Company Profile
Summer 2012
Who We Are
Our company was founded with the specific aim of producing the best quality HTML5 games
possible for both desktop and mobile web browsers.
For us HTML5 games are our core business and what we focus on every
single day. The platform itself is still very young, and this technical infancy
combined with the unrelenting progress being made by key stakeholders
like Apple and Google lead to a natural state of flux surrounding HTML5.
This makes it a constantly shifting platform on which to work, and will
remain in this way for the next few years until the technology matures and settles down. But it’s a
platform that we’ve made our home on, built a strong community around and adapted our
decades of web and game development skills to. We hope that we can share those skills with you.
The eye of the storm
Photon Storm Ltd. is a privately held micro-business run by husband and wife team Richard and
Susannah Davey. We are supported by a raft of talented freelance designers, animators, musicians
and developers that we’ve worked with over the past 6 years.
Susannah was previously a Resource Planning Manager for the Royal Bank of Scotland where she
was responsible for the scheduling and workloads of hundreds of staff. She now runs project
management and key account handling for Photon Storm. Ensuring deadlines are met is her remit.
Richard spent the last 6 years as the Technical Director for Aardman Digital (aardman.com/digital),
the multiple BAFTA winning online division of Aardman Animations. While there he was
responsible for the technical delivery and concepts behind hundreds of high quality, lovingly
crafted games that covered both treasured Aardman brands such as Wallace and Gromit, Timmy
Time and Shaun the Sheep, as well as numerous 3rd party properties. A small selection of projects
include: Something Special (BBC), Andy’s Wild Adventures (BBC), Live and Deadly (BBC), Lego
Ninjago (Lego), Gumball (Turner), Chop Socky Chooks (Turner), Tony Robinson’s Weird World of
Wonders (Macmillan), Pirates! (Sony Pictures), Raving Rabbids (Ubisoft) and the Tate Movie
Project (Fallon/Tate). He fully understands the importance of working with broadcast and
entertainment companies, careful brand handling and meeting transmission dates. He especially
enjoys creating compelling gaming content for young children, of which he and Susannah have
two.
Before joining Aardman Richard spent 4 years with The Game Creators, helping them build game
development software and the huge community that surrounded it. Prior to this he was a lead
web and PHP developer responsible for building sites including Comic Relief, Cosmos Holidays,
Alton Towers and many others. He has spent his entire professional life crafting engaging online
content. Working with HTML5 games is the combination of years of key skills and interests in one.
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What We Do
We focus on 3 key areas:
1. Building original HTML5 games and Converting Flash games to HTML5
2. Developing the Kiwi.js HTML5 Game Framework
3. Supporting the wider HTML5 Game Development community
1. HTML5 Game Development
We develop our own games, featuring our own IPs and characters, as well as building games for
clients. Often these games will be conversions or adaptations of existing Flash games. As a
company with nearly a decade’s worth of Flash experience we are well suited to handling Flash
conversions, and understand intimately the best ways to extract assets and re-creating gameplay.
Mobile Browser Performance
At the moment the mobile browser space is still in its infancy with regard to
performance and capabilities. Things that are common-place in desktop or
native mobile apps can sometimes be hard to translate to mobile browsers –
if at all. A large part of our work is advising clients what is and isn’t possible
given the limitations imposed on us by today’s devices. It’s important that
you don’t design just for the iPhone as it gives an unrealistic level of
performance compared to say an Android 2.3 handset.
Often we’ll use canvas rendering for our games, but in other cases it’s more effective to use DOM
and CSS3. In some games we’ll even combine the two. There’s no “one size fits all” when it comes
to mobile browser, and until the platform settles down over the next few years we’ll be here to
help advise you on best practices.
Games Portfolio
In the following pages you can see a range of our completed HTML5 games, but we’ve also got lots
of exciting new titles in development for clients such as the BBC.
Please respect our clients and their properties. We give you links to test our games in good faith
and would appreciate you not sharing them outside of your organization.
Remember that all of these games were built for mobile web browsers and as such should be
tested on them. They use touch controls and are sized for smaller resolutions and the lower
performance of mobile devices.
