Technique Retreat, Manchester 2011
Last weekend I attended Technique Retreat 2011, held in Manchester and organised by the White Room. There were several streams of training available, but I concentrated on mobile and JavaScript.
Matt Ryan gave a good introduction to iPhone and Android development, and I thoroughly enjoyed Seb Lee-Delisle’s Creative JavaScript sessions, where we were introduced to creating animations and modelling physics using the HTML5 canvas. By the end of the weekend we were most of the way to making a fully functioning Asteriods game. :)
The mobile development sessions only scratched the surface of what’s possible, but it gave me the confidence to get started developing for those platforms. And Seb’s course demonstrated how something that looks complicated can be made from a series of very simple components (the concepts are accessible to anyone with basic JavaScript and maths knowledge). In fact it has inspired me to create my own game using some of the principles and techniques he introduced.
