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Hi people of impact js

Would be great if we can share a bit about ourselves here

I just graduated with an engineering degree, am unemployed and have delusions of grandeur abt using impact js to build really awesome (profitable) games.

Been learning abt game development since Zynga grabbed the headlines in 2007, read lots of articles, played lots of casual/social games. I know its hard as hell to be a sole game dev (ie whos going to create the assets), but my gut feeling is we can compete with others based on quality/creativity and clever marketing. Let me know if u guys share the sams vision.

Sure thing. I've been a developer since 2001, started out at a MS shop but quickly transitioned over to the LAMP stack. I had the joy of being a freelance developer for several years until last year when the "economy" caught up with me and several of my core clients slowed down to a trickle way quicker then I could react to. With a young family I had to jump back into corporate life. Now I work as a PHP dev on internal apps for a local company.

I too have ambitions to make at least some money off of the games I build with Impact. I've built web apps in the past and have made some residual income from them and with Dominics blog post about his ad rev from his two games, I have a some hope that it's possible to make at least something from the games.

I'm also working on a little JS/HTML5 game hosting platform, that will allow those who want to use it to easily tie in things like Highscores, badges, store game data in a db, etc... via a simple js api. I'm just putting the final touches and hope to at least have a alpha version available at the end of February.

I agree with you that while the market is flooded with games, there is still the possibility to compete for your small piece of the pie. Good luck.

I'm coming from left field here. I'm a medical doctor (who plays a game developer on the Impact forums) and have been toying around with game development since my days with the Apple IIe - which dates me quit a lot, I know.

It's quite a lonely world being a physician who is also a coder, since I don't know anyone else who is. My goal with Impact is actually to develop animated medical education tools. I've created a number of apps primarily with Ruby and Rails which I use in my own office for office related (boring) stuff. But ultimately, I'd like to be able to produce high quality interactive, animated apps to help teach biology, medicine, health, etc.

Of course, I would love to produce a few cool games along the way! All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy after all. Best of luck.

I've been in the web app space for 10-15 years and have always been tinkering in the background on one game or another. I've had some successful ones, but far more that never made it to the public.

My take on the business side: don't make games to make money. Make money to make games. Put 100% of your energy into caring about the quality of the game and whether or not it's something you'll like to play. Put 0% of your energy into caring about whether or not people will pay for it or like playing it.

The sweet irony is that those who "make money to make games" tend to be those who make any money. Period.

Quote from MikeL
I'm coming from left field here. I'm a medical doctor (who plays a game developer on the Impact forums) and have been toying around with game development since my days with the Apple IIe - which dates me quit a lot, I know.

This is fantastic. We should talk offline. I'm pretty involved in the Ruby on Rails community, and I see a RailsConf talk in the making here. "How one endocrinologist is using Ruby on Rails and ImpactJS to make gall bladders dance"

Care to ping me at ape [at ] me.com?

@Ape - I agree that you should focus on the quality of the game and make sure it is as fun as you can make it, but I don't think that wanting to make money from a project means that the quality will suffer.

Sure it does if you have stock holders and a board of directors pressuring you to get something out on budget that is one thing, but I think as an indie developer you can take your time, make it the best game (or app) you can, but still have ideas on how you want to monetize it, even if it's just the appstore or ads.

Eh, just my feeling on it, I could be totally off :)

@MikeL - that's great. I have a question for you though, I've got this pain right in my ...ah just kidding. But seriously that's awesome to hear you want to make some educational apps. Best of luck.

hey this thread is growing!

about the 'making games to make money' debate:

it's hard for a small team (let alone a single developer) to decide between the two.

For me, I look at the 4 options:

a) bad game and no revenue ( -2 )
b) bad game with some revenue ( -1, often impossible in these days )
c) good game with no revenue ( +1 )
d) good game with some revenue ( +2 )

bottom line is, I need to be developing, and hopefully one day hit a sweet spot. Games are a hit based business.

Quote from Ken
@Ape - I agree that you should focus on the quality of the game and make sure it is as fun as you can make it, but I don't think that wanting to make money from a project means that the quality will suffer.

Yeah, I guess I was being a bit extreme for dramatic effect. You can make a game that's design is informed by how much money it's likely to make. But given the choice, would you rather spend a year or two toiling away on something you REALLY love (that may fail) or something you think will make money (that may fail).

Speaking from experience, the most rewarding projects I've worked on (both for my soul and my wallet) have been ones that I REALLY loved, whether or not they had any prospect of making a dime.

It can takes years of almost delusional devotion to a project for it to get to the point where it even has the potential of making money. It's much easier to keep the dream alive when you love it, regardless of its odds of success.

