Seattle Game Dev JS: A look back and a step forward.

And it’s with this milestone in mind, we’d like to say a heartfelt Thank You, to all of our members, sponsors and everyone who helped to make our meetings the awesome knowledge filled nuggets they are!

This year looks to be even better than the last. We kicked it off with a power outage, followed by an amazing recovery and presentation (in spite of no power!) on HTML5 Optimizations, from the Double Down mobile team. Never a dull moment!

Last year, our group went from 0 to 380 members, a huge achievement! The Game Dev JS crew is a diverse community full of developers, artists, gamers, program managers, network admins and JS enthusiasts of all kinds. Our youngest developer member is just 13 years old! By always keeping the content fresh, the speakers lively and the members engaged, we’ve been able to build a robust community – we couldn’t have done it without you!

If you’re interested in JS, meetup is a great chance to have some fun, learn something new, share something you know and meet some very interesting characters.

Key Takeaways

• Seattle Game Dev JS grew from zero to 380 members in its first year, built on a mix of talks, lightning demos, and happy hours.
• The group’s 2012 lineup spanned the full HTML5 stack: rendering, canvas tricks, audio, native wrappers, Windows 8, and node.js server architecture.
• A community like this works because it stays deliberately cross-disciplinary — developers, artists, PMs, and network admins all in one room.
• The single best way to get value from a meetup is to show up, ask questions, and eventually present something yourself.
• 2013 planning is open: we want your topic ideas, venue suggestions, and speaker pitches.

Why a JavaScript Game Dev Group Matters

When we started this group, “HTML5 game development” was still a phrase that made a lot of people squint. The <canvas> element was young, browser performance was inconsistent, and the idea that you could ship a real game — not a tech demo — in JavaScript was treated as a novelty rather than a platform.

A year later, that conversation has changed completely. The reason a local meetup matters in a field like this is that the documentation lags reality. Blog posts describe what worked six months ago.

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Conference talks are polished to the point of being abstract. What actually moves a developer forward is sitting next to someone who solved your exact problem last week — a canvas that stutters on a specific device, an audio element that won’t unlock on mobile, a build pipeline that chokes on a large asset bundle.

That’s the gap Game Dev JS fills. It’s not a lecture series. It’s a room full of people who are all mid-problem, comparing notes.

What We Covered in 2012

Here’s some of what we covered over the year:

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• Javascript Game Development: an Overview – Grant Goodale, Massively Fun
• Retained Mode Graphics Libraries – Kevin Moore, Pixel Lab
• Stupid Canvas Tricks – Dean Hudson, Massively Fun
• HTML5 port of Zepto Labs’ Cut the Rope – Joel Fillmore, Pixel Lab
• Challenges of building a native UIWebView application around an HTML5 webapp – Jeff Close, Adam Hardtke, Sean Stringer, and Nate Vaughn, DDI
• Native wrapper technology: CocoonJS – Iker Jamardo, Ludei
• HTML5 game development for Windows 8 – Giorgio Sardo, Microsoft
• Game engine design around node.js and express.js – Dean Hudson and Mason Browne, Massively Fun
• Co+Pilot: a tool built using Javascript and a JQuery like syntax to allow users to make native apps – Myron Millin and David Whitlark
• Effective HTML5 Game Audio – Chris Khoo, Wappworks Studios

All of these topics and numerous lightning talks and demos by group members were presented over the year. And of course, we get together for the occasional happy hour also!

A very special thanks to Double Down Interactive, Big Fish Games, GameHouse and The Makers Space for hosting!

The Themes Behind the Talks

Looking back at that list, a few clear threads run through it — and they’re worth naming, because they map almost exactly onto the decisions any HTML5 developer has to make.

Rendering and the retained-mode question. Kevin Moore’s talk on retained mode graphics libraries and Dean Hudson’s “Stupid Canvas Tricks” sit on opposite sides of a real architectural fork. Immediate-mode canvas drawing gives you total control and minimal overhead, but you manage every redraw yourself. Retained-mode libraries (the lineage that runs through frameworks like CreateJS, PixiJS, and later Phaser) give you a scene graph, hit testing, and tweening out of the box — at the cost of an abstraction layer between you and the GPU. Neither is “correct.” The right answer depends on whether your game is a handful of sprites or a complex, stateful world.

The wrapper problem. Three separate talks — the DDI UIWebView session, Iker Jamardo’s CocoonJS presentation, and Co+Pilot — all circled the same question: how do you get a web app into an app store? In 2012 the options were roughly:

Approach	What it gives you	The trade-off
Plain web app	Zero friction, instant updates	No store presence, limited device APIs
Native WebView wrapper	Store distribution, some native hooks	Performance ceiling, UI mismatch with native chrome
Accelerated wrapper (e.g. CocoonJS)	GPU-accelerated canvas, closer-to-native speed	Vendor lock-in, platform-specific quirks

That table is still a useful way to think about the decision today, even though the specific tools have evolved.

