some hacking. They provided us with some demos and code we could play with on a USB key. A lot of people left during this time and I (ashamedly) followed suit because I wanted to catch the European Festival in Burnaby.

If you want to learn more about game development with HTML or Windows 8, visit WootStudio.ca, which provides you links to free game art, Javascript libraries, starter kits and other tools to help you develop that game you always wanted to!