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McCoy’s - Nearest the Bull
Client: Activation Digital
http://gametest.mobi/mccoys
McCoy’s are a very popular brand of crisp (potato chip) in the UK. This game was created to
support an on-pack promotion campaign. Over 50 million packets of crisps were printed with the
game QR code and URL. Following this the customer will be taken into a mobile optimized web site
based around the competition. The game involves winning a game of darts by dragging the dart
around and then throwing it when the power-meter is at the right level. If the player is closest to
the bull after the AI has a turn then they win and can enter the competition. Two different game
modes are present and various professional challengers to compete against.
The game features low and high resolution assets with intelligent display adaption for mobile and
tablet along with Facebook integration to pull in player details. It is seamlessly tied in with the rest
of the promotional site.
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NFL Kids – Jump Duck
Client: Brandissimo
http://gametest.mobi/jumpduck
The NFL run a large children’s web site featuring hundreds of Flash games meant for desktop
consumption. Due to growing visits from mobile browsers they have built a mobile optimized
version of the site and ported over a number of their Flash games to it. Jump Duck is just one
game we have converted for them.
It was a technical challenge because it features a full parallax scrolling backdrop; the stadium, the
side line, the grass and the lines all scroll at different speeds. We then layered large fully animated
sprites on-top and finally constantly shifting weather effects on-top of this. The game changes
from dawn through dusk with rain and snow effects at times. The game employs the use of canvas
for ease in device scaling and the weather effects.
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NFL Kids – Galactic Rusherz
Client: Brandissimo
http://gametest.mobi/galactic
The NFL run a large children’s web site featuring hundreds of Flash games meant for desktop
consumption. Due to growing visits from mobile browsers they have built a mobile optimized
version of the site and ported over a number of their Flash games to it. Galactic Rusherz is just one
game we have converted for them.
The game involves piloting the football shaped space craft through space, avoiding the rolling
asteroids and collecting the power-ups that come your way. Charge up your Ion Beam and you can
unleash a blast wiping out all asteroids in your path. Your squad follows your every move, so fly
carefully to ensure they survive as they’ll help multiply your score.
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Agilent – Rapid Sprayer
Client: T-Minus 1 Creative
http://gametest.mobi/rapidsprayer
Agilent create all of the parts required to run a water park – pumps, servos, tubes and various
other mechanical items. Summer is a key time for them and they wanted 3 games to feature on
their Summer of Fun web site as part of a campaign targeting their customers, and of course they
wanted the games to work on any device.
Rapid Sprayer involves “shooting” the objects with a spray of water as they fly through the air.
Score enough points and you win the game and can enter into their prize draw competition.
We produced a mobile resolution version, an iPad / tablet resolution version and a Flash version of
this game to cover all possible devices.
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Agilent – Tube Rider
Client: T-Minus 1 Creative
http://gametest.mobi/tuberider
Agilent create all of the parts required to run a water park – pumps, servos, tubes and various
other mechanical items. Summer is a key time for them and they wanted 3 games to feature on
their Summer of Fun web site as part of a campaign targeting their customers, and of course they
wanted the games to work on any device.
Tube Rider is a small re-action based game. As the child flies down the water tube you can slide
him from side to side, the aim being to collect the items as he moves down the tube. There’s no
way to actually fail the game and it was designed this way according to the clients requirements.
We produced a mobile resolution version, an iPad / tablet resolution version and a Flash version of
this game to cover all possible devices.
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Agilent – Photo Hunt
Client: T-Minus 1 Creative
http://gametest.mobi/photohunt
Agilent create all of the parts required to run a water park – pumps, servos, tubes and various
other mechanical items. Summer is a key time for them and they wanted 3 games to feature on
their Summer of Fun web site as part of a campaign targeting their customers, and of course they
wanted the games to work on any device.
Photo Hunt is a simple “Spot the Difference” style game. With two images side-by-side you need
to find all the differences between them by touching them on either picture. They are then circled.
Once all the differences are found you win the game.
We produced a mobile resolution version, an iPad / tablet resolution version and a Flash version of
this game to cover all possible devices.
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Droplets
Photon Storm
http://gametest.mobi/droplets
We created this game ourselves – both the game design and the graphics. It’s a re-action based
vertical platform game. Take control of the droplet characters as they fall from above, slide them
left and right and try to get them home safely.
