This is the company I moved to silicon valley to work for, and it has been a blast. I might be biased, but I think we've got a really great crew at Game Closure. Deciding to move out west was the best decision I could have made.
The past year has been a wild ride. I see now why many people enjoy the startup scene so much. Not only is it challenging... it's a hell of a lot of fun.
Since you work there, can you provide a little detail on this article's claim that Closure reduces development time from 6 months to six weeks. Is that just by avoiding different teams for different platforms?
Sure. On our website, you'll see a demo or two (admittedly out of date) of how our platform generally works: Write your games once, using HTML5 and Javascript, and they'll run anywhere with essentially no code modification: Browser, mobile, tablet. There's two primary reasons it's a lot faster to work with our tech: First, for the reason I mentioned above (write-once, run anywhere). Second, writing at a higher level of abstraction (JavaScript vs. Objective-C and Java) makes iteration much faster. Our SDK builds on that: we've worked hard to extract great performance from javascript on mobile phones specifically, and we provide a higher-level UI framework which cuts down a lot of the development time.
How do you handle controls on the different sized screens? A button on an iPad != a button on a iPhone and must be scaled accordingly. Congratulations on the funding 12mil is a big round.
Why would anyone do that instead of writing in Actionscript and compiling to iphone/android/flash/javascript or converting finished actionscript to haxe or if you're wwilling to put up with no rename refactoring support in FDT or FlashDevelop at this time, just writing it in haxe.
Writing server code in javascript is a bad idea imo namely because its easier to find competent java developers.
I wish you guys and other developers would embrace haxe.
I'm really glad to see these guys progress. Michael Carter seems like a great guy.
Carter emailed me last year and we chatted a bit about Game Closure, but I declined any sort of interview because I didn't want to move to SV. At the time he mentioned they were bootstrapping, and its great to see how far along they've come.
These days as a side project I'm developing my own set of HTML5 Canvas games that I plan to open source to that others can have good examples and tutorials to start making their own cross-platform browser games[1]. I'd really love to see any HTML5 canvas games take off.
Hopefully some day in the future we'll be helping each other, maybe even more directly. :)
[1] (Here's not the place, so current progress is in my profile)
10 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 34.2 ms ] threadThe past year has been a wild ride. I see now why many people enjoy the startup scene so much. Not only is it challenging... it's a hell of a lot of fun.
Writing server code in javascript is a bad idea imo namely because its easier to find competent java developers.
I wish you guys and other developers would embrace haxe.
Question: Does GameClosure have any plans to use WebGL?
Also wanted to give you a heads up re: Art Hack Weekend SF http://www.gaffta.org/2012/02/13/art-hack-weekend-sf-a-webgl... See you there, perhaps?
My dentist is next to their office. I love mountain view.
Carter emailed me last year and we chatted a bit about Game Closure, but I declined any sort of interview because I didn't want to move to SV. At the time he mentioned they were bootstrapping, and its great to see how far along they've come.
These days as a side project I'm developing my own set of HTML5 Canvas games that I plan to open source to that others can have good examples and tutorials to start making their own cross-platform browser games[1]. I'd really love to see any HTML5 canvas games take off.
Hopefully some day in the future we'll be helping each other, maybe even more directly. :)
[1] (Here's not the place, so current progress is in my profile)