TOOLS // GAME ENGINES | BUILD
But there’s another major reason why WebGL and HTML5 appealed so much. A key goal for us is to open up game development to the widest audience possible. Mozilla came up with some fascinating stats last year: there are 200,000 iOS developers out there and 600,000 Android developers. How many web developers? Eight million. The vast majority of these know JavaScript and can start developing games via PlayCanvas right away.
The engine’s hosting and ‘simple publishing’ abilities seem core to what you’ve built with PlayCanvas. Why and how is that important with the engine? Games are made to be played. But it’s amazing how difficult developers make it for people to play their games sometimes. Weighty downloads, lengthy installs and frequent updates are examples most of us are familiar with. One of the key strengths of the web is that games can reach the end user in record time.
A ‘one click’ publish from your PlayCanvas project followed by a tweet can result in an avalanche of players accessing your game. App stores are great for monetisation, but nothing beats the web for virality. Of course, we do recognise it’s critical for devs to be able to publish to app stores as well. This is why we have partnered with a company called Ludei whose CocoonJS technology can trivially wrap HTML5-based games as native apps for publishing to Google Play or the iOS App Store. It’s a very quick and easy process.
Exactly what kind of studio types or models was the engine conceived for? Perhaps you’d consider it suitable for a broader spectrum than just small teams? We’ve built PlayCanvas to address the needs of indie developers. I’m talking about small, potentially distributed teams who are looking
to make money from their titles. That said, it’s also a great fit for game jammers, students, enthusiasts and so on. The sweet spot for PlayCanvas is casual, social and mobile games. Since triple-A game development projects are relatively few in number, it’s just not something we’ve been focusing on.
I’m struggling to think of what else
we could do to make games development any more accessible.
Will Eastcott, PlayCanvas
Let’s talk in more detail about the core abilities. What features would you say define the engine and will offer users the most opportunity in terms of the games they make?
We have an awesome feature set in our runtime engine and visual editor. But we’ve set out to change how people make games so the core features that really set us apart are mainly workflow related. Realtime collaboration is absolutely key and a complete revelation for games developers who have been forced to effectively work in isolation year-upon-year. Check out engine forum threads on the subject of collaboration and team-working and you’ll sense the frustration. Cloud-storage is another major feature which grants an amazing amount of freedom. Sit down and develop on any machine you choose. There are well-understood reasons why the world stopped using Outlook Express and started using Gmail.
Another cornerstone to the engine is the community. It’s just not sufficient to claim a forum and a Q&A site constitutes a
community today. We follow, we star, we like, we share. We want to be able to engage with like-minded individuals, to teach, discover and learn. PlayCanvas lets you do all this since everybody works online and stores their projects on
playcanvas.com.
How does the existence of – and recent changes to – PlayCanvas reflect trends in the industry? In other words, how is it a response to the way you see the games making business going?
The main trend of the last 15 years or so is that technology for games development has become cheaper and easier to access. PlayCanvas is the next logical step down that path. The runtime is open source and distributed under a liberal MIT license. The tools sit on a URL and developers have nothing to download or install. You can access the toolset from your smartphone or tablet as well as the desktop.
The tools are free to use and even the premium subscription accounts are incredibly cheap. We’ve got to the point where I’m struggling to think of what else we could do to make games development any more accessible than it is with PlayCanvas. More generally, we’re seeing a thriving indie development community scoring some amazing commercial successes. We’re seeing more and more outsourcing and distributed teams. There are more platforms to target than ever. PlayCanvas is a direct response to all of this.
I think it’s also important to look at some of the trends beyond the games industry. Productivity applications of all types are now migrating into the cloud and subscription- based SaaS platforms are now commonplace. Making video games is a team-based, multi- discipline activity so if any industry can benefit from these ideas, it’s ours.
www.playcanvas.com
JULY 2014 | 43
PlayCanvas (above) can be accessed online without any large downloads or lengthy install processes
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