Ask HN: Best way to make quick, relatively simple HTML5 games today?

#1

Post by cableshaft » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 3:23 PM UTC

I've been out of the web game loop for awhile, but it seems there's always a new javascript library being released and it's hard to keep up with which ones are worth my time.

I want something that's open enough that I can make any type of game or mechanics with it (although I am focused more on 2D puzzle and turn-based strategy games).

Unity seems to be overkill but I do have experience with it, and I used to churn out Flash games a decade ago. Now I'd like to update a few of them to HTML 5 and bang out a few other ideas, but I have much less time to work on them than I used to back in the day.

Something that could be translated to a mobile app without much difficulty would be nice, also, like 2048 was.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to make quick, relatively simple HTML5 games today?

#2

Post by iends » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 4:14 PM UTC

Have you looked at http://phaser.io/ ? Lots of resources available for it, active IRC channel, even a few books written.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to make quick, relatively simple HTML5 games today?

#3

Post by cableshaft » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 4:43 PM UTC

iends wrote: post #2

Have you looked at http://phaser.io/ ? Lots of resources available for it, active IRC channel, even a few books written.

I may have briefly visited the site a while back, but I haven't looked at it too closely. I'll check it out more later. Thanks for the suggestion.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to make quick, relatively simple HTML5 games today?

#4

Post by nblumoe » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 4:55 PM UTC

I really like https://www.scirra.com/construct2 for having fun and fast prototype iterations. Just be aware, that it is UI and click heavy, but yet powerful and flexible. I think it will be hard to manage large code bases in Construct, but that is something I have not yet gotten into with my simple hobby projects.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to make quick, relatively simple HTML5 games today?

#5

Post by tluyben2 » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 4:58 PM UTC

iends wrote: post #2

Have you looked at http://phaser.io/ ? Lots of resources available for it, active IRC channel, even a few books written.

Just started making a game in Phaser and so far I find it very nice. Before that I used MonkeyX and before that Impactjs: Phaser feels better supported so far.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to make quick, relatively simple HTML5 games today?

#6

Post by colanderman » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 5:17 PM UTC

I've always wondered, why more people don't use SVG for web games. It's easier to work with than HTML+CSS, and since you can specify simple animations in it, you can reduce the amount of work your game loop needs to do manually.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to make quick, relatively simple HTML5 games today?

#7

Post by kyle-rb » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 5:18 PM UTC

libGDX is a Java game engine that's relatively simple and lets you deploy to HTML5, Android, iOS, and desktop. PlayN.io is fairly similar I think, but I haven't used it.

2048 is actually somewhat of an odd case, since it was originally only an HTML5 game that was built to run in both the browsers of desktop and those of mobile devices. For this reason, the developer didn't actually port the game to Android/iOS until much later. Pretty much all the versions on the App Store/Google Play Store were 3rd party clones of the original, since it was relatively simple and open source.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to make quick, relatively simple HTML5 games today?

#8

Post by k__ » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 6:48 PM UTC

Phaser and Crafty are code oriented 2D game engines.

I think entity component system of Crafty scales a bit better than Phaser, but on the other hand Phaser has a bigger community.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to make quick, relatively simple HTML5 games today?

#9

Post by slurppurple » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 8:17 PM UTC

Babylon.js is a pretty good option for 3d games

Re: Ask HN: Best way to make quick, relatively simple HTML5 games today?

#10

Post by tobr » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 8:32 PM UTC

PuzzleScript[1] sounds like it might work for what you want to do, at least for quick prototypes. It's a brilliant little online IDE for a puzzle game DSL.

It might seem like a toy, but there's a community of people who create genuinely good games in it.[2]

[1] http://www.puzzlescript.net/editor.html

[2] http://puzzlescriptgallery.tumblr.com