I recently saw an impressive new JavaScript game engine called Akihabara. Take a look at it if you haven’t already – it’s really quite spectacular. The Akihabara site has demos of five complete games built using the engine, and while they’re somewhat rough, the experience is what’s truly impressive.
Why so impressive? Well, for starters, these games are built using nothing more than JavaScript and the HTML5 canvas element. While HTML5 alone does not make something an instant Flash killer (see the continuing saga of efforts to usurp Flash with the HTML5 video element), Akihabara is incredibly smooth. Each demo, while fairly rudimentary, controls flawlessly. There are no frame rate hiccups, no input lag, and no jerky animation. The demos are completely playable, easily on par with your average flash game, and decidedly better than some punch-the-monkey banner ad.
The fact that these demos were built with JavaScript adds another interesting benefit – the full source of each game is only a few clicks away! Because the Akihabara engine is doing most of the heavy lifting, the game code that remains is clean and very readable. Levels for 2d scrolling games are nothing more than an array of images, and enemy AI takes up just a few lines for each type of enemy. I don’t know the limitations of the engine yet, but it seems like most any 8-bit era game could probably be ported to JavaScript without too much of a hassle.
So, does this mean that the future of casual gaming is JavaScript? Unfortunately, probably not. While the performance of Akihabara is impressive, the fact that source code is easily available makes it unlikely that serious commercial projects will choose this route. However, the relative simplicity of making games with this JavaScript framework means that we can probably expect a lot of new games written by enthusiasts – like those who submit Flash games to sites like Newgrounds – to use JavaScript, for access to the iPhone / iPad market if nothing else.
5 Comments
that’s all cool & great js tool to try, thank you very much for sharing.
While the performance of Akihabara is impressive, the fact that source code is easily available makes it unlikely that serious commercial projects will choose this route.
You can easily extract source code from Flash SWF with Sothink Decompiler. On the other hand, it is possible to obfuscate JavaScirpt code by bloating logic flow, renaming variables, and dynamically evaluating downloaded code.
Roughly speaking, except that javascript is not compiled to bytecode it is completely equal to Flash in features. The reason why it is not used today is because it has no advantages over Flash, and a lot of libraries and ide applications exist for Flash but not for javascript.
Thanks for the reply. You’re right, the lack of JavaScript IDEs really is the big sticking point. Adobe keeps saying that they want to produce best-in-class tools for HTML5 content – if they can pull it off, I think they’ll be just as relevant (if not more) than they were when they first bought Macromedia.
Yes. Saw this game engine a couple of weeks ago. The games on it are impressive, and I think the guy behind it would write great games whatever language he was given.
I write games myself in js for Palm’s webos. I used the GMP game engine. Whilst the game examples aren’t as good, there are some tutorials and it’s only 25kb in size.
I think js games will become popular on mobile devices where the js runs locally. webOS apps are mostly js and the phonegap project means you can now write apps for several mobile devices (iPhone and Anroid, amongst others) in js, distribute them through the app store and they are played locally on the device.
I am porting my webOS game at the moment to iPhone with phonegap. Whilst it’s not straight forward it is reasonbaly doable.
Check out my site iapplogic.com for details.
Hi there
Talking about this I thought you might be interested in this page: the best HTML5 games to play at the office
Check it out and help me to grow this list. Feel free to add your comments.
Note that those games can also be played on the iphone or ipad.