Articles - Jesse Freeman - Microsoft Technology Evangelist Focusing On Windows 8 Game Development

March 14, 2013

My Take On Monetizing
HTML5 Games

Last night I was on a panel called Making Money With HTML5 Games in 2013. I was actually hesitant to be on the panel at first because I have not made much money with my own games but figured I had an interesting take on the topic since I work for Microsoft coupled with my monetization shortcomings. On the panel was Jamie Hall, Co-Founder, President/CTO of MocoSpace, Elle Chen, License Manager of BoosterMedia, Robert Grossberg and Vincent Obermeier, CEO and President of Tresensa. While we were all supporters of making HTML5 games, especially since each of the companies we work for has a vested interest in helping people monetize their game, it was interesting to see a completely “topic friendly” panel where we all agreed to the main points that HTML5 is a viable platform for the future. I thought I would write about points I brought up about HTML5 gaming, why I believe in it and ways to help you monetize on it your own.

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January 30, 2013

NYC Gaming January: Demo Night

Last night I got to show off my latest game, Super Paper Monster Smasher, to the NY Game Meetup during their monthly game demo night held at Microsoft’s Office. Not only is this a great opportunity for me to get some feedback on my own games but I also like to see what others are up to in the city. NYC has a small but growing group of Indie game developers and all of the games presented last night were very impressive. This was also my 3rd time speaking at the event so it’s a big honor to keep being asked back now to present my latest work. Here is a quick summary of the event and what I saw.

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January 6, 2013

Version Control Techniques
For Rapidly Prototyping

I am a big believer in using version control no matter how small the project is. It’s especially important when you are doing any kind of rapid, agile, or iterative development. Recently I took part in Ludum Dare, which is a 48 hour game jam, and wanted to share my own personal technique for staying on top of versioning my work. While I use Git, this will work in any VC system that support branching and tagging.

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January 1, 2013

Looking Forward to 2013

I started 2012 off by publishing a book on HTML5 gaming. I also started building three games (TileCrusdaer, Super Resident Raver and Jetroid) and didn’t finish any of them. I did end up with a decent Ludum Dare 25 game. At Roundarch I was heading up several large projects and doing full time management which I ended up not liking too much; I missed coding. So I left enterprise consulting and took a job with Microsoft which has turned out to be absolutely amazing! On the personal side of things my wife finally convinced me to move out to Long Island so we sold our Williamsburg apartment and bought a house. I’ve never lived in a house before, it’s kind of crazy. Now I have room for my own home office and it turned out to be a good move since I now work from home for Microsoft. Finally to top off the end of the year, we had a new baby on December 28th, only a few days from the end of the year. So how can I even top this in 2013?

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December 24, 2012

Free Game Art: Super Resident Raver

Resident Raver is an idea I had almost 14 years ago when I went to college. Raving was big and Resident Raver was also a popular game at the time. It made sense to combine the two and that is how I came up with the basic premise behind Resident Raver: a dorm is overrun with raver zombies and you need to escape. I started the game way back in Flash 4 and over the years dabbled with it here and there. Last year, while I was writing my book, I decided to make Resident Raver the tutorial game in the book and that gave me even more motivation to actually finish. Once the book was done I wanted to make a proper version of it so I borrowed some elements from Super Crate Box and Elevator Action to build out this demo. Being happy with this, I hired Iñaki Diaz to clean up all the artwork to get it ready to publish to the Windows Store before I even knew I was going to join Microsoft. Unfortunately this game has been sitting around collecting dust so I figured I would release the artwork for free so others can use it in their games.

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