Hey guys,

almost a year ago released my HTML5 Game Engine Impact to the public. Since then, I made quite some bugfixes and added lots of new features (most recently: slopes!). I'm happy to say that Impact is now better than ever!

I think one of Impact's biggest strength is the "Weltmeister" level editor - it makes it really easy to integrate your own game objects and add some properties and connections. Here's a screencast of the whole thing.

Obligatory screenshot:


(Edit: the game in this screenshot can be played here or be downloaded from the iPhone AppStore)


Impact is a commercial Game Engine. This was quite an experiment in the beginning (selling a JavaScript Framework, WTF?) and I actually expected it to fail - but it didn't. I'm proud that even a small but devoted and friendly community developed around the engine.

My decision to sell Impact instead of releasing it as Open Source allowed me to spend quite some time on the documentation, give support in the forums, IRC channel and via email and continuously improve the engine itself. I intend to keep working on this thing!

Oh, and Impact is currently on sale for only $49 - Happy Holidays

Hey there,

it took some time, but I finally managed to finish it:
http://impactjs.com/

Packing everything together and writing a ton of documentation and tutorials surprisingly takes a while 0_o

This is the Game Engine behind "Biolab Disaster", which now also runs on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Try it:
http://playbiolab.com/

So, yes, the Engine is not free. You have to pay $99 to download it. I know that's quite a steep price, but if you want to do iPhone game stuff, I think it's a reasonable solution.

Any thoughts? Feedback?

Thanks for all the feedback!

The chrome crashing issue seems to be quite common; as STRd6 said in another thread, it probably has to do with many sounds playing simultaneously. I wasn't able to replicate, though :/

Is there any way to display the FPS in the game?

Press F while the game is running.

Edit: Looks like no autosave or save at all if you close the window. Impossible with HTML5 or simply not implemented?

Not implemented, since the game has only three levels and I'm lazy. You could save state in a cookie, or (if you need more space) with HTML5 Local Storage.


(I just looked through my "crap" folder on my Server and found this screenshot: http://www.phoboslab.org/crap/weltmeister.png (yay for Balding's Quest!) - uploaded September 2009, that's a YEAR ago 0_o)

The scaling issue is really annoying. Luckily, doing nearest neighbor scaling by yourself in JavaScript is pretty easy. But you really shouldn't have to do this - I hope there will be a cross platform CSS attribute to switch to nearest neighbor some day.

JavaScript still has a bad reputation because of Internet Explorer's lackluster implementation. However, JavaScript performance has increased ten-fold in all modern browsers. By all means, it's not slow anymore.

The iPhone and iPad are also fast enough to easily "compute" 200 frames per second with my engine - the problem is the drawing performance. As soon as you enable drawing to the canvas, the framerate goes down. I expecting Apple to fix this in the future. There is no reason for it to be this slow.
   
The "Inconvenient distribution" you mentioned is unfortunate. I guess it's the price to pay when using "open" technology, instead of the black box that is Flash :/ That said, there was a proposal some time ago, to point to certain files inside a ZIP archive (something like http://example.com/game.zip,graphics/tilemap.png). Not sure what happened with it, though.

Thanks to Websockets, multiplayer is also possible. See WPilot. I guess, you're right about the easy tampering with scores and leaderboards, though. I really don't think this is easily fixable. Of course you can also tamper your scores in Flash games, but it's way more complicated than with JavaScript.


My 2 cents: It's still difficult to develop games for HTML5, but this will get easier, as browser vendors will fix their bugs.

I think the real benefit is the huge competition and arms race that is currently going on in the browser market. It's incredible how fast all the new standards got implemented. Soon all major browsers will have hardware acceleration for the 2D Canvas Context; Chrome has even enabled WebGL already in their current beta builds.

This competition is exactly was has been missing for Flash for a long time.

As for the performance: there's something wrong with the hardware acceleration in FF 4.0b5; A bug report was already filed.

I just added "event.preventDefault()" for the input stuff - this should(?) fix the X/C issue in Firefox. I could also suppress the scrolling when you hit Space, but this won't work in Opera :/

Thanks!

Can't say too much about the Safari crashing issue, sorry. I'll add other keys (Space and Up Arrow?) for you guys where X/C isn't working.

I just uploaded the Editor as well, if you want to play around a bit. Saving is disabled, but everything else should work. Press Space to open the Entity or Tile menu (depending on which layer is currently active); hold Right Mouse Button to pan around; Z and Y are undo and redo:

http://www.phoboslab.org/biolab/weltmeister.html

Hi there,

I just finished my game "Biolab Disaster". It's completely done in HTML5: JavaScript, <canvas> and <audio> - no Flash or other Plugins required.

You can play it here:
http://www.phoboslab.org/biolab/

I also made a short making-of video:




The game was initially built as a demo and playground for my (yet unreleased) game engine Impact, but became much more. I hope you'll like it

The quote from David/Knytt is interesting (and probably very true). The thing is, I don't think my character is "clumsy" and I wouldn't say the Lunar Lander is clumsy for that matter. I think there's a difference between characters that are hard to control (as in flying a helicopter) and characters that are unresponsive or unfair (clumsy) to control.

