Hi all,

Not long to go now before LD25. No doubt you are planning what tech to use and making sure that you are well-versed in your chosen tools so you can hit the ground running next weekend.

Will and I have been working on PlayCanvas for the last two years and we think we’ve got a really great tool for making HTML5 games.

We want you to be able to use it to make your Ludum Dare games, so we’ve got 30 spots in the Closed Beta available for LDers who email support@playcanvas.com with “Ludum Dare” in the subject line.

PlayCanvas is a browser-based game development environment, so you can build 3D browser games, collaboratively and publish really quickly onto the web. Ideal for people who want to push HTML5 games that bit further but maybe don’t want to write the WebGL themselves. Will has done all the hard maths so we don’t have to

You can check out what was possible 6-12 months ago in our previous LD entries:

Tiny World – This one went pretty smoothly, we integrated Box2D and the extra day for the Jam gave us a chance to add a little extra polish. I spent the first day battling matrix maths though, which thanks to our new Entity library I (and you!) won’t have to this time.

Alone – Fittingly, I entered the solo contest for this one on my own. It was really early days with the Designer tool and pretty painful. Also, clearly, I’m no artist But still we learned a lot.

This time I hope to avoid all the “bit short” comments which both previous entries received.

So, if you are interested in making an HTML5 game, but you don’t want to do all the low-level stuff yourself, or you fancy having a functional 3D art pipeline for Blender, Maya or Max up and running in advance, or you want a level editor tool or you want the guy who wrote the library on email support over the weekend, or you just want to drop us an email and tell us what you think, get in touch!

Dave – PlayCanvas