Any interest in a Javascript game development library?
I've been looking at game development with Javascript lately. I'll admit that the possibilities with Javascript are not quite as fancy as what one can do with other tools like Flash and Silverlight, but there is so much available right now at least as far as 2D animation and interaction go that I think the area deserves some attention.
If you do a search on Google for "javascript games" you will get some decent results. Most were made in the days of Netscape 4 and are far outdated. All are probably made with one-shot code written from scratch. Game development doesn't get very far this way. When it comes to programming computer games in languages like C++, developers usually have libraries at their disposal to handle a lot of the work.
So I was thinking today… jQuery offered me a lot in terms of animation, AJAX, and DOM manipulation when I was working on my Tunnel game, but there is a lot more that could be offered on top of that. Things like movement, sprites, timing, collision detection, tiled backgrounds, level data, private game data; things that are common across games and are a pain to do by hand every time. It would be cool if there was a library built on top of jQuery to facilitate some of these things via objects and allow a programmer to "set up" their game basics so they can just go about designing the core behaviors and making the graphics, kind of like what the Interface class does for GUIs.
Unfortunately I am no Javascript guru or game programming guru so I don't think I could do much to put together a serious library (and I'm also very limited on time), but I'm hoping there are some gurus out there who might be interested in the idea. So I'm just putting this out there to see what kind of interest there might be. Let me know what you think and if this sounds like a worthwhile project.
I'm a committer with the Dojo Toolkit, and this is something I've been pushing for over a year. What there really needs to be is a "this is what I want" page somewhere, since it seems the like the majority of JS devs don't have a background in gaming.
Hi, I think that this is very much a worthwhile project. My background is games and web development. (I used to work at Acclaim Entertainment as a lead in their art dept.)
I'm looking for anybody who might be interested in co-designing and developing retro arcade games to run in a web browser.
Building foundation libraries seems like a pretty cool place to start!
Neil, Wilf: I'm glad to hear there are others out there who are interested. I've been thinking a lot lately about what would go into a first attempt at this library but unfortunately I have not had any time to write anything down. I've just been too busy with other projects. I'm hoping that someone with more experience in Javascript might take the lead on this and then I can get involved. As it is I just can't really get started.
Searching for a JS game lib today (after spending too much time on my own drag and drop JS library re a game I'm making), I settled on this to test out.
http://code.google.com/p/javascriptgamelib
Lots of features, a couple of developers, maybe it needs a JQuery layer underneath it
Haven't run across other libs to add to that list.
Thanks so much for sharing that, guyal. I haven't had time to even think about writing a library so I'm glad others out there are working on it. I'm going to check this one out!