Chad Austin

Real-Time Multiplayer Network Programming

Many of the most popular games have a multiplayer component. All but one of the top ten most popular games on Steam, a digital distribution and communications platform for PCs, are either designed for a multiplayer experience or contain support for multiplayer (see Table 12-1). As you will discover in this chapter, adding multiplayer support to a game increases the range of experiences that a player can have by introducing the elements of human psychology and social interaction to the game agents. However, adding real-time multiplayer can be rather tricky to implement correctly. Although it may seem daunting, by following some principled methods, you can add a new, exciting dimension to your game.

Making a Multiplatform Game

Making games is exciting, exhilarating, and hugely fulfilling. Making good games isn’t easy. Making great games that work on multiple platforms is . . . what this chapter is about.

Applying Old-School Video Game Techniques in Modern Web Games

In computer graphics, frames are processed and painted on the screen by what some people refer to as the “animation,” “main,” “game,” or “update” loop. Personally, I prefer to call it “main,” “game,” or “update loop” for the sole reason that it’s standard practice in the industry to use this routine to perform other tasks besides painting pixels on the screen.

Mobile Web Game Techniques with Canvas 2D API

When we consider mobile HTML5 games, we usually compare them with native games. One might think that native games are always superior to browser games or that browser games can never touch native games in performance. But check out the top 10 games in the native app market. Often you will find that many of the top-selling games do not use 3D graphics, particle effects, and so on. It seems that we are able to create similar kinds of mobile games in the browser with HTML5.

Saving Bandwidth and Memory with WebGL and Crunch

When it comes to optimization, both real-time 3D applications and web pages happen to share a common target: images. Images, whether they take the form of textures or tags, often make up the majority of the visual information on your screen at any given time. The metrics for optimization differ based on the medium, however. 3D apps, such as games, need images that can be loaded quickly, drawn fast, and take up as little memory as possible by taking advantage of hardware-supported texture compression formats. Web pages, on the other hand, are primarily concerned with the bandwidth required to download the images to your device, skewing heavily towards small, lossy formats like JPG. In other words, 3D apps are concerned about the size of the image in video memory and web apps are concerned about the size of the file on the server.

Introduction to TypeScript: Building a Rogue-like Engine

TypeScript ( http://typescript.org ) is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript. TypeScript is cross-platform, runs on any browser, and is open source. Microsoft created it, and it’s hands down one of the best languages for building HTML5 games. One of the great things about TypeScript, apart from adding typing to JavaScript, is that it allows you to start using some of the cool features of ECMAScript 6 (ES6) now, even though it may be years away from being finalized. This means that you can put to good use classes and other higher-level constructs that you find in languages such as C# and Java; moreover, TypeScript is incredibly similar to ActionScript 2 and 3. The final key advantage of TypeScript is that it outputs human readable JavaScript, plus you can use existing JavaScript libraries or inject the code directly into your TypeScript classes and start taking advantage of typing provided by the compiler.

Creating a Two-Dimensional Map Editor

This chapter expands on the techniques covered in Chapter 6. You will get the most from this chapter if you have worked through that one first.

Playing Around with the Gamepad API

There is a great focus on making HTML5 games for mobile devices, which is good, of course, but core pro gamers are usually visualized as having a gamepad in their hands. So why not use it and deliver the full experience of a game using the Full Screen, Mouse Lock, and Gamepad APIs? The last API provides the ability to use a consoles controller to play HTML5 games—how cool is that? With the W3C specification presently being written, we will have an API that is easy to implement, does not require any plug-ins to run in your browser, and is as simple as just plugging in your device and playing the game right away.

Importing Flash Assets

The first generation of HTML5 games was simply about fighting to reach an acceptable frame rate. These games were mainly developed by individual hackers or tiny, programmer-led teams and featured mainly static artwork.

JavaScript Is Not the Language You Think It Is

JavaScript is a deceptively familiar language. Its syntax is close enough to C/C++ that you may be tricked into thinking it behaves similarly.