Hacker News Reader

Comment by plehoux | Hacker News Reader

I would bet on javascript games for 2 reasons:

1. In a short timeframe, tools that convert html 5/js code base to IOS and Android will be good enough for most of casual gameplay type (match 3, tower defense, one button gameplay, etc.).

2. The web will slowly move from a primary game consumption platform (billions of flash games being played every day!, thousands of small studios living from their flash work), to a marketing platform for mobile games.

With one html/js code base, small indies will be able to push instantly to the web and app stores. They will keep selling sponsorship of theirs games to portals like kongregate and armorgames on the web, get their games expose to millions of visitors, build an audience and promote their app store offering in the meantime.

Win win for portals and game developers.

View on HN

I will always bet on JS as well.

The games you're talking about here, however fall in to the category of casual games described in the article. So for more featured games, we'll have to wait a bit longer and mature the platform as we go, but eventually we'll get there.

Good point about the same code base. I forgot to mention this in the article, but the reason the programmers say "HELL NO" is that maintaining two different code bases is a nightmare. (Semi-)automatic porting is easier and cheaper.

But that might shift in the future, we might be looking at a time when the only version you need to make is the web version, even for non-casual games.

But that might shift in the future, we might be looking at a time when the only version you need to make is the web version, even for non-casual games.

Unless your game requires or will requires heavy duty CPU and lot of RAM. In which case, you would need to wait several generation before a phone can run your game.

Think of FPS shooters of today, except the resource spending is inverted from the art department to the software side. Instead of racing for the biggest and greatest graphic, they aim for the most complex and detailed world as possible. Instead of gameplay being only 40 hours long game, it is measured in years.

That is the kind of game I am working on.

Phones need serious improvement to run these kinds of games anyway, we're probably looking at at least half the time it's going to take for these games to run with the web technology stack on the mobile to get it running even natively on the mobile. So for mobile, the wait is on, no matter what.

It's going to take a while, but our toolkits need sharpening as well, so I'm not expecting a non-trivial web game to emerge very soon. But the platform is growing in the right direction.

You got me interested, what kind of a game are you working on? Sounds like my kind of a game.

A cross between simulation and RTS game. You're supposed to build up a colony and manage your society. The details are not too abstract, as all units you see will have individual names and the details of your infrastructure are pipes, conveyor belts, workshops, electrical lines, generators, and so on.

You could say it's a "dwarffortress" except the details are totally different. For example, chopping down trees will not kill dwarves, but it does in my game. Production and logistics in my game is a lot smarter to prevent players from worrying about managing food production so that they can worry about more interesting things.

It's a very ambitious project for sure, and I am not expecting to complete the game until many decade latter. I am in this project at about 4 Kloc of code, yet a completed RTS game is about 40 Kloc. Mine will be bigger than this.

The main challenge in doing this project is whether or not I have the ability to slog it out for several decades and the ability to resist temptation to rewrite the whole codebase at once.

Make sure to make a fuzz about it when it's ready to be played, I sure have to give it a shot!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com