Avoid the spikes, birds, squirrels, lava, water and pretty much everything! Collect the hearts and
joysticks as you fall for high score challenges.
This game is available from mobile gaming portals such as MSN and Yahoo Games. It’s a reinterpretation of a Flash game we built a few years ago. The levels were re-designed to fit mobile
and the game changed slightly. This was a quick turn-around for us as we completed the build in
just two days, but we did have all of the assets and level data to start with.
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Nutmeg
Photon Storm
http://gametest.mobi/nutmeg
This is an original game created by ourselves, both design, levels and graphics all made in-house.
It’s a “one button” horizontally scrolling platform game. Jump and run your way across the 10
increasingly complex levels, avoiding the baddies and collecting the stars.
The graphical style of this game has been incredibly popular for us and it was well received and
played by gaming portals across the world.
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2. Kiwi.js – Our HTML5 Game Framework
In conjunction with Instinct Entertainment we are
building Kiwi.js, an advanced HTML5 game
framework. We will be specifically targeting mobile
web browsers as well as desktop support.
The framework is being built from the ground-up,
taking into account every “best practice” we’ve
come to learn about game development over
the years.
Focusing on performance and a feature-rich
set of components we hope to enter public
beta with the framework by the end of
September 2012.
Development can be followed on our blog, and
we recommend this article to start with:
http://www.photonstorm.com/archives/2926/how-weapproached-the-design-of-our-html5-game-framework
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3. HTML5 Game Developer Community Support
When we started out with HTML5 game development we quickly realized there was no real
community for it, and no single source for news related to this subject. So in November 2011 we
decided to change that.
HTML5 Game Devs.com
http://www.html5gamedevs.com
We created this site to be a hub for all the news going on in the world of HTML5 game
development. We publish HTML5 game and business related news articles every hour of every
day, from game releases to tutorials and shifts in the market.
The site has gone from strength to strength currently reaching 150,000 visitors a month. We
expect this increase dramatically after we launch the significant new re-design in Q4 2012.
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HTML5 Game Developers Business Forum
In addition to the main public site we also recognized the need for a private place where game
developers could talk freely and safely about the business deals they were making, so at the start
of 2012 we set-up a private invite-only Business Forum.
The forum boasts a healthy number of developers who collectively produce the majority of HTML5
games out there today. We discuss game portal deals, publisher deals and contract work, and
work with each other to fulfill contracts when extra resource is needed.
So if you need freelance development work and we’re booked-up then we can almost certainly
find someone to help.
CreativeJS
We’re also regular contributors to CreativeJS.com – a web site dedicated to showcasing new and
innovative uses of JavaScript on the web. Curated by a collection of industry veterans we focus on
covering games and demos in our posts, but you’ll also find plenty of other great topics such as
particle effects, browser experiments and more WebGL than is good for your GPU.
Authoring
We recently finished the technical edit of an O’Reilly book on HTML5 game development with
ImpactJS and are one of the contributors to the new Microsoft sponsored site Build New Games.
Our opening article about producing a platform game will be live shortly. We write regularly on
our blog which enjoys a significant and healthy readership, and can be found actively interacting
with our peers and followers on twitter.
We firmly believe that in order to truly understand a technology you have to fully embrace it: to
meet the people working in it, to remain fresh regarding news and developments and to
contribute back to it via source code, tutorials and sharing knowledge.
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Contact Us
Web sites:
http://www.photonstorm.com
http://www.html5gamedevs.com
Twitter:
@photonstorm
Email:
Richard Davey
[email protected]
Phone:
+44 (0)1594 844773
Skype:
richard.davey
GTalk:
[email protected]
Timezone:
London (GMT)
Rates:
We can provide a fixed-price quote for work or an hourly rate.
The rate will depend on the services required: code, art, animation or audio.
We do not work on-site but will travel for meetings and project kick-offs.
Our own IP games are available to license.
Company:
Registered in England and Wales.
Company Number: 8036404
VAT Registered: 136 4333 27
Professional indemnity insurance: £1 million
Public and products liability insurance: £1 million
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