Mozilla Game On | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla Game On

gameon.mozilla.org

152 pointslee33734 comments

Fair warning: participate for the fun, not for the prizes. Mozilla ran a competition like this in 2010. My game "Favimon" won the "Most Original" category. I never did receive most of the prizes they claimed all winners received, including a copy of Adobe Dreamweaver Creative Suite 5, a guest post on the Yahoo! Games blog, a Think Vitamin sponsorship, and John Resig's "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja" book. This was despite many polite inquiries to the competition organizer. Overall I thought the competition was excellent, but Mozilla's lacklustre follow-up afterwards was disappointing.

Not only that but the prizes are pretty lackluster. Grand prize gets an all expenses paid trip to SF, which is awesome, but everyone else gets one of these hunky beasts http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130... . Which has no place in my laptop and is ironically pretty useless for html5 games.

A modern GPU is actually pretty essential for html5 games to run right (whether using canvas or webgl).

That one is well beyond the requirements for html5 gaming and is for desktops when most people these days are using laptops or tablets.

You think too small, then. html5 gaming as a platform isn't meant to just end at Quake quality visuals and 2d puzzles. I'm putting words in other peoples mouths here since I have no idea Mozilla's or Google's motives, but I'm sure someone working there has a vision of running Skyrim or Crysis 2 quality visuals and worlds on top of web tech using APIs like webgl to get the hardware performance needed, all while streaming assets over the net and in completely connected experiences run from a browser, where you can pick up your session anywhere without any install times just by going to the game site.

What is now high end desktop graphics hardware (gtx 670) will in a few years be common in laptops. The modern gtx 640M, for example (a mainstream graphics chip for a mid range laptop) has performance comparable to a mid-range 9600GT desktop dedicated gpu from 4 years ago, at one third the power consumption, or an 8800GT, a high end card from 6 years ago. So if trends hold, GTX 670 performance will be available in a mainstream laptop profile in 5 years.

Go even further - the Tegra 4 coming out this year will feature up to 64 shader cores on an APU package running at 600mhz, which beats out the Playstation 3's 24 shader units at 550mhz in the RSX handily (other architectural changes, such as the lack of dedicated VRAM for bandwidth and latency, come into play, so comparing the two just on shader cores alone isn't sufficient). But in practical terms, next generation tablets will have graphical capabilities that rival or surpass consoles that are still the market leaders.

So a web game developer, especially a very future-thinking one, might want to try to build a game engine modeled around matching performance of devices 5 years from now on the high end, rather than treating the current status quo as the performance they should expect when web games using webgl really take off. Using a 670 or some comparable high end card to create demos that truly test the bounds of performance in these technologies now iron out the wrinkles 5 years from now when everyone's tablet is boasting similar performance.

Meh

The grand prize winner also gets a GTX690 which is worth $1000.

Hey there,

I was responsible for the 2010 version of Game On. We screwed up your price (long story) and will make good on it now. I know. It's late. Like in: Too late. I am sorry. Trust me - it was not done on purpose or out of neglect (well, I guess you can argue about that).

Anyway: Short of it is - I am sorry. And we will make good on it. Expect an email today (if you haven't already received it).

Thank you, pmoz and callahad. Email received. I assumed it had just slipped through the cracks, no hard feelings. I did receive an awesome Game On t-shirt, and the Buckyballs.

> (long story)

I hope I'm not being a dick by commenting on this but the subthread is getting fairly long with 'me too's. Can you give any kind of explanation as to what's been going wrong?

Also, this is the first I've heard about Game On 2010 so I went to find out more[1] and it looks like all of the links (winners list, game gallery) have been stomped by this year's site. I can still see Google's cached screenshots but no info.

And ninethly: loved Browserquest. Competitors, get your MMO on!

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=mozilla+game+on

Sure. Happy to shine some light on what happened at Game On:

We had a contractor help with organizing the contest. A software vendor had kindly offered to sponsor one of the main parts of the prices. Unfortunately they never actually sent the software packages to us for distribution to the category winners. Meanwhile the contract for the contractor had expired and I essentially just dropped the ball on following up with the winners and offering them a replacement in lieu of the originally planned software package.

Your typical chain of events crap. My bad. We are actively sorting it out now.

