The Enchant.js story

[loleg]

We talked about Akihabara, a hypercreative district of Japan, already in this group. Just want to share another stunning new project coming from the same street as the game maker - enchant.js is a HTML5 game engine made to be accessible to kids, with apparently over 200 games developed with it since the release in April. 

The 19 year old founder came to the onGameStart conference in Poland yesterday to tell the touching story of his game company, which I excerpt here from this blog post: http://www.smashinglabs.pl/ongamestart-day-1

Anyone using Enchant.js already? See the code samples to get an idea of how it works.

For those who read Japanese you might want to also check out http://wise9.jp/archives/4510

-loleg

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Enchant.js – Ryo Shimizu

It was the strangest lecture I’ve ever heard. Ryo admitted that he is tired and has jet-lag, also he spoke very rough English (like mine, but with Japanese accent). He started live coding, wrote maybe ten or fifteen lines of code and showed result in a browser – moving bear sprite.

Then it started to be totally out of control. He continued with his presentation and showed some slides about Fukushima power plant, the earthquake and its disastrous results. He told us a story about his family, about people that lost everything and it was really quite touching. From this events his company had emerged. Because after earthquake children were forced to stay at home, they had nothing to do and play with. Ryo started an educational company, UEI, to teach people of age 16 to 22 how to create simple online games. This is how enchant.js was created, and the rest of presentation was about engine and its impact in Japan. Ryo leaded a very funny speech, full of japanese words nobody understood and english words nobody understood. I think it was great, as it was the last lecture and everybody was tired, so a bit of non-technical stories were really refreshing.

Also it was rather clear that enchant.js is quite powerful and easy to use. We heard a stories about kids making over 100 games in 10 days after initial release and housewives attending gamedev workshops, so check it out or play some games at 9leap.