

Introducing a Minimalist Html5 Game Template - ojr
https://blog.mozilla.org/labs/2012/05/introducing-a-minimalist-html5-game-template/

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Tloewald
It would be nice if a link were provided to a simple example showing off the
template. Lots of hoop jumping to see hello world...

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epaik
I agree.

I also find it a little strange that they're 'releasing' something that has a
version of 0.1. Can't it wait until there's something substantial to show off?
I was excited reading the headline and seeing it's from Mozilla, but I was
disappointed by the dearth of examples.

Still, as a game development enthusiast I'll be following the progress of this
project.

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dmose2
As a primary author of the template, I can offer some insight here. This was
originally posted on the Mozilla Labs site, which is one of the ways that we
try to offer cues that this is early days and not yet production software. As
far as the verb "releasing", I don't have a sense for how better to word a
blog post about a 0.1 version of something, but I'm very much open to
suggestions.

Other folks have asked for an examples as well, and I'm still struggling with
the best way forward here. At the very least, I'm thinking that the next
version wants the text from "let's get started" included as well as a
screencast demonstrating how one could start off a project (by typing at the
command-line). But the reality is that this is a minimalist template that most
consists of infrastructure bits (it eases pulling in libraries, building,
deploying, modularity, tests, etc.). So it's a bit like the HTML5 boilerplate
in the sense that it's not very opinionated -- it's applicable and supports
almost any sort of game. So if you have thoughts on the best way to demo and
talk about this, I'd love to hear them.

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epaik
Using the word "release" is fair enough. I wasn't familiar enough with Mozilla
Labs when I initially read the post.

I think there are two major reasons why people want to see examples/demos:

The first, is to learn from said open-source example, and see how specific
parts of the template/library are integrated.

The second, less obvious reason, is to see if other people are actually using
this template at all in the first place. This is important to me as a game
developer because I don't want to invest my time into something that's not
proven to work.

As minimalist as the template is, having a full game developed using the
template would be the ideal example/demo in my book. Not only would it show
off what the template could help with, it could also be used as an open-source
reference for people interested in game development in general. You could
easily have one demo game for each genre of game that might be made using this
template.

Do you have any interest in partnering with developers to make demos/examples?

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dmose2
Agreed on both of those reasons. We absolutely are interested in partnering
with developers who want to make demos or examples based on this template. If
you (or anyone else reading this) is interested, I'd love to hear from you
either via email at dmose@mozilla.org or on irc.mozilla.org in #games (I go by
dmose there).

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DigitalSea
Interesting. Perhaps because I've had a bit of experience dabbling in some
pretty graphically intensive/impressive HTML5 applications this template isn't
all that impressive to me and I was expecting a lot more. Needless to say,
it's great people are releasing things like this and no doubt it'll get a bit
more feature packed as people fork and make changes hopefully. Exciting times
ahead, now where's my beer template, I'm thirsty.

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dmose2
My hope was that choosing to refer to it as "minimalist" would help calibrate
people's expectations not to expect to much. I'd be interested in other
language or naming that we could use to make that more clear.

This template will indeed become somewhat more featureful over time, but part
of the intent is that highly specialized, opinionated, and therefore
featureful templates should be built on top of this one (eg a template for an
MMORPG). Again, thoughts on better verbiage to make this more clear would be
greatly appreciated.

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karolisd
Is there a reason the link is https? I had to change it to http to work.

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Skalman
https works well for me.

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gcao
Interesting project. It'll be good to have coffeescript support.

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dmose2
I'm not a coffeescript guy, so I'm curious what sort of support would be most
valuable? Would there be more than just a build command?