The two other people are unrelated to Game On - they are waiting for t-shirts which fell through the cracks somewhere. I don't particular care who blew this - all I care about is that those two people get their shirts. And one of them already emailed me. So - we're sorting it out as well. :)

And on the first Game On - we ran this as a fun experiment out of Mozilla Labs. The 2012 edition is run as a much bigger thing out of the Mozilla Foundation. :)

Thanks. Your response to the issue reflects well on your organisation (imho). I'm making a note here: 'huge success'.

So, as a Game On 2010 contestant, my entry is now gone from their site? I prefer to participate to js1k which does not erase entries. Also the reader should be aware that he will be in competition with games in development for years, some run by companies. (edit: not to mention the sudden urge to send prizes now instead of in due time)

Gah. The old site and old pages will come back -- part of the shift that pmoz mentions above is that different teams ran the 2010 site and the 2012 version, and so we're learning (a bit late) how to build in permanence into the site structures).

I also work for Mozilla, on the MDN website. If you want you can always upload a copy of your game to the MDN demo studio too:

https://developer.mozilla.org/demos/

Woah! That's not cool. I work for Mozilla in a completely unrelated capacity, but I'll try to follow up with folks and see if we can fix that.

Edit: Aaaand beaten to the punch by pmoz. Like always ;)

Mozilla seems to have issues with prizes they offer for stuff. I was supposedly selected to receive an FF4 t-shirt for my continued bugzilla participation and bug filing. I replied with the size (+ maybe design) I wanted and that was that :(

Same thing happened to me, and I had filed only one relevant bug. Not sure how that worked.

Same thing as in "you were supposed to get a shirt but never got it"? If so - see above. Send me an email. We'll fix it.

Hmm... Not I was responsible for that one as well - but send me an email to p {at} mozilla {com} with your shipping address and t-shirt size and I'll get you a t-shirt.

It's a fun competition, but I had the exact same experience as oulipian. I co-created RAPT, which won "Most Fun", and we never received Dreamweaver, a Think Vitamin sponsorship, or "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja". However, we did receive a box containing t-shirts, Buckyballs, and Mozilla swag.

And we're sorting your price out as well (as well as everyone else who won). :)

Apologies again. We'll fix it.

hey adding my apologies here. please do send me your latest email address so that i can help rectify. my email is jchoi {at} mozilla {dot} com.

@oulipian, please send me your latest email address so that I can help get this sorted out. You can reach me at jchoi {at} mozilla {dot} com.

I have emailed you! Thanks for the follow-up.

Hey there! I'm Chloe, the organiser for this year's Game On competition. I wanted to let you know that changes have been made this time around to ensure all the prizes are delivered on time. We hope to see you join us this year!

I've seen competitions like this before, but I've never had the time to commit to submitting anything. The rules and guidelines for this particular competition seem simple, straight-forward enough. I fear I, again, won't find the time to participate.

I will have to remember to check back in on this, to see what everyone came up with.

Anyone on HN want to cooperate with me on a game for this competition? I've created some HTML5 games previously, also participated in the previous Mozilla Gameon (with Freeciv.net), and think this sounds like a lot of fun! Feel free to post game-proposals in this thread.

Twitter: @andreasrosdal

Apologies for the shameless plug:

If anyone is interested in making a game for Game On, you might be interested in using PlayCanvas (http://playcanvas.com) to do so. Our CEO, Will, spoke at the Mozilla Game Jam in London at the weekend.

We're making a HTML5 game development environment in your browser. Features: 3D engine, real-time collaboration on scenes; game-scripting in javascript; art-pipeline for Blender, 3DS Max, Maya. Demos here: http://playcanvas.com/demos

Email support{at}playcanvas{.}.com and mention Game On or email me directly if you are interested.

</plug>

Sounds fun. How do I start making games (tutorials, useful libs)? Can anyone please help. I know JS and CoffeeScript but have no idea about Sprites, Collisions, Physics etc.

[Edit] Sorry just saw this - https://gameon.mozilla.org/en-US/resources/

If someone wants to team up with me to produce a game for this compo, find my contact in my HN profile. I participated in the github game off this year and was one of the winners - http://khele.in/pappu-pakia/

I think this is a smart way to promote HTML5. Good job Mozilla.

I'm rounding up people to get a Game On event going in Berlin.

Get in touch with @hdragomir on twitter if you'd like to help us.

A really nice initiative. Well done, Mozilla.

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