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Impact HTML5 Game Engine released

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Re: Impact HTML5 Game Engine released

#51

Post by bullseye »

savoy11 wrote: post #23

And there we go - the typical HN oh no, it costs money ($99 for an engine, mind you, that may save you hundreds of hours development time). How much do you charge per hour? Can this library save you hundreds of hours? Do the math. I am not surpirsed at all that the average tech startup is a failure, with more than half of the people failing to get the "charge money for product/service" model everyone else in the worl…

>> And there we go - the typical HN oh no, it costs money...

Why do you think this is unique to HN?

In my experience, this is a common mindset. If anything, I think you have a higher ratio of people willing to adopt commercial libraries here than many other development communities.

Re: Impact HTML5 Game Engine released

#52

Post by chipsy »

savoy11 wrote: post #23

And there we go - the typical HN oh no, it costs money ($99 for an engine, mind you, that may save you hundreds of hours development time). How much do you charge per hour? Can this library save you hundreds of hours? Do the math. I am not surpirsed at all that the average tech startup is a failure, with more than half of the people failing to get the "charge money for product/service" model everyone else in the worl…

For the game market right now, no, it's not worth $99, because:

1. HTML5, and more specifically Canvas, isn't ready to deliver on its gaming promises yet. Too many slow/incomplete implementations to be fully cross-browser/cross-platform.

2. You will get an almost identical engine with a strong community ecosystem if you use Flixel and a map editor(e.g. Flan, DAME, Wasabi M). And that resulting game will be tailored for the Flash portal market. Here is a perfectly great game made for Ludum Dare 19 in 48 hours in Flixel: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview... And here is a different LD19 entry that was done with no engine at all, just raw haXe: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview...

3. In a year it is likely to be obsoleted by engines based around other HTML5 technologies(CSS and SVG make for stronger "general 2D scenegraph" technologies, and WebGL is faster). It's a feature-poor engine - the highlights are the collision system and map editor - and the existing free ones are similar.

If you do buy this engine, it's probably because of ignorance, which in itself is a bad sign. There's reams of game code lying around the internet, and the most important thing isn't having the code but having an understanding of how it works. You are better served by buying a book on engine creation, reading that, and reading open source engine code, than to buy one set of documented engine code and only read that.

The only time this equation differs is when we're talking about features that are not dime-a-dozen and are truly a pain to integrate properly. I would be more impressed if it had one or more of:

* A tightly integrated full-physics engine(in addition to the basic platforming collision)

* Scene serialization/in-game editing

* More of a story for UI code - menus, settings, user profiles, keybind configuration, etc.

* Networking features

* Features for AI design(for example a state machine editor).

Re: Impact HTML5 Game Engine released

#53

Post by benologist »

wtracy wrote: post #50
benologist wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Flash is the easy target. But it's also a complete non-victory - the prize for "winning" is HTML5 games will co-exist on sites like Kongregate and Armor Games, and maybe one day represent the majority of new titles. That still leaves games being developed natively for multiple mobile platforms that are bigger markets, more rewarding, and increasingly more important than Flash for casual gaming. The fight really…

Zynga is worth more than EA now: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-10-26/zynga-tops-elect... Like it or not, casual games are becoming a much, much bigger market than "hardcore" games. Bejeweled is one of the most profitable game franchises right now. If I were writing that game from scratch today, I would do it in Flash or HTML5. That gets you every desktop that matters, and the number of mobile devices that sup…

Yeah the casual game industry is exploding, and my startup's a big part of it!

My argument wasn't that casual games have any problem, but that Flash itself is just one component of an industry that is increasingly focused on mobile.

Re: Impact HTML5 Game Engine released

#54

Post by julian37 »

charlesju wrote: post #29
mcav wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone have any experience with one or more of the above, to help narrow down the field of viable frameworks?

https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js has 900+ followers on github, by far the biggest project from my initial analysis.

Made by Mr.doob who did the demos at http://mrdoob.com/ and who worked on Google's http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/ .