Here's a simple test I give myself: if I were infinitely wealthy (with a team of accountants who made managing that wealth invisible), what would I do with my time? Would I make the quirky weird stuff I want to make? Or would I make the stuff I think could be the next Farmville, even though I detest Farmville?

As it turns out, the stuff I want to make is the stuff people more likely want to see. And it's not just that my ideas are all that special, it's that they're mine, and different from everyone else's. That's what people respond to.

@ape - thanks for the interest. Sent you an e-mail.

@Ken - Ok, you had me going for a second. Although, I get that periodically, that's the first time that someone has done that to me on-line. Funny ;)

I work as a graphic artist and musician so I like making my own art & music for my games, mostly platform adventures.

I also started on the Apple IIe (terrible sound and graphics, but I loved it from 1984-89) and then PC before Windows (16-colour EGA was a quantum leap, even if sound was still bad).

Recently got back into games with Flash around 2009, and thought it was great, but then the whole iOS and HTML5 evolution happened.

I tried Objective-C and made one iPad game as part of a community project (Quexlor: Lands of Fate on app store).

But after the project I wasn't completely happy with Cocos2D. Good tools, but still too complex. Not enough demos and tutorials.

Then I discovered the Objective-C library called Sparrow, which I may look at again some day because it seems simple and is based on the familiar (to me) ActionScript way of doing things.

But then I looked at something I had bookmarked a while back -- Biolab Disaster. Impact was finally released, so I looked at the code and demos.

Impact is what I wanted all those other frameworks to be. It's so well organized and logical. Very simple and intuitive. The key is Weltmeister integration. No other framework integrates with a tile map editor in quite the same way with entities and triggers and basically whatever you create.

Now that there's iOSImpact with hardware acceleration, it's just that much more promising. If you learn Impact you can use it on websites, and packaged apps.

@stahlmanDesign awesome story! Am checking out Quexlor: Lands of Fate.

PS: any possibility of showing some of your flash games to us? Warning: I'm a Kongregrate addict, love Flash games.

Hello all,

I'm an Apple Certified Mac Tech/IT support person working in Hollywood for a marketing agency. However I have a BFA in Entertainment Arts/Animation and have been dabbling in many different creative things since I was a kid. Since working in Hollywood I've also been able to get some work doing voice over which is a lot of fun but is hard to make a living at.

I have a Mac and a PC (built my own win7 box at home) and play a lot of games on Steam. I also like to spend time making levels for Counter Strike Source, etc.

I've always wanted to make games and have always wanted to program. I've been doing a lot of bash scripting to automate stuff at work and have been trying to learn some basic C with some crappy old books and the internet. I realize that getting up to speed with Objective-C and Xcode is pretty daunting for a beginner, so I'm hoping to learn through javascript and impact.

Just dissecting impact/weltmeister and reading through the forums I feel like I've learned a bit.

I don't have plans to make money, necessarily. I just want to learn how things work and enjoy making games. I have lots of ideas, but need to learn how to turn those ideas into a functional game. I'm hoping impact will help me make that happen.

@axphin - I can see your passion in games. big respect, and good choice with Impact. I went from zero to something in 4 months. Never coded a game in my life!

I used to be in IT doing PHP, changed careers a while ago and now I'm a trainer of hypnosis and hypnotherapy.

I always loved games since the atari 2600 in my childhood, then i graduated and been workin in web design since 1999 i made some bad and small games on flash and now that i disvovered impact i am working fulltime atm in game resembling zelda 2 called elliot quest. You can find more about it at http://ansimuz.com

LAMP stack developer

I did a computer science degree, now working as a Python (Django) developer :)

I also spent about a year writing JavaScript for HbbTV set top boxes.

hi guys!

Me, I'm a web dev being in dot net since the beginning and ASP before that! but am goign to be reading medical herbalism at uni next year though! so maybe my first "proper" game besides a bunch of tech demos with over 9000 particles will be related to this fascinating subject lol

Hi i think this a great game, no doubt

Started back in the early 80s doing stuff on ZX81/Spectrum/C64.

Then a long tenure as a PC developer doing biz apps using Clipper/FoxPro/Delphi.

Last few years been mainly a SQL Developer but got into iphone development about 3 years ago. Done a few apps and 2 games, 1 using corona and 1 using objC+cocos2d. Really looking for a one tool solution for mobile/web/facebook so had to be HTML5 + decent JS framework, that being Impact!

Hi guys,

I studied design and work as frontend developer and UX-designer in an IT-consulting-agency. I recently finished my first game, which I did in JS without any frameworks. I just wanted to see if I could do it. Now I want to focus more on the gameplay side, without having to worry about rendering and all the stuff that ImpactJS does for you.
I compared several frameworks and decided to buy Impact. I bought the O'Reilly book and now I'm working through it.