• MVP-run tech conference in the Poconos, TechBash
  • Microsoft has a great community of MVPs, or Most Valuable Professionals, whom we acknowledge annually for their commitment to their community and helping others. Recently, a group of MVPs gathered to plan TechBash, a technical conference in the Poconos at Kalahari Resorts, about 2 hours north of Philadelphia, and 2 hours west of New York. I was there with my family earlier in the year, and we had a blast. It’s a large resort with an indoor water park, some restaurants, and an arcade. The perfect trip to bring the family on.
• Indie Dev Podcast, Ep 31 – Pek Pongpaet & Daniel Pesina, Mortal Kombat
  • This week is a bit different. I’ve got my co-worker in DC, Shahed Chowdhuri on the show, along with Pek Pongpaet (pong-pat) and Daniel Pesina. Shahed and Pek grew up together, and Pek met Daniel while studying at his Wushu.  Daniel played Johnny Cage and ninjas Sub-Zero, Scorpion, Reptile, Smoke, and Noob Saibot in several Mortal Kombat games, and Pek has worked on 6 MK games spanning 10 years. Master Pesina is perhaps most famous for his work as Johnny Cage and the ninjas in the first two Mortal Kombat games. He has also worked on films such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze, Book of Swords, Press Start.
• A handful of free and useful tools for streaming on Twitch
  • In the last few months I decided to start streaming the games I’m playing, podcasts I record, and programming tutorials that I create. I use OBS (Open Broadcast Software) for all of this, which is a free tool for recording and streaming audio and video from your computer. I created a video tutorial around this as well.  Now that I have more experience with it, I wanted to share some other tools that I’m using in tandem with OBS to give my stream a more professional look and feel. If you think I’m missing out on any, let me know.
• The construction worker who changed his life and career through video games
  • I had the opportunity to speak with Chad Bostic of Hello Tech Pros last week and join him on his podcast and share my story. Chad has a number of interesting topics covered each week, including entrepreneurship, motivation, and productivity, but what I like most is that he gets the human element behind all of these things.
• Using a gamepad for HTML5 projects
  • The HTML5 gamepad API allows you interact with the web browser through a traditional gamepad, whether it is from Microsoft, Sony, or some other third party product. Bear in mind that it is an experimental technology, so that means it isn’t implemented in every browser (yet).
• Diablo, a Classic Game Postmortem
  • Video + Slides from GDC 2016. Can you believe this game is 20 years old this year? And was originally turn-based, single player, and for DOS.
• Porting Retro City Rampage from MS-DOS: From PS4 to 1.44 MB Floppy
  • Not many people are designing video games for MS-DOS these days, but that didn’t stop Vblank Entertainment’s Brian Provinciano from taking on the task. In this 2016 talk, hear Provinciano explain how he reduced memory usage down to 4MB, increased performance to run on a 486 PC, reduced disk space to fit on a single 1.44MB floppy, and finally ported the game to MS-DOS itself.
• Sketchfab is a 3D visualization tool for showcasing your work in the browser
  • I love this concept. Great way to showcase your work and get the word out about your game. Also embeds directly into Facebook posts, which helps grow an audience.
• More than 75% of an app downloads open and app once and never come back
  • For years I’ve been preaching that downloads are worthless. The real number you should be concerned with is how often are people utilizing your application, and how much time are they spending on it. What are you doing to entice your users to come back each day?

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Microsoft has a great community of MVPs, or Most Valuable Professionals, whom we acknowledge annually for their commitment to their community and helping others. Recently, a group of MVPs gathered to plan TechBash, a technical conference in the Poconos at Kalahari Resorts, about 2 hours north of Philadelphia, and 2 hours west of New York.

I was there with my family earlier in the year, and we had a blast. It’s a large resort with an indoor water park, some restaurants, and an arcade. The perfect trip to bring the family on.

Visit the TechBash website

Buy tickets

When

September 28-30, 2016 · Kalahari Resorts, Pocono Manor, Pennsylvania

Why attend?

Wondering why you should attend TechBash? There are lots of reasons. For starters, we’ve got great presentations for you by a variety of awesome speakers, including keynotes from Pete Brown and Glenn Block. Our venue, the Kalahari Resort is really cool. It is a brand new Resort, Conference Center, and 100,000 sq ft indoor waterpark! Location?

There are 70+ sessions with a large selection of speakers, not only from the community, but also many Microsoft employees.

We want to inspire our attendees to build great things. At TechBash, we are building an environment that is designed for attendees to get the most out of the event. In the many sessions at TechBash you will learn all sorts of new things. But we know that a lot of great things happen outside of the talks as well. That is why we will have a great attendee lounge that will have plenty of space for you to hang out and talk with old friends and new. It will provide a great place for speakers and attendees to have follow up talks after sessions. There will be snacks and coffee. And it will also include our Hack Lab and our vendors as well.

Hack Lab

The Hack Lab is a space for our attendees, speakers and sponsors to collaborate, brain storm, hack and even demo the results! For 2016, there will be no kid coding sessions, but the Kalahari waterpark and arcade are fun for the entire family.

