HTML5 Game Development

Who we are

Photon Storm was established in 2006 as an indie game developer releasing games in our spare time. But at the start of 2012 we turned the hobby into a full time job and our company was founded. Our mission statement was simply to produce the best quality HTML5 games possible for desktop and mobile browsers.

For us HTML5 games are our core business. It’s what we focus on every single day. The platform itself is still very young and this technical infancy combined with the unrelenting progress being made by key stakeholders like Apple and Google lead to a natural state of flux surrounding HTML5 at the moment.

This makes it a constantly shifting platform on which to work, and it will remain this way for the next few years until the technology matures and settles down. But it’s a platform that we have made our home on, built a strong community around and adapted our decades of web and game development skills to. We hope that we can share those skills with you as we’ve done with many clients to date.

The eye of the storm

Photon Storm Ltd. is a privately held micro-business run full-time by husband and wife team Richard and Susannah Davey. Ilija Melentijevic provides art direction on many of the Photon Storm games and is a key member of the team. We are also supported by a raft of talented freelance designers, animators, musicians and developers that we’ve worked with over the years. As well as serving commercial clients we are also an indie game developer and strong contributor to the open source game dev scene.

Susannah was previously a Resource Planning Manager for the Royal Bank of Scotland where she was responsible for the scheduling and workloads of hundreds of staff. She now runs project management and key account handling for Photon Storm. Ensuring deadlines are met is her remit.

Richard spent 6 years as the Technical Director for Aardman Digital, the multiple BAFTA winning online division of Aardman Animations. While there he was responsible for the technical delivery and concepts behind hundreds of high quality, lovingly crafted games that covered both treasured Aardman brands such as Wallace and Gromit, Timmy Time and Shaun the Sheep, as well as numerous 3rd party properties. A small selection of properties he’s worked on includes: Something Special (BBC), Andy’s Wild Adventures (BBC), Live and Deadly (BBC), Lego Ninjago (Lego), The Amazing World of Gumball (Cartoon Network), Chop Socky Chooks (Turner), Tony Robinson’s Weird World of Wonders (Macmillan), Pirates! Band of Misfits (Sony Pictures), Raving Rabbids (Ubisoft) and the Tate Movie Project (Fallon/Tate). He fully understands the importance of working with broadcast and entertainment companies, careful brand handling and meeting transmission dates. He especially enjoys creating compelling gaming content for young children, of which he and Susannah have two.

Before joining Aardman Richard spent 4 years with The Game Creators, helping them craft compelling game development software and the huge community that surrounded it. Prior to this he was a lead web and PHP developer responsible for building sites including Comic Relief, Cosmos Holidays, Alton Towers and many others. He was one of the first Zend Certified PHP Engineers in the UK and has spent his entire professional life crafting engaging online content. Working with HTML5 games is the combination of years of key skills and interests into one.

Ilija, originally from Serbia now lives in Sydney, Australia where he works for the fine folks at Soap Creative. But he still finds time to lend his limitless pixels skills to our own IP games. His artistic talents know no bounds – from sketches and paintings to the highest quality pixel art. You’ll find an archive of his artwork on this site as well as in lots of our games.

What We Do

We focus on 3 key areas:

1. Building original HTML5 games and Converting Flash games to HTML5
2. Developing the Kiwi.js HTML5 Game Framework
3. Supporting the wider HTML5 Game Development community

HTML5 Game Development

We develop our own games, featuring our own IPs and characters, as well as building games for clients. Often these games will be conversions or adaptations of existing Flash games. As a company with nearly a decade’s worth of Flash experience we are well suited to handling Flash conversions, and understand intimately the best ways to extract assets and re-creating gameplay.

Mobile Browser Performance

At the moment the mobile browser space is still in its infancy with regard to performance and capabilities. Things that are common-place in desktop or native mobile apps can sometimes be hard to translate to mobile browsers – if at all. A large part of our work is advising clients what is and isn’t possible given the limitations imposed on us by today’s devices. It’s important that you don’t design just for the iPhone as it gives an unrealistic level of performance compared to say an Android 2.3 handset.

Often we’ll use canvas rendering for our games, but in other cases it’s more effective to use DOM and CSS3. In some games we’ll even combine the two. There’s no “one size fits all” when it comes to mobile browser, and until the platform settles down over the next few years we’ll be here to help advise you on best practices.

Browse our games portfolio for examples of our work.

Kiwi.js HTML5 Game Framework

In conjunction with Instinct Entertainment we are building Kiwi.js, an advanced HTML5 game framework. We will be specifically targeting mobile web browsers as well as desktop support.

The framework is being built from the ground-up, taking into account every “best practice” we’ve come to learn about game development over the years.

Focusing on performance and a feature-rich set of components we hope to enter public beta during Q4 2012.

Development can be followed on our blog, and we recommend this article to start with.

HTML5 Game Developer Community Support

When we started out with HTML5 game development we quickly realized there was no real community for it, and no single source for news related to this subject. So in November 2011 we decided to change that.

HTML5 Game Devs.com

http://www.html5gamedevs.com

We created this site to be a hub for all the news going on in the world of HTML5 game development. We publish HTML5 game and business related news articles every hour of every day, from game releases to tutorials and shifts in the market.

The site has gone from strength to strength currently reaching 150,000 visitors a month. We expect this increase dramatically after we launch the significant new re-design in Q4 2012.

HTML5 Game Developers Business Forum

In addition to the main public site we also recognized the need for a private place where game developers could talk freely and safely about the business deals they were making, so at the start of 2012 we set-up a private invite-only Business Forum.

The forum boasts a healthy number of developers who collectively produce the majority of HTML5 games out there today. We discuss game portal deals, publisher deals and contract work, and work with each other to fulfil contracts when extra resource is needed.

So if you need freelance development work and we’re booked-up then we can almost certainly find someone to help. If you’re an active HTML5 game developer yourself looking for a break into the business side of the industry then drop us a line and we’ll consider you for membership to the forum. We only take developers who have already released a game.

CreativeJS

We’re also regular contributors to CreativeJS.com – a web site dedicated to showcasing new and innovative uses of JavaScript on the web. Curated by a collection of industry veterans we focus on covering games and demos in our posts, but you’ll also find plenty of other great topics such as particle effects, browser experiments and more WebGL than is good for your GPU.

Authoring

We recently finished the technical edit of an O’Reilly book on HTML5 game development with ImpactJS and are one of the contributors to the new Microsoft sponsored site Build New Games. Our opening article about producing a platform game should be live shortly. We write regularly on our blog which enjoys a significant and healthy readership, and can be found actively interacting with our peers and followers on twitter.

We firmly believe that in order to truly understand a technology you have to fully embrace it: meet the people working in it, remain fresh regarding news and developments and contribute back to it via code, tutorials and sharing of knowledge.

If you would like us to work on your HTML5 game then please contact us with your requirements.

Feel free to download our Company Portfolio as a PDF. It contains our details, portfolio of game work and contact information.