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Sorry for the shameless plug, but my games also use a ready-to-use JS game engine entirely developed by me. They don't look as polished as Biolab, but I surely enjoyed writing them.

A demo: http://ralphgoodtimes.com/webgame_chillyzombies.html

Source code here: http://ralphgoodtimes.com/webgames_info.html

Use it for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed developing them.

Does anyone have any experience with one or more of the above, to help narrow down the field of viable frameworks?

I've been doing some tests with sprite.js. For what I want to do, it seems a bit sluggish and has some bugs. You can switch between DOM and Canvas mode, which is neat, but there are some bugs in the canvas mode that cause my sprites to disappear, and sprites with a repeating texture seem to show a seam. Impact looks quite a bit more polished.

https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js has 900+ followers on github, by far the biggest project from my initial analysis.

Very cool - I agree 100%

I watch (follow) three.js on github for a while and I see frequent activity (commits, pull requests) on the project. Compared to most of the other (2d, simple stuff) frameworks this one is a full blown 3D engine albeit it does only rendering (no collision detection etc).

Made by Mr.doob who did the demos at http://mrdoob.com/ and who worked on Google's http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/ .

I have made a simple game using Akihabara: http://kilianvalkhof.com/ktype2/ (mind you, "a" is "z" on your keyboard, and you use it to shoot, too. one of the frameworks idiosyncrasies)

It's...undocumented. That's really the most I can make of it, now. I have promised to work on helping document it, which I will try to do over the holidays, but as of now, you pretty much have to read the entire code, and you'd still have no idea how the creator wants each piece to fit in with the other pieces (if you check my source code, note how, for example, I circumvent the build-in health system simply because I don't know how it works)

To be comparable to ImpactJS there needs to be collision detection, tilemap support, sprite animation and depth sorting, input and audio abstraction, a loader and framerate locking. So from that list only Akihabara and GameJS remain.

Although I'm a gamejs committer, i disagree :)

Take for example doodlejs: it doesn't have any of the things you mention, BUT its scene graph is superior to all other engines.

Not everyone wants the same things in his framework. E.g. sprite animation makes no sense (not a lot) if your lib is vector & tween centric.

See my list of favorites in a comment higher up.

I'm the author of xc.js (https://github.com/fairfieldt/xcjs).

If you're looking for an equivalent product, xc.js has a big advantage over the others listed: it runs natively on iOS (and Android soon).

It's a fairly young library, and admittedly has some shortcomings but it would also love some contributions :).

I used The Render Engine (not in the list above http://code.google.com/p/renderengine/) to make http://pistolslut.com It's pretty nice.

If you care for game centric libraries that use canvas, then only the following are valid choices.

In my personal favorites order with random remarks:

  * https://github.com/kesiev/akihabara - arcade game centric
  * https://github.com/oberhamsi/gamejs - (my lib) port of PyGame; commonjs
  * https://github.com/biilly/doodle-js - scene graph
  * https://github.com/batiste/sprite.js - simplistic but fast sprite handling
  * https://github.com/fairfieldt/xcjs - coffeescript
  * http://easeljs.com/ -

three.js isn't a game engine. It's as much of a game engine as a blank WebGL canvas is a game engine. It's just a lib for doing 3D in a 2D context (though it also supports 3D contexts).

Edit: And neither is canvas.js.

I've been interested lately in 2D Javascript/HTML 5 games and ported an old one I did, but things like this make me suspect that there's way too much competition, especially for such a new, immature platform. I think maybe 2D games are just too easy - every man and their dog is willing to make them for peanuts or free. I also have an OpenGL book to read but who knows how that will go.

I guess that's the way the game is played. Eventually one or more engines will flourish, take off and become wildly popular.

gamejs.org is my baby.

coolest features are:

   * similar to PyGame.org API (so lots of docs & known patterns)
   * commonjs support
   * server-side support built in (via ringojs.org)
   * modern browsers only
   * MIT license

effectgames.com has a pretty strong library with good examples and documentation. I've been using it on-and-off to play around with and it does a good job of generating cross-platform games. One important feature is that it offers similar functionality to Impact (eg. a level editor) but it's all web-based.

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