Hi from Zynga!

Hi everyone!

I'm Paul Bakaus, CTO of Zynga Germany, and as of now, a new member of the SVG Working Group. I'm also the AC rep for Zynga, who has joined W3C just a couple days ago.

Zynga has recently started investing heavily into the open web stack. While most of our current games (CityVille, FarmVille) still run on Flash, our subsidiary in Germany is exclusively focussing on JavaScript driven game technology. We are building a new generation engine to power future games that run platform independent and cross-device. Some of you might have already seen the Aves Engine prototype videos last year at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmtQOB_KFzU that we built before we've been acquired and became part of Zynga: We are not talking about little table driven interactions, but full blown isometric animated game experiences that are deployed to hundreds of millions of players.

As we're doing something that (likely) hasn't been done before, a lot of our time is spent on research. Every day, we encounter new issues with the web stack, and we eventually realized that it doesn't make sense to keep all of it to ourselves. By joining W3C and actively contributing back and sharing our unique perspective, we hope to kill two birds with one stone: Improving our games, and improving the web for anyone building games.

Finally, I've joined the SVG working group (and might bring in some of our other JS devs in the future), as this is where a lot of the visual innovation happens (that then eventually gets moved over to CSS). While we do not use SVG currently mainly due to implementation performance reasons, I'm looking forward to see what knowledge is hidden within the SVG spec than could be ported over, and what additions make sense to power games, both to CSS and SVG.

Long story short, I'm looking forward to working with all of you to make the web a better place for games!

Thanks,
Paul

Paul Bakaus
CTO Zynga Germany