From the I Can Haz GameZ?
Mozilla believes that the Web is the platform for apps, and not just business productivity apps, but gaming apps as well. To prove their point, the open source foundation now has a full HTML5 browser game out now called BrowserQuest.
It leverages WebSockets and Canvas to enable a MMOG
The WebSockets bit is particularly innovative as a way to enable multiple players in the game.
“When you start to play, your browser opens up a WebSocket connection to one of several load-balanced game servers,” Mozilla Developer Paul Rouget wrote. “Each server hosts multiple world instances and handles the player synchronization and game logic within all instances. Because the server code is running on Node.js, both the server and client codebases share a small portion of the same JavaScript source code.
While the game itself is now live as a demo, that’s not the real magic either. The real magic is that the code for the game is all open source and available now on Github.
The idea of using HTML5 as the basis for building games isn’t new or unique to Mozilla. I’ve played around a bit with Scirra’s Construct which is a full HTML5 building tool (unfortunately the new version isn’t open source anymore though..).
The BrowserQuest code also is not a game development environment either, rather it’s the source code for the actual game – meaning you can modify it, but it’s not an engine that you’re going to want to use to build ‘any’ HTML5 game that you want.
That said, thanks to the power and brilliance of Github, I’ve just forked BrowserQuest and expect to have hours of fun this week attempting to modify this game. My first idea is to create an episode called BrowserQuest: The Quest for Standards where players will fight evil demons from the land of ‘G’ and they’ll also have to defeat the big blue ‘E’.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
