

Udacity adds HTML5 Game Development Course - vignesh_vs_in
https://www.udacity.com/course/cs255

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jiggy2011
HTML5 gaming is an interesting frontier but I am sceptical that we will see a
resurgence of the sort of the casually played (and developed) amateur games
that we saw during the hayday of newgrounds and similar sites.

In retrospect Macromedia made a stroke of genius with Flash in bundling design
& animation tools, sound editors and a code editor into the same IDE.

All of this combined in an easy-to-pirate package along with the thousands of
tutorials and code samples available online made game development almost
shockingly easy.

Myself and a more artistic friend could literally sit in his bedroom and crank
out a complete game over a weekend by taking turns at the computer and
drinking heavily. No thinking about "engines", writing asset import code ,
muddling through JS patterns/frameworks or being stumped by cross browser
quirks.

Deployment and getting instant feedback was as simple as uploading the .swf to
deviantart.com and spamming the link to all of our contacts via MSN messenger.

All of the .js game dev stuff by comparison looks like hard work.

~~~
jastanton
I'm curious, do you think it was the IDE that was the game changer (excuse the
pun)? If JS had a game dev IDE with bundles sound editor etc... do you think
it would be as popular as Flash?

~~~
jiggy2011
I can't say for certain but I would wager it was certainly a significant part
of it.

You could put a programmer or an artist down in front of it and it was
intuitive enough and gave an "integrated" feel which was also probably part of
what made Visual Basic popular.

Basically the interface felt "empowering" to the newbie in a way that
something like vim doesn't.

For example, you could create an animated sprite and with a couple of clicks
transform it into something that you could manipulate directly in the code as
an object. No importing third party libraries or creating "sprite sheets" was
required.

I'm not sure if the bar for games has become significantly higher apart from
in the AAA area, plenty of successful indie titles still look like SNES games.

A games/multimedia specific JS IDE that dealt with as much of the crap
surrounding the JS ecosystem as possible could certainly have a chance of
being popular. Though I think something built around <http://love2d.org/> with
easy browser publishing might be better in some ways.

~~~
AshleysBrain
Our startup's IDE, Construct 2, attempts to do just that for HTML5:
<http://www.scirra.com>

Do you think that's in the right direction?

~~~
jiggy2011
Interesting, though you seem to be going for a "no coding required" approach
which always ends up hitting limits pretty quickly.

Do you support an easy way to add custom JS code for logic that the in built
tools cannot handle elegantly?

Also interested in how this works, do you generate JS code or do you have a JS
engine which reads settings from other files?

~~~
AshleysBrain
There aren't any hard-coded limits, and you can do things like make recursive
functions with unique local variables at each call. We have a JS SDK for
custom code too: <https://www.scirra.com/manual/15/sdk>

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duhroach
Thanks for your interest in the course!!

Re: Jiggy2011 - All game dev is hard-work; JS is easier in some ways, harder
in others. We've had good 2D IDE's for 20 years now to make 2D games; Making
the runtime HTML5 isn't new (especially with the ability to export SWF to JS
with easel.js)

Re: CodeCube5 - We'll be covering perf on rendering, input, sound and overall
entity processing

Re: muyuu - NaCl is awesome! Html5 is awesome! Web game development is a win
either way; NaCl is great for devs who have an existing codebase, HTML5
generally works for most others.

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vignesh_vs_in
blog post by course instructor Colt McAnlis
[http://mainroach.blogspot.in/2013/01/the-past-and-future-
of-...](http://mainroach.blogspot.in/2013/01/the-past-and-future-of-game-
development.html)

~~~
muyuu
Looks great, but I guess NaCl isn't covered in the course.

~~~
j_s
Pardon my ignorance, but where is NaCl in HTML5?

~~~
muyuu
That's why I don't expect it to be covered, despite NaCl being his main area
and it being a course on game development.

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zachgalant
This looks like you need to have experience coding to take this class.

If you're a beginner or know a beginner who is interested in HTML 5 game
development, you need to check out <http://codehs.com>

We teach you how to program from the ground up and get you as quickly as
possible to creating awesome games in the browser.

The whole time, you get personal help from tutors who answer your questions
and give you feedback on all of your programs.

You can make some really fun games really quickly. Here are some demos:

<http://codehs.com/demos>

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krsunny
What is everyone's favorite HTML5 game engine? So far out of all that I've
tried I like the Isogenic game engine:
<https://github.com/coolbloke1324/ige_prototype>

~~~
laserDinosaur
I highly recommend Construct 2: <http://www.scirra.com/construct2>

It takes care of most of the heavy lifting when developing games for HTML5,
but it still has a very open and powerful scripting language (unlike something
like gamesalad which is more like using pre-built blocks).

Edit - Ha, beaten by 1 minute.

~~~
Yhippa
Have you made anything using it yet?

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CodeCube
Whoa, interesting ... I'm particularly curious as to what performance
improvements he will go over.

I've been working on a little html5 game engine myself. It lets you use
sprites in a retained mode like API, while still giving you an immediate mode
interface to manage the game logic. It's still pretty early, need to do more
work on some samples and documentation, but there are some docs there in the
wiki :)

<https://github.com/joelmartinez/flatredball-js>

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ameen
While HTML5 hasn't been employed heavily by the gaming industry, signs of it
are showing up. Gas Powered Games' recently teased "Project Mercury", their
next-gen cloud powered Modding Tool & Web platform –
<http://youtu.be/kuGdQqUhKD4>

Such projects are possible only due to HTML5/WebGL, and the innovations on top
of it. In a couple of years, we'd be seeing mainstream studios shipping AAA
Games as Web-based applications.

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manish_gill
Just noticed the design change on Udacity. Interesting, but I preferred the
old one.

~~~
droithomme
There's something seriously wrong with the new design. Clicking on just about
anything results in a 5-15 second loading time for pages, it feels like it is
bogged down in database queries for routine page access. Furthermore, some
class pages have out of control javascript that pummels most browsers and pins
CPUs. Wasn't like this at all before the new design, which seems to not have
been tested.

~~~
cdman
Hey droithomme, could you please email some concrete examples (like I'm on
page X, do Y after which there is a long delay) to attila [at] udacity.com?
We're trying to iron out all the issues as quickly as possible.

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thurn
I'd be really curious to know which libraries, frameworks, or engines they
intend to employ. Just yesterday I started learning the melonJS canvas game
engine and it's been a lot of fun so far!

~~~
krsunny
According to the blog post in a link from this thread they are using
<https://code.google.com/p/gritsgame/>

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plumeria
Why is it still unavailable today Feb. 4th??

