Issue #520: Solitaire tutorial, Excalibur, and twinkling tree

Issue #520 - December 22nd 2023

If you have anything you want to share with the HTML5 game development community please let me know by sending an email to andrzej.mazur@end3r.com.
I'm also open for related sponsorship opportunities and job listings.
 

Articles:

Mickey Mouse is set to become public domain in 2024, but it's a bit complicated
Steamboat Willie's copyright expires in 2024, and here's exactly what that means.
Adam Bankhurst at IGN

Steam trolls players with bans wrapped up like Christmas presents
Valve goes full Grinch-mode on unsuspecting Dota 2 cheaters.
Ethan Gach at Kotaku

China to ban some monetization and engagement tactics in games
Daily log-in rewards, loot boxes for minors, auctions for in-game items among the prohibited mechanisms; spending limits also imposed.
Brendan Sinclair at GamesIndustryBiz

GTA 6 lead hacker faces indefinite custody in ‘secure hospital’
Rockstar spent $5 million to recover from the hack.
Nicole Carpenter at Polygon
 

Tutorials:

Create a solitaire framework in vanilla JavaScript
These pages describe the design and programming of a game of Spider solitaire to run in any graphical browser.
Graham Relf's blog

Developing HTML5 games with Phaser, webpack and Visual Studio Code
To start building HTML5 games serioulsy, you have to automate and streamline the process of importing libraries and exporting distributable files.
Emanuele Feronato's blog
 

Tools:

Excalibur - an open-source 2D HTML5 game engine

Poki-pixijs-template - quick and dirty template to build hypercasual PixiJS games
 

Resources:

Santa Tracker

Last day of Gamedev.js Survey 2023 collecting answers
 

Demos:

Star particles

All-seeing eye

Dweet of the week: twinkling tree
 

Games:

Space to Jump