Preface
I wrote this book to scratch an itch, but also because I could see the potential in the (at the time) nascent HTML5 gaming community. I wanted to help developers navigate the wilderness of HTML5 and learn about Canvas, WebGL, and SVG, along with best practices for each.
It sometimes took a bit of discussion to convince developers that HTML5 wasn’t just a plaything. They were surprised to learn they could have rich content with all the niceties of a desktop application—such as double buffering, hardware acceleration, and caching inside the confines of the browser without a plugin. Many of them considered Flash as the sole option. It was interesting to watch the tides turn from “Flash for everything” to “Use Flash only where there are HTML5 gaps.”
During my writing of this book, the ecosystem around HTML5 game programming has rapidly evolved and matured. I am sure the technologies will continue to evolve, and I look forward to the advances the next year brings.
Key Features of This Book
This book covers areas contained in the “loose” definition of HTML5, meaning the HTML5 specification, WebGL, SVG, and JavaScript as they pertain to game programming. It includes sections on the math behind popular game effects, teaching you the hard way before providing the one to two lines of code solution. For those who are still getting accustomed to JavaScript, there is a chapter on alternative languages that can be used to produce games. These include languages that run directly in the JavaScript engine, those that compile to JavaScript, or those that are a combination of the two. Server-side JavaScript has taken the programming world by storm in recent months. For games, it presents an extra level of flexibility to structure games. Logic can start in a self-contained client instance and then progress to a scalable server instance with few changes in code. The book closes with a discussion of how and where you might publish your games. You have a multitude of choices for game engines and libraries. All the libraries used in this book are unobtrusive in their handling of data, and you could easily take the lessons learned and apply them to other libraries. This book does not discuss the low-level details of WebGL, instead opting for the use of a high-level library that permits low-level API access when needed. The goal of this book is to get you quickly up and running, not to teach you all there is to know about WebGL, which could be a book all by itself.
Target Audience for This Book
This book is intended for application developers who use or would like to learn how to use HTML5 and associated web technologies to create interactive games. It assumes knowledge of some programming languages and some basic math skills.
Code Examples and Exercises for This Book
The code listings as well as the answers for the exercises included in this book are available on the book’s website. You can download chapter code and answers to the chapter exercises (if they are included in the chapter) at http://www.informit.com/title/9780321767363. The code listings are also available on Github at https://github.com/jwill/html5-game-book.