Learning to control your craft in Wipeout or your character in N is what makes those games great. I'm not saying my game is in this league, I'm just saying that games that require "skill" can be fun. Many racing games are based on that assumption.


If you want to play the game, you can also try the PC version I made 5 years ago:
http://www.chaosquake.de/yuckfu/

Hi,

I posted a thread in the announcement forum for this game about two month ago. Sales didn't went very well, but after I spent a several months developing my game, just to see it fail miserably at the App Store (though it has been "pirated" a few thousand times), I thought I'd give it a second try.

Yuckfu 1.2 features a completely new Challenge Mode with 30 Levels and the price has dropped to $0.99. You can buy it at the App Store (iTunes link).

You can now also download the free Lite Version (iTunes link), which just cuts some of the challenge levels and the highscore upload.


Screenshot:


More info: http://yuckfu.net/
Developer diary: http://www.phoboslab.org/log/yuckfu-dev-diary



Though reviews in the App Store say that this game sucks, I'm still convinced that it's actually very good and fun to play. I read some reviews, stating that the game is too hard, or that the controls suck - which is just sad, since the challenge of the game is the controls. You know, Lunar Lander would be no fun if you'd just have to click with your mouse where it should land...

What do you think of this game? And in generall - do you think iPhone games have to be "dumbed down" to be successful, or is Yuckfu just a bad game?

This games certainly looks pretty nice. However it's nearly unplayable for me for two reasons:

1) I have a dual monitor setup where the desktop spans over both monitors. Your game sadly does so too. An option to choose the resolution (or play in windowed mode) would be nice.

2) I have a non-QWERTY keyboard layout; moving around with WASD is real pain for me. You could either check keys by their scancode (instead of by their character) or provide a config to redefine the keys.

I know, my setup is pretty weird. Most people won't have any of these problems, so feel free to ignore my post.

Not fully true. (1) Objective-C might be more aesthetically pleasing according to your tastes, but it is very much a peripheral language today, the only practical reason of learning is to develop for the iPhone, and (2) there are C++ language features that aren't supported in Obj-C.

I'm not talking about aesthetics. I'm saying that Objective C, as a language, is just far better designed than C++. C++ implements a whole range of bad ideas. And yes, C++ has more "features" than Objective C, but a lack of features isn't always a bad thing.

Sadly, you're right about Objective C being a peripheral language (outside of the OSX world that is).

My friends call me Domo

It's quite obvious you haven't read the Rules thread

You know, forum rules are like EULAs - usually they're full of stuff you already know or don't care about, but once in while there's something important in them; hidden in the depth of the document...

Yeah, that's a lame excuse... You kinda got me here. Sorry. Here's my introduction.

Thanks for the subtle hint!

After being slapped in the face, I decided to introduce myself here



My name is Dominic Szablewski, I'm from Germany and currently a student. I worked for an ad agency before and have done some web projects there. So I know stuff about Perl, PHP, JS, HTML, CSS etc.

I learned programming on my dad's Schneider PC (12mhz!), but it took me a while to really do something with it. I've picked up quite a few programming languages on my way and consider myself to be good at C++ and Objective C, as well as all the web shizzle I mentioned before.

In "recent" years, I've programmed a game called Yuckfu, which I also ported over to the GBA a while later. It is now also available for the iPhone. I also did some maps for Quake 3 a while back, and we currently do some

at my university. I'm very much into interface design and stuff like that.

I love games that you have to learn; learn like riding a bike. Games that seem easy, but are actually pretty hard. Many arcade classics are like that, but Quake(1) or the classic Wipeout for PSX are probably my favorite amongst all of them. Endless replayability.

Read my blog if you still can't get enough of me

Well, I'd say go ahead with a "C language". Plain old C is by far the easiest - from a concept standpoint that is. Learning the C++ syntax on top of that shouldn't be that hard either, since you already know about OOP. But beware, C++ itself is an ugly, devious language. One that nobody will ever understand fully.

Objective C is much cleaner. Some concepts of Objective C (and Apple's API) seemed a bit odd at first and the syntax is (imho) not that elegant - the language however is. Objective C is all what C++ could've been. I knew my way around in C++ when I decided to start programming for the iPhone. It took me only one or two days to pick up most of the syntax; so that was quite easy.

C is a good starting point if you want to program "highend" realtime stuff. Things like memory allocation and pointers work quite the same in all three flavors of C.

Oh, and if you want to program for the iPhone, you're not bound to Objective C. You just need Objective C to call the API, but not for your game internal stuff. So if you're more comfortable with C++ you can still write most of your game with it.

Yeah, the GBA version is only two years old... and kinda hard to get running on actual hardware

So yeah, spam.

It would've been spam if I posted this in a viagra forum!

So, yeah. My iPhone game Yuckfu finally made it's way into the AppStore(iTunes link). It's a litte arcade game, where you control a (cute!) robot and collect... stuff.

There's a trailer and some more info at http://yuckfu.net/

Here's a screenshot:


And a senseless promo image:



The whole thing is based on a PC game I made about 4 year ago. The PC version looks like crap and has no sound, but the gameplay is nearly identical.

Now, go get the iPhone version and kick my friend (Josen) from the first place already! He's been there far too long; his ego might explode.