BarCamp, to re-appropriate David Cross's magnificent descriptive powers, is like an earthquake wrapped in a hurricane, nestled in a box of tsunamis. I previously blogged about the Portland Firefox Developers group that emerged from BarCampPortland 3. However, there was yet another fantastic birthing there: the Open Web Games group.
Alain Bloch scheduled a session called Developing Non-Flash Web-based Games. A bunch of people attended, probably three times what would've fit in the room it was supposed to be in, so it was held in a row of cubicles, with most people standing.
It was a great discussion, covering canvas, Flash, Canvas3D, O3D, Silverlight, Unity, JQuery, iPhone gaming, and a lot of talk about existing Web-based games. Check out the notes from the session for logs of the talk. There was a lot of interest in building libraries for different gaming models and interactions, to ease the building of games on the Web.
The talk was way too short, and at the end it was clear there was interest in building a proof-of-concept game using canvas and other HTML5 technologies. So to further that effort, and to continue the brainstorming on building games using the open Web, we created the OpenWebGames group on Google Groups. Join us in finding ways to make the Web more funnerer than ever!
If you're coming to the Open Source Bridge conference in Portland Oregon from June 17-19, the group is getting together to sprint on development of a game at the OSB Hacker Lounge. Even you're not attending, if you have ideas for a game to sprint on, or want to join in online, join the group!