Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Please Review My Project (JS Game Engine)

news.ycombinator.com

1–10 of 53 posts

Ask HN: Please Review My Project (JS Game Engine)

#1
Hi Everyone,

This is the first time that I've submitted anything here, but I lurk and read HN daily. My partner Joe and I just launched a suite of tools for building 2D web games with pure JavaScript and we'd really love your feedback. 

http://www.effectgames.com

Briefly: we're a web developer and designer who are both very heavily into video games. While trying to avoid any negativity around Flash, we thought standard and open web tech would be a better basis for creating games (plus we're more familiar with JavaScript).

We have been working on this off and on for over four years, and now we're ready to release the "Effect Engine" -- a pure JavaScript / DHTML framework for displaying and animating game graphics, playing sounds & music, handling keyboard & mouse, and performing sprite collision detection. It smoothly renders multiple layers of parallax scrolling tiles and sprites without requiring Canvas or SVG (so it plays nicely with all modern browsers).

Right now, we're working on expanding some of the available game demos to full blown titles (for example: http://www.effectgames.com/effect/games/crystalgalaxy/1.0b), but that doesn't mean that the engine is done.

We're planning on launching a slew of new features in the coming months, but we've gotten to a point where we'd really appreciate some feedback for improving Effect.

As excited as we are about finally getting to create the games that we've had in our heads for years, we're even more excited to see what our friends on HN can do!

Min and Joe

Re: Ask HN: Please Review My Project (JS Game Engine)

#7

Do you plan to eventually use Canvas/SVG or do you find this way works better for the long term and overall?

Hi, currently this is pure JS/DHTML but we are considering Canvas for the future. We go into a little bit more detail in our FAQ. http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/docs/Freq...

Re: Ask HN: Please Review My Project (JS Game Engine)

#9
post #4

Looks interesting. Is this taking advantage (or do you plan to) of HTML 5?

Hi, again, this is pure JS/DHTML but we are looking at HTML 5, specifically for audio. We go into more detail on our FAQ. http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/docs/Freq...

Re: Ask HN: Please Review My Project (JS Game Engine)

#10
This is really wonderful! The games play quickly on Chrome, how well do they preform on IE?

The Mario demo was great, and the Platformer demo really expanded on that to show it supports modern techniques.

Just FYI, in Chrome, http://www.effectgames.com/effect/games/crystalgalaxy/ shows alert boxes complainigna bout unloaded resources.

I didn't see it mentioned on the site, but what is your revenue model for this? Advertisements? Charge for the devtools?

Do you deal with multiplayer at all yet?

Best of luck with this project!

Post reply on HN