The post MVP-run tech conference in the Poconos, TechBash appeared first on Dave Voyles | Tech Evangelist at Microsoft.

Master Pesina is perhaps most famous for his work as Johnny Cage and the ninjas in the first two Mortal Kombat games. He has also worked on films such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze, Book of Swords, Press Start, and Mortal Kombat Fates Beginning, winner of the 2015 Urban Action Showcase Best MK Film award.

Pesina appeared as one of Shredder’s foot soldiers in the 1991 film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze.

Pongpaet’s expertise ranges from product design and development, and martial arts. Prior to Pinstagram, Pongpaet was VP of Product at Spoton, a loyalty and social media company. He’s worked at Accenture Technology Labs in the research department coming up with next generation user interfaces.

He was introduced to  Chinese martial arts (Wushu) late in life when he met Master Daniel Pesina in 1998. He opened Pek to a new world of skill, discipline, artistry and mastery that would come to consume and permeate all of his life. His martial arts experience has led to motion capture roles in 6 Mortal Kombat games over the next 10 years.

The post Indie Dev Podcast – Ep 31 Pek Pongpaet and Daniel Pesina, Mortal Kombat appeared first on Dave Voyles | Tech Evangelist at Microsoft.

In the last few months I decided to start streaming the games I’m playing, podcasts I record, and programming tutorials that I create. I use OBS (Open Broadcast Software) for all of this, which is a free tool for recording and streaming audio and video from your computer. I created a video tutorial around this as well.

Now that I have more experience with it, I wanted to share some other tools that I’m using in tandem with OBS to give my stream a more professional look and feel. If you think I’m missing out on any, let me know.

Discord Chat Overlay

Discord Overlay Host application so that I could capture my voice chat to OBS while I stream to Twitch, and still be able to use the desktop application for responding to text chat. This application allows you to create an OpenGL or DirectX “game” window and then add it to Discord to put their overlay on it. You can then use OBS game capture to display the portions you want on stream.

I use this when I want viewers to see the 5 or so people who I am chatting with via microphone.

Free Twitch Themes

I use one of these sets for my own page. Easy way to make your page look a bit more professional.

Twitch Alerts

I use popup alerts so that the room is notified when I have a new follower or someone makes a donation. Even better, I can tie into their API and have the latest follower have their name remain on screen. Here are some of the features available (and all free):

• Popup Alerts
• Stream Labels
• Donation Goals

You’ll also need this Chrome extension, which creates a .txt file for you, so that you can display some of the information about stream labels on your screen.

Kap Chat

Overlay chat from your Twitch room into your actual video feed with this. You can style it with an CSS, and create transparent backgrounds, as well as fade, so it’s never intrusive to people watching your feed.

Stream Tip

This is a simple way to setup payments for your stream. I believe you need a PayPal account for this to work, but it only took me a couple of minutes total. From here, I added a PayPal button to my Twitch page, so when people click on it, they are brought to my tips page.

Better TTV

This make Twitch far easier to view. Dark themes, anon chat, recent chat history, and custom emotes are just a handful of the things you can quickly add with this.

Discord

While not directly related to Twitch, I use this chat program for finding other people to play with. Whether it is Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, or Paragon, I can find a full group any time of day, and we all have microphones. Needless to say, this makes your stream more engaging, too.

The post A handful of free useful tools for streaming on Twitch appeared first on Dave Voyles | Tech Evangelist at Microsoft.

I had the opportunity to speak with Chad Bostic of Hello Tech Pros last week and join him on his podcast and share my story. Chad has a number of interesting topics covered each week, including entrepreneurship, motivation, and productivity, but what I like most is that he gets the human element behind all of these things.

He is always looking for new guests as well, so submit your story here.

Key Takeaways

• Sometimes you have to take a job, ANY job, to pay the bills
• If you are getting deeper in debt, evaluate the situation and look for alternatives
• Facebook (AKA: “Fakebook”) shows the highlight reel of friends and family, only their best moments
• You have to invest in yourself, even if you are already in debt
• A missed opportunity is gone forever, but if you take it, it may change your life
• Keep an optimistic mindset on everything you do
• When getting into a new industry, take a pen and paper and listen more than you talk
• Business cards are not dead – they are critical for networking
• Create a simple website to start marketing yourself
• Network and learn – talk to as many people as possible
• Find out what you are passionate about and figure out how you can make money at it
  • Look at other people in the industry – how do they get paid?
• People do care what you think – put your thoughts out in the universe
• Indecision IS a decision, but ANY OTHER decision is better
• Make something, anything and get started today

The post The Construction Worker Who Changed His Life Through Video Games appeared first on Dave Voyles | Tech Evangelist at Microsoft.

Mozilla has some fantastic docs and examples for the API, so I won’t reinvent the wheel here.

Why would anyone do this?

