HTML5 Games: Learning from Mobile and Flash Games | Hacker News Reader

HTML5 Games: Learning from Mobile and Flash Games

gamasutra.com

40 pointsgsanghani8 comments

Actually, as a game producer for over 20 years, I'd say the biggest problem with HTML5 games is audio. There isn't a solution that is universally adopted at the moment.

The article basically says, make good games, which really has nothing to do with the tech of HTML5. I've had a few of my titles featured by Apple and I am often asked what I did to get them to notice my title. The answer is extremely simple: "make good games".

The Firefox devs are at least working on adding in Chrome's audio API, so once that's out you'll finally be able to use one codebase for all your audio, as long as you don't care about IE or desktop Safari...

But yeah, audio is a big problem. I'd argue that caching and content distribution in general are probably the other big problem. Having to roll your own complete solution for downloading and caching assets for every game is a pretty big problem, in part because the available options for storing assets on a client are pretty miserable in HTML5.

Gamification of games? You know it makes sense.

Don't just learn; use them together, Flash can export to .fxg format that can be read by Illustrator and then you can use ai2Canvas[0] to have the same graphics in canvas. Plus if you need more advanced control the code can be easily parsed because it includes comments with the names of the original layers.

[0]https://visitmix.com/labs/ai2canvas/

This article has almost nothing to do with Flash, despite the title. It's much more about casual games in general. Using ai2Canvas won't help you implement "gamey" features any more than drinking locally sourced coffee will.

Flash was brought up because it was a huge delivery mechanism for a huge portion of casual games over a significant time period. The general theme of the article is that because HTML5 is the up-and-coming technology in the casual games area, many games miss out on basic strategies employed by games on more less cutting-edge platforms.

Am I wrong in thinking that on this day, Feb 25, 2013, Flash still is still a huge delivery mechanism for a huge portion of casual games.

You're correct. I intentionally simplified the tenses to avoid having to investigate Flash's current position and potentially misstate it.

It can help you bring your sprites from flash to canvas in a vector-like way and this is really useful because creating sprites/characters is an important part of game development, and is very painful to do it right on canvas.

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