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Audio. Chris Khoo’s talk on effective HTML5 game audio was, and remains, one of the most underrated topics in the field. Audio is where web games break most often: autoplay policies, codec support differences, and the latency between a user gesture and a sound actually firing. If you’re building a game today, budget real time for audio — it is not a “drop in a file” problem.

Server-side JavaScript. Dean Hudson and Mason Browne’s talk on game engine design around node.js and express.js was an early signal that the server and the client could share a language. That matters more than it sounds: shared code for game state validation, shared data formats, and one mental model across the stack.

How to Get the Most Out of a Meetup

If you’re new to this kind of group — or you’ve been lurking and haven’t come out yet — here’s the practical advice we’d give anyone.

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• Come with one specific problem. “My game is slow” gets you sympathy. “My canvas drops frames when I draw more than a few hundred sprites” gets you an answer.
• Talk to the person next to you, not just the speaker. The talk is the excuse; the hallway conversation is the value.
• Give a lightning talk. Five minutes on something you learned is the fastest way to become a known quantity in the group. You don’t need to be an expert — you need to have solved one thing.
• Follow up. Exchange contact info, and actually send the link or the snippet you promised.
• Bring your non-developer perspective. Our artists, PMs, and network admins ask the questions developers forget to ask, and those questions are often the most useful ones in the room.

Building a Community That Lasts

Growing from zero to 380 members in a year sounds like a vanity metric, but the number that actually matters is retention — how many of those people came back. A few things we’ve learned about keeping a technical community alive:

• Rotate the content. If every meeting is a beginner canvas tutorial, your experienced members stop coming. If every meeting is deep GPU optimization, you lose the newcomers. Mix overviews, deep dives, and demos.
• Keep the barrier to speaking low. Lightning talks and member demos lower the stakes and surface people who would never volunteer for a full slot.
• Feed people, literally. Happy hours and shared meals do more for community cohesion than any amount of agenda planning.
• Thank your hosts publicly. Double Down Interactive, Big Fish Games, GameHouse, and The Makers Space gave us rooms, and rooms are the unglamorous prerequisite for everything else.
• Make it welcoming to every age and background. Our youngest member is 13. That’s not a novelty — it’s a reminder that this field has an unusually low barrier to entry, and the group should reflect that.

Looking Ahead to 2013

Sounds great right? What would you like to see us talk about in 2013? Where do you want to meet?

Some directions we’re curious about, and would love your input on:

• Mobile performance and profiling — how to actually measure where frames are going, using browser dev tools and device testing.
• Multiplayer and networking — WebSockets, latency compensation, and the messy realities of real-time sync.
• Tooling and workflow — build systems, asset pipelines, and how small teams ship without a dedicated tools engineer.
• Physics and collision — when to use a library and when to write your own.
• Accessibility and input — keyboard, touch, and motion-control platforms, and how to support more than one without doubling your work.

Reply below with your ideas or tweet @massivelyfun using the #GameDevJS hashtag. See you soon!

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Seattle Game Dev JS?

It’s a Seattle-area meetup group for people interested in JavaScript and HTML5 game development. It brings together developers, artists, designers, program managers, network admins, and general JS enthusiasts for talks, lightning demos, and social events.

Do I need to be an experienced developer to attend?

No. The group deliberately mixes overview talks with deep technical dives, and members range from a 13-year-old hobbyist to professional engineers at established studios. If you’re curious about JS game development, you belong in the room.

How can I propose a talk or suggest a topic?

Reply in the comments on this post, or tweet @massivelyfun using the #GameDevJS hashtag. We’re actively looking for topic ideas, venue suggestions, and speaker pitches for 2013.

What kinds of topics does the group cover?

Historically: rendering and canvas techniques, graphics libraries, native wrappers and app-store distribution, HTML5 audio, Windows 8 development, and node.js/express.js server architecture. We’re interested in expanding into mobile profiling, multiplayer networking, tooling, physics, and accessibility.

Who hosts the meetings?

We’ve been hosted by Double Down Interactive, Big Fish Games, GameHouse, and The Makers Space, and we’re grateful to all of them. If your company has space and wants to support the local dev community, we’d love to hear from you.

Is this group only about games?

The focus is games, but the skills overlap heavily with general web and app development — canvas rendering, audio handling, native wrappers, and node.js architecture all apply well beyond games. Plenty of our members work on non-game projects.

Further reading

• HTML5 — Wikipedia
• Canvas element — Wikipedia
• Node.js — Wikipedia
• Meetup (service) — Wikipedia

P.S. A few readers have asked which courses & training we actually reach for — it's Udemy Game Development Courses; take a look here if you want the current details.