HTML5 started off being a highly anticipated platform a couple of years back. It was meant to take over Adobe Flash, and even today continues to gain popularity and curiosity amongst developers. A lot of talk of HTML5 might have begun with Apple not supporting Flash on Ios devices, but HTML5 largely got known for its cross platform feature, thus evolving as a preferred platform.
What makes game development simpler with HTML5 are the frameworks and tools currently available. We’ve compiled a list that of some of these tools. Construct 2 is an HTML5 game engine that allows anyone to make games across platforms without any programming experience. It enables rapid game development with ready physics behavior to add to game objects. Working with Construct 2 is as simple as dragging your game objects (images) to a canvas screen and setting properties and behavior to them. The downside of this is that the engine may limit creativity if you want to add a behavior that is not compatible with the engine.
The Construct 2 engine comes in 3 editions; one of them being completely free for an unlimited time. However to use it for a commercial project a license needs to be purchased.They have some great demos to show how powerful the engine is for game development on their website. Cost: Free for non commercial projects Platforms: Web Browsers, ios, Android, Windows 8 Metro App, Chrome Web Store Website: http://www.scirra.com/construct2
LimeJS is a JavaScript game framework for web browsers and mobile platforms (ios and Android). Released under the Apache license, the framework ensures that games can be created in the shortest time supporting every modern browser that runs HTML5. Digital Fruit developed LimeJS as part-time project when there was a lack of tools for developing HTML5 based games especially for touch screens (ios, Android). LimeJS goal is quite clear: to provide an easy way to build good game experiences without thinking about details that go into writing complex game code.
The framework is free and open source. They have some nice demos for inspiration and programming guide to begin game development. Cost: Free Open Source Platforms: Web Browsers, ios, Android Website: http://www.limejs.com/, http://www.digitalfruit.en/
Impact is a JavaScript Game Engine that allows development of HTML5 Games for desktop and mobile browsers (iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch). The engine makes great use of the canvas element and comes with a 2D level editor for side scrolling games or top down RPG games. The website has a list of tools and libraries that can be integrated with ImpactJS. The engine is not free though. What makes ImpactJS unique from the other engines is that it comes with a 2D Weltmeister Level Editor that helps create side scrolling and top-down RPG games easily. It also has debug tools which helps identify performance bottlenecks. It is also based upon an Ejecta Framework that renders the game via OpenGL on ios improving performance. Cost: $99 per license for unlimited game development Platforms: Web Browsers, ios Website: http://impactjs.com/
This HTML5 game engine makes game creation easy because it has a drag and drop interface and a complex behavior library for game designers. The engine comes with In-App Previewer that emulates the game display on a mobile screen. The engine can go cross platform including ios, Android Kindle, Windows 8 and desktop. The engine comes in 2 editions – the free version which is limited in features and the paid version which is for $299/year. The advantage of the pro paid version is that it provides benefits such as Game Center, iAd, in-app purchasing, Android publishing and Twitter postings which is not available with other engines. Cost: Free version which is limited in fea- tures and the paid pro version at $299 Platforms: Web Browsers, ios, Android, Kindle, Windows 8 Desktop Website: http://gamesalad.com/
Crafty.js is a modern component and an event based framework for JavaScript games that tar- gets DOM and canvas. The component is community driven so it constantly looking for community support to share code samples and help the component evolve. The Crafty component unlike the other frameworks is not as simple as a plug and play but comes with advantages such as smaller foot- print and makes use of something known as “Entity Component System” where the game entities (objects such as hero, enemy, wall etc) can have components (set of functions and properties) directly applied to them avoiding long chains inheritance and polymorphism. Cost: Free Website: http://craftyjs.com/http://crafty-components.com/
Box2DJS is Javascript port of the Box2D Physics Engine. Box2D was originally written in C++ and used on several operating systems including ios and Android. Ports of Box2D slowly started getting written to support different environments outside C++. One of them was for the Flash Platform. The Javascript port apparently has been com- pleted form the Flash ActionScript version of the port. And the reason is none other than the fact that ActionScript and Javascript are both based on the ECMA-262 Standards which makes them very familiar to any developer who might have worked on either. Box2D is a very powerful physics engine that can simulate convex, rigid body objects inter- acting with each other through properties such as restitution, gravity, and friction with varying values. Many successful games have been cre- ated using this engine which makes it reliable to develop games that need good physics. Cost: free Website: http://code.google.com/p/box2dweb/
FlashJS is JavaScript graphics and game development engine with API similar to ActionScript. It is an HTML5 game development tool allowing writing AS3 code within the actionscript code. Licensed under Apache, the framework is open source and encourages contribution from the community. Cost: free Website: http://flashjs.com/smarty.html
One of the newer kids on the bloch is the Quintus HTML5 Game Engine. Designed to be modular and lightweight, it is aimed for both mobiles and desktop. It supports an event based hybrid Object Oriented approach, has easy asset loading and sprite sheet generation. Fundamentally, it is easy to learn and games can be written in very less lines of code. What is good about the Quintus Engine is that it has dedicated website with a great guide on the engine components and many examples to get familiar with the engine. Cost: free Website: http://html5quintus.com/
This Javascript library for 2d Graphics is extremely powerful for rendering graphics in games. It uses WebGL and runs on the GPU accelerated HTML5 Canvas element making it extremely fast even on low-end devices. Currently it runs on open source with plenty of good examples to look and learn from. The developer of this library is constantly working on stabilizing its features thus lending his commitment to evolving it. Cost: Free Website: http://lib.ivank.net/