Re: Impact HTML5 Game Engine released

#56

Post by julian37 »

bullseye wrote: post #51
savoy11 wrote: post #23

And there we go - the typical HN oh no, it costs money ($99 for an engine, mind you, that may save you hundreds of hours development time). How much do you charge per hour? Can this library save you hundreds of hours? Do the math. I am not surpirsed at all that the average tech startup is a failure, with more than half of the people failing to get the "charge money for product/service" model everyone else in the worl…

>> And there we go - the typical HN oh no, it costs money... Why do you think this is unique to HN? In my experience, this is a common mindset. If anything, I think you have a higher ratio of people willing to adopt commercial libraries here than many other development communities.

Indeed, just read the comments below the very article!

Re: Impact HTML5 Game Engine released

#57

Post by Sephr »

clyfe wrote: post #20

The grand list of similar (free) projects: http://easeljs.com/ https://github.com/biilly/doodle-js https://github.com/fairfieldt/xcjs https://github.com/batiste/sprite.js https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js https://github.com/ysimonson/canvas.js https://github.com/davebalmer/jo https://github.com/lostdecade/diggy http://gamejs.org/ http://www.aframejs.com/ http://gamequery.onaluf.org/ http://www.kesiev.com/akihabara/

three.js isn't a game engine. It's as much of a game engine as a blank WebGL canvas is a game engine. It's just a lib for doing 3D in a 2D context (though it also supports 3D contexts).

Edit: And neither is canvas.js.

Re: Impact HTML5 Game Engine released

#58

Post by kilian »

mcav wrote: post #26
clyfe wrote: post #20

The grand list of similar (free) projects: http://easeljs.com/ https://github.com/biilly/doodle-js https://github.com/fairfieldt/xcjs https://github.com/batiste/sprite.js https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js https://github.com/ysimonson/canvas.js https://github.com/davebalmer/jo https://github.com/lostdecade/diggy http://gamejs.org/ http://www.aframejs.com/ http://gamequery.onaluf.org/ http://www.kesiev.com/akihabara/

Does anyone have any experience with one or more of the above, to help narrow down the field of viable frameworks?

I have made a simple game using Akihabara: http://kilianvalkhof.com/ktype2/ (mind you, "a" is "z" on your keyboard, and you use it to shoot, too. one of the frameworks idiosyncrasies)

It's...undocumented. That's really the most I can make of it, now. I have promised to work on helping document it, which I will try to do over the holidays, but as of now, you pretty much have to read the entire code, and you'd still have no idea how the creator wants each piece to fit in with the other pieces (if you check my source code, note how, for example, I circumvent the build-in health system simply because I don't know how it works)

Re: Impact HTML5 Game Engine released

#59

Post by ShardPhoenix »

clyfe wrote: post #20

The grand list of similar (free) projects: http://easeljs.com/ https://github.com/biilly/doodle-js https://github.com/fairfieldt/xcjs https://github.com/batiste/sprite.js https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js https://github.com/ysimonson/canvas.js https://github.com/davebalmer/jo https://github.com/lostdecade/diggy http://gamejs.org/ http://www.aframejs.com/ http://gamequery.onaluf.org/ http://www.kesiev.com/akihabara/

I've been interested lately in 2D Javascript/HTML 5 games and ported an old one I did, but things like this make me suspect that there's way too much competition, especially for such a new, immature platform. I think maybe 2D games are just too easy - every man and their dog is willing to make them for peanuts or free. I also have an OpenGL book to read but who knows how that will go.

Re: Impact HTML5 Game Engine released

#60

Post by teamonkey »

fookyong wrote: post #7

Biolab http://playbiolab.com runs so smoothly on a mobile web browser it's worth $99 just to see how it's done. Purchased a license immediately :)

It's even not too bad on my 3G. It chugs a bit when there are a lot of particles (so an option to switch off on older phones would be welcome), otherwise it's quite playable.

Multitouch doesn't seem to work though. I can only press one control at a time.

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