Chapter  13

HTML5 Game Engines

Game development for HTML5 has been progressing rapidly over the last several years. Browsers have come a long way in implementing the HTML 5 canvas specification, as well as optimizing the execution of JavaScript. As browsers have become better with JavaScript, and some really creative developers have put together compelling HTML5 games, frameworks to automate many of the repetitive tasks associated with game development have come onto the scene. These engines take care of loading assets, playing sounds, managing levels, offline storage—virtually all of the moving parts—allowing you to develop modular code and assets that you can (we hope) reuse on different games.

This chapter introduces several of the more popular game engines and their strengths and weaknesses, as well as how you may use these different engines with the Facebook Platform, and some simple examples of the engines’ uses. These engines can be broken down to open source and paid products, each approach having its own tradeoffs.