Building Games in HTML 5

 

HTML 5 is probably one of the most talked topics of the year 2011 in the Web development world. HTML 5 brings Web 2.0 to plain vanilla HTML. Besides implementing Web 2.0 tags like Audio and Video, several developers and small companies have built many libraries and APIs to build a variety of interfaces.

 

Two libraries I found interesting are ImpactJS and CraftyJS.  

 

 

Impact is a JavaScript Game Engine that allows you to develop stunning HTML5 Games for desktop and mobile browsers. Impact runs on all HTML5 capable browsers: Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and (behold) even Internet Explorer 9. Of course, this also includes the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. Check out ImpactJS here: http://impactjs.com/

 

 

Crafty is a JavaScript game engine to help you develop games for the browser (and not just the new ones). With a modular design, creating reusable components and extensions is easy and if submitted, could even help others.

 

Rather than having a long hierarchy of inheritance, Crafty uses the Entity-Component paradigm or data-oriented. This will be explained in a later tutorial but is very simple to understand. Basically, every game object is an entity, and every bit of functionality is a component. All you need to do to give your entities (or game objects) functionality is to assign some components. Check out CraftyJS here: http://craftyjs.com/

 

 

If you are new to HTML 5, we have many articles and tutorials on HTML 5. Check them out at our HTML 5 section.

 

Namaste!