There was indeed. It was given by Ron Harwood of Blacknova Traders. Unfortunately details were scarce since I wasn’t quite up to travelling all the way to the US to attend ;-).

Anyway, I spent a while yesterday, after finishing the draft website for Quantum Star SE, looking through some of the other Open Source PHP games in our little corner of the PHP programming world. While doing so I stumbled across Ron’s php|works slides. If you didn’t already know and skipped the first sentence, Ron gave the talk at the conference about PHP Web Games. The slides came up when searching for word of Blacknova on public mailing lists (I’m shameless).

Anyways for those interested:
http://www.blacknova.net/phpworks/

Ron sets out some good points on designing a PHP game. He also makes a good stab at pointing out there is a distinction between a PHP Application and a PHP Game. The slides are no doubt a poor substitute for actually hearing Ron’s talk in person, but are nevertheless a good read. They omit PHP programming techno babble which probably is no harm. Games differ in how they are designed – a part which many may tend overemphasise with good reason. Knowing PHP is useless if you can’t work out a well balanced game design that’s fun to play afterall :-).

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