Michael Wales

Update 3: The demo page has been updated to feature an index of currently completed demos. After a long day of working on image/sprite support I took a break from engine development and built up a quick demo, Example 3, that features some actual gameplay elements!

Update 2: Redditor gramathy just informed me it’s also working in Safari, if those of you in that world are willing to run a quick test for me. @erikbrannstrom told me it’s also working in Firefox 4 Beta.

Update: If you run Google Chrome, I have a demo running publicly right here – if you could reply with your FPS count (lower-left) and system info you feel is relevant, it would be much appreciated.

Gaming has always been a passion of mine and as any of my friends can tell you, I’m constantly coming up with ideas for new games. Unfortunately, my expertise in this little programming world has been primarily delegated to the world of web development. Thankfully, with HTML5 on the horizon, I can finally combine these two passions of mine into one package of pure awesome and peak out my nerdometer to its maximum.

I’ve spent the last 6 hours working on a JavaScript game engine, using HTML’s new canvas element, that is based off of the extremely fun and easy to use Love2d game engine for Lua. Now, there is a bare minimum of functionality here thus far but I’m having a lot of fun working on this and I think it’s a great foundation to continue working off of. I shared a few quick screenshots on Forrst, of my first and second example demos – complete with code and performance summaries; but, I also wanted to record a quick demo so everyone could see this bad boy in action.

The video below (HD available on YouTube) sits just under 10 minutes and will introduce you to the engine, I discuss what my goals are in basing the API off of Love2d’s API and I actually rebuild my second example demo and bounce a square around the screen! Check it out and let me know what you think in the comments!