I came across the website HTML5games.com yesterday and there is some amazing stuff there. It’s one of those sites that makes you believe all the hype about HTML5. We’ll be making games that work for everyone without the need for a plug-in and it will all be open-source! This will all be true one day but I think we have a while yet. Why? A lot of the examples only work right in Safari or Chrome. It’s been a big enough challenge to get people to upgrade from Internet Explorer 6 to 7 and 8, and if IE9 doesn’t live up to it’s hype, I doubt enough people will move to Safari and Chrome to make HTML5 games a killer.
Also, take a look under the hood of some of these games. I’m amazed by the amount of JavaScript needed just to make something like Pong. I’ve said this before, but right not making HTML5 games is something that very experienced programmers are able to do. One of the things that made Flash great for making games is the actual Flash IDE. It’s pretty easy to get started with making a simple game because it only takes about 20 lines of code to create an object that you can control with the keyboard. Some of the examples I’ve seen take multiple JS files with a hundred lines of code each. The learning curve for HTML5 games is pretty high and I still think it’s going to take some kind of really kick ass IDE to allow beginners to start learning comfortably.
And I know there are developers out there that don’t want people to be able to take a look at their code and it’s as easy as right-click/view source to see how HTML5 games are made. And if you’ve spent weeks building a game for a company and then once you release it, anyone can come along and copy your code, it might be a reason for not wanting to make it using HTML5 and JavaScript. I realize this is all open source, but imagine how easy it would be to just copy and paste all the code and change the graphics a little bit.
I know this might come across as a “Flash guy” ranting but I’ve been spending a lot of time working with JavaScript and jQuery. I’ve never been a big fan of JavaScript but libraries like jQuery make it a lot easier to use. But I think for things like HTML5 games to take off, we’re going to need all the browsers to run JavaScript at the same speed and either an improved version of JS or an IDE that makes it easier to build them.