At last weekend’s NY Game Makers Meetup I covered 10 simple math examples that are critical in any game. These example range from handling layout to simple collision detection. While I am no expert at math, I have learned and collected the following examples over the years as I built up a library of reusable code that can be easily ported to different programming languages. To make demonstrating these examples easier to run, I wrote them all in JavaScript, posted them to JSFiddle so you can see them in action and also play around with each one on your own. While math in gaming may seem intimidating, especially if you are like me and come from an art background, I hope you will find the following examples easy to use and useful in your next game. Let’s get started.

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I have been running my Game Development workshops in NYC now for a little over 3 months and one of the most common problems I run into are people who have never coded before or have coded and are interested in getting into game development. So last weekend I figured I would take a step back and start with a blank slate to teach people the fundamentals of game programming. The lesson was a great success and I wanted to capture it here on my blog to help ease the fears of others learning how to program their first game.

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Earlier in the week I posted an in depth walkthrough of how I ported an HTML5 game called Heroine Dusk by Clint Bellanger to Windows 8 in less than 10 minutes. I used NodeJS and Grunt to create an automated workflow that allowed me to work in Visual Studio to test out the Windows 8 build but also generate a deploy folder for the web. Shortly after doing this I realized I should give it a try with Windows Phone 8 since there is a rudimentary HTML5 app templates that comes with the Windows Phone 8 SDK. I’ve talked about it a little before and since I had a general” idea that it was possible I decided to give it a try. This process took me all of 5 minute to do and I immediately had a playable version of Heroine Dusk without any code changes running on WP8. Here is how I did it.

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Last week I read about this great HTML5 game called Heroine Dusk by Clint Bellanger which was featured on IndieGames.com. Two things go my attention, first I am seeing more and more HTML5 games get featured on IndieGames.com and also this game was a perfect candidate to see how quickly I could get it up and running on Windows 8. I’ve talked a lot about the great opportunity the Windows Store offers HTML5 game developers to monetize their games so after contacting Clint he sent me a link to the source code on GitHub and I got to work. The entire process took less than 10 minute and I documented it here for others to check out. In addition to showing how I got it up and running in Visual Studio I also was able to add some of the Grunt workflow stuff I have been talking about lately which allowed me to keep both a Windows 8 and Web build in sync which is key for anyone looking to get the most out of their investment HTML5 game’s code base.

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The other week I wrote an introduction to Phaser and I wanted to follow up with a short walk through on how to get a project up and running with Phaser, TypeScript, NodeJS and Grunt. I have talked about a similar workflow in the past as well but figured I should come up with a basic Phaser Project Template to help get others started. Here are some instructions on how to use it.

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