HTML5 gaming is an interesting frontier but I am sceptical that we will see a resurgence of the sort of the casually played (and developed) amateur games that we saw during the hayday of newgrounds and similar sites.
In retrospect Macromedia made a stroke of genius with Flash in bundling design & animation tools, sound editors and a code editor into the same IDE.
All of this combined in an easy-to-pirate package along with the thousands of tutorials and code samples available online made game development almost shockingly easy.
Myself and a more artistic friend could literally sit in his bedroom and crank out a complete game over a weekend by taking turns at the computer and drinking heavily.
No thinking about "engines", writing asset import code , muddling through JS patterns/frameworks or being stumped by cross browser quirks.
Deployment and getting instant feedback was as simple as uploading the .swf to deviantart.com and spamming the link to all of our contacts via MSN messenger.
All of the .js game dev stuff by comparison looks like hard work.
I'm curious, do you think it was the IDE that was the game changer (excuse the pun)? If JS had a game dev IDE with bundles sound editor etc... do you think it would be as popular as Flash?
I can't say for certain but I would wager it was certainly a significant part of it.
You could put a programmer or an artist down in front of it and it was intuitive enough and gave an "integrated" feel which was also probably part of what made Visual Basic popular.
Basically the interface felt "empowering" to the newbie in a way that something like vim doesn't.
For example, you could create an animated sprite and with a couple of clicks transform it into something that you could manipulate directly in the code as an object. No importing third party libraries or creating "sprite sheets" was required.
I'm not sure if the bar for games has become significantly higher apart from in the AAA area, plenty of successful indie titles still look like SNES games.
A games/multimedia specific JS IDE that dealt with as much of the crap surrounding the JS ecosystem as possible could certainly have a chance of being popular. Though I think something built around http://love2d.org/ with easy browser publishing might be better in some ways.
There aren't any hard-coded limits, and you can do things like make recursive functions with unique local variables at each call. We have a JS SDK for custom code too: https://www.scirra.com/manual/15/sdk
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HTML5 gaming is an interesting frontier but I am sceptical that we will see a resurgence of the sort of the casually played (and developed) amateur games that we saw during the hayday of newgrounds and similar sites.
In retrospect Macromedia made a stroke of genius with Flash in bundling design & animation tools, sound editors and a code editor into the same IDE.
All of this combined in an easy-to-pirate package along with the thousands of tutorials and code samples available online made game development almost shockingly easy.
Myself and a more artistic friend could literally sit in his bedroom and crank out a complete game over a weekend by taking turns at the computer and drinking heavily. No thinking about "engines", writing asset import code , muddling through JS patterns/frameworks or being stumped by cross browser quirks.
Deployment and getting instant feedback was as simple as uploading the .swf to deviantart.com and spamming the link to all of our contacts via MSN messenger.
All of the .js game dev stuff by comparison looks like hard work.
I'm curious, do you think it was the IDE that was the game changer (excuse the pun)? If JS had a game dev IDE with bundles sound editor etc... do you think it would be as popular as Flash?
I can't say for certain but I would wager it was certainly a significant part of it.
You could put a programmer or an artist down in front of it and it was intuitive enough and gave an "integrated" feel which was also probably part of what made Visual Basic popular.
Basically the interface felt "empowering" to the newbie in a way that something like vim doesn't.
For example, you could create an animated sprite and with a couple of clicks transform it into something that you could manipulate directly in the code as an object. No importing third party libraries or creating "sprite sheets" was required.
I'm not sure if the bar for games has become significantly higher apart from in the AAA area, plenty of successful indie titles still look like SNES games.
A games/multimedia specific JS IDE that dealt with as much of the crap surrounding the JS ecosystem as possible could certainly have a chance of being popular. Though I think something built around http://love2d.org/ with easy browser publishing might be better in some ways.
Our startup's IDE, Construct 2, attempts to do just that for HTML5: http://www.scirra.com
Do you think that's in the right direction?
Interesting, though you seem to be going for a "no coding required" approach which always ends up hitting limits pretty quickly.
Do you support an easy way to add custom JS code for logic that the in built tools cannot handle elegantly?
Also interested in how this works, do you generate JS code or do you have a JS engine which reads settings from other files?
There aren't any hard-coded limits, and you can do things like make recursive functions with unique local variables at each call. We have a JS SDK for custom code too: https://www.scirra.com/manual/15/sdk
I've used Construct 2, it's definitely good stuff.
Do you plan making a linux version?
Or do you think that because games now have a higher bar we will see fewer but better JS games?