Building a JavaScript-Based Game Engine for the Web

Google Tech Talk
June 11, 2010

ABSTRACT

Presented by Paul Bakaus.

There are many professional game engines out there for consoles, PCs, and mobile handhelds. However, there is one big empty gap, even in 2010: Not a single game engine targets desktop and mobile browsers natively without the use of plugins.

In this session, Paul will talk about the challenges of building a pure browser-based gaming engine, how web programming concepts like event-driven architecture need to be considered, and what it means to fully utilize the open web stack—HTML5, client- and server-side JavaScript, external Stylesheets, server-side JavaScript and, of course, Canvas—to squeeze every millisecond of rendering time. We will go into the details of our own upcoming Aves Engine for isometric real-time games and will give you a very solid idea of what needs to be done to build graphically rich, real-time, full featured games for the web.

Paul Bakaus is the CTO of the Germany-based startup Dextrose AG, and his corporate work mostly focuses on UX, UI and tricky JavaScript challenges. He is best known for creating jQuery UI, the popular official UI framework for jQuery, where he was the driving force behind many of its plugins.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Tal Ben-Ari]

0:45 Audience size: 4 people.

[Slipp D. Thompson]

2:40 “No game developer in the industry would start over from scratch”???

Perhaps no game dev who doesn't want to actually push technical boundaries and make break-out profit. Many of the wildly popular indie devs out there (indie now, but many from the formal industry) have done exactly what you're saying they wouldn't.

A few devs & games off the top of my head are using fully custom engines: Mojang's Minecraft, Polytron's Fez, Semi Secret Software's Hundreds, Crazy Viking Studios' Volgarr.

[Corbbin Goldsmith]

actually... I don't think he's either. Maybe german...

[Corbbin Goldsmith]

20:41 "eni mer". lol. I think he's either swedish or norwegian.

[Unox90]

Probably true, but please remember that this clip is almost 3 years old

[lorenzo lol]

14:44 : jQuery is a good framework for cross browser but it's very very slow !

20:18 : it's wrong, CANVAS is really fast, 10x faster than SVG or HTML when working with graphics (test on Chrome and FF)

[tettentettentetten]

jQuery for games? LOL! good luck with performance xD

[lucas catalani]

this was on july 2010. today for those os that doesn't support flash' you have AIR and act as a native. Also have the capability of gpu programming under the flash stage 3d and engines like starling. js can be great for browser sites and apps, but gaming is about flash/air. also you program in a real language, true oop and most important, a compiled lang (always faster than any interpreted one).

[fsfx]

If you are a web developer yor next step would be using web-mvc-frameworks like zend or rails. personally i use spring mvc but this could be tough for a php coder. most beginners write bad code if they try to invent their own structures in php or node.js for example. mvc frameworks will be helpful for your web dev carreer as well as for (browser) game server programming.

[Stephen Davies]

this talk is quite badly presented, the guy skips subjects, contradicts himself (e.g. canvas) and goes of on tangents all the time, with silly comments based on no evidence (not from scratch comment)