The browser is fast today. Really fast. With that, comes the ability to add new experiences, such as games on the web. Now, I’m not talking about only games that were written directly in JavaScript (those are fast too) but with the recent rise of asm.js and emscripten, which allows us to transpile C / C++ to JavaScript, we can now utilize popular middleware such as Epic’s Unreal Engine and Unty’s Unity 3D to write games in another language, but play them in the browser.

With these new experiences come new ways to interact with the browser, and therein lies the desire to use the gamepad.

Now would I use this for browsing Facebook? Eh, probably not. But it  would work very well for any of these 30 games.

Xbox One Gamepad

The Xbox One Wireless Controller can be used to play Xbox games on your PC when connected via micro-USB cable.

To use an Xbox One Wireless Controller with your PC, you’ll need to make sure you have the current PC drivers.

Windows 10

The drivers come pre-installed with the OS.

Windows 8 or 7

You’ll need to download and install one of the following driver packages:

• PC drivers for Xbox One Controller (x86)
• PC drivers for Xbox One Controller (x64)

You can find more information on the topic here.

What if you prefer a PS4 gamepad?

Well you’re in luck! Just download DS4 windows, plug in your PS4 gamepad, and you’re good to go. It’s a set of drivers which sit on top of your gamepad drivers, and behave exactly as you’d expect. I actually use this pretty often when playing games on my PC.

EDIT: Great insight from Reddit user NoDownVotesPlease:

I’m not sure you even need DS4 to use the PS4 controller. [At least for HTML5 projects] I have tested the controller with chrome and firefox on both Window and OSX and it works fine without any specific drivers. The only issue I had was the right stick doesn’t map correctly in firefox, but it was perfect in Chrome.

One cool thing is the gamepad API works in the Android version of chrome too. So my html5 game had full controller support on my phone once I connected with a usb on the go adapter.

HTML5 Gamepad Tester

There’s a fanatic tool in the browser to check that this all works, and you can find it here.

Troubleshooting

Upon plugging in my Xbox One gamepad to my Windows 10 machine, I discovered that it wasn’t immediately recognized. I opened the Device Manager and saw that I needed to update the driver.

Sure enough the problem had to do with the fact that the USB wire I was using was not working properly. Always check your wires. But I figured I’d throw some of the debugging tools in here so that you can step through some issues, should you have them in the future.

At the next screen I selected “Search automatically for driver” but saw that the best driver was already installed. Odd.

I restarted the machine and the warning went away, but it still wasn’t picking up my gamepad. I found this great article on how to debug the situation. It was now detecting my device, but I couldn’t calibrate anything.

Try it out

Reddit user Gamepadable created a site to showcase games and projects that make use of the API.

The post Using a Gamepad for HTML5 projects appeared first on Dave Voyles | Tech Evangelist at Microsoft.

I recently picked up a motorized desk after reading this review from Wirecutter . I wound up going with the Jarvis Standing Desk Frame ($525 at Amazon), then throwing a $29 IKEA  Linmon table top on it.

I also wanted to cover how I wired things up, to allow things to seamless transition between sitting and standing without tugging at the devices. I use nylon cable sleeves to bundle several cables together, thereby making it seem like there is only one fat cable there.

I also use a a $14 standing mat, which has saved my back.

In terms of an ergonomic chair, they are well worth the money. It’s too much for me to cover here, but worth taking your time to investigate.

Did I miss anything? Should I be using something else for cable management? Let me know!

The post Once I used a motorized desk, I never looked back appeared first on Dave Voyles | Tech Evangelist at Microsoft.

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So you’ve created a web app (a website designed for a mobile device), but now you need to figure out how to debug it, because the mobile browser just doesn’t have the tool built in. In comes Vorlon, a free tool to do exactly that.

Dave Voyles joins James Quick to show us how we can easily use VorlonJS to remotely debug websites and test our JavaScript.

• [1:30] Project overview
• [2:15] DEMO: Debugging with VorlonJS

Follow the conversation @msdev
Become a Fan @ facebook.com/MSFTDev
Subscribe to our podcast via iTunes, Windows Phone Marketplace or RSS

If you’re interested in learning more about the products or solutions discussed in this episode, click on any of the below links for free, in-depth information:

Websites & Blogs:

• James Quick’s Blog
• Dave Voyles Blog
• Github: https://github.com/DaveVoyles/VorlonJSDemoSite

The post Quick Dev: Debugging mobile web apps using VorlonJS appeared first on Dave Voyles | Tech Evangelist at Microsoft.

@DaveVoyles

This weekend the team at Unity stopped by Philadelphia to attend not only Dev Night  on Thursday at the Philly Game Forge, but also to Pipeline Philly on Saturday to host a day-long workshop and testing for certifications. All of Unity’s upcoming events can be found at unity3d.com/events.

I had a chance to stop by on Saturday and record a lot of the content, as well as livestream it on Periscope.Thanks again to Mark and Ashley(@avashely) at Unity for presenting in Philly!

I also posted a bunch of the photos online. 

The post Recap of the Unity Roadshow in Philadelphia for game devs appeared first on Dave Voyles | Tech Evangelist at Microsoft.