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Comment by dsirijus | Hacker News Reader

Unstable, underpaid, overworked and extremely competitive market. Also, pinnacle of engineering in both frontend and backend; eats web dev for breakfast.

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Writing your own games (either in your free time or as an attempt to make a living from it) is extremely fun though, and I would recommend that any developer pick up an intro to game dev book and have at it :)

Can you recommend a book on game dev for senior developers? IE I do not want to be hand-held through how to program, just the physics and concepts of good structure for game development.

As a senior dev who's just started to dabble in games I've found Game Engine Architecture by Jason Gregory to be very useful and high quality.

Oh looks like there's a second edition coming out at some point http://www.amazon.com/dp/1466560010

It's a fantastic book, for sure. Gamasutra published an excerpt of it when it came out, going over some of the section on the main game loop: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132587/book_excerpt_ga...

Woah, thanks!

What about web game dev now? We're almost seeing entire operating systems running in JavaScript.

Can we please just keep producing game binaries for the desktop where it actually runs like it's meant to? /rant

Writing JS games is fun :) I've got a little html5 game engine I'm working on: https://github.com/joelmartinez/flatredball-js

Here's a live sample (that you can edit in real time) - http://joelmartinez.github.io/flatredball-js/#rain

It's not as much about reinventing things in JS, it's about exploring what is possible in that environment. I'm not a huge fan of the "compilers" that just take an executable and compile it to JS ... I'm more going for a "native web" experience.

Let's not pretend a bouncing ball is exciting regardless you see it in the browser or not. (Except if you're seeing your own stupid ball animation, of course.)

Writing games in any language is fun, so by all means keep doing what you enjoy. :)

But let's not forget all these problems JS implementations see have already been solved extremely well on the desktop.

I hear this on HN quite a bit, but it's not that big of an issue. Most game developers don't need the raw speed of a native system. They do need to create something that can be played by everybody, and is easy to develop for.

The very fact that we're seeing so much html/js game dev (including games packaged with a browser as native apps)says it all. Game developers don't pick up a language/platform lightly, if they're making games for it, it's a good choice.

However, regarding mobile platforms, you can forget all I've said.

It is not my concern that some indie developers use whatever they are familiar with. We've been playing those funny stick figure flash games on rainy days anyways. They can be fun to play and fun to develop.

However, it is the big studios that should not push to this platform. They had compile-time guarantees, insane ecosystem, known performance tradeoffs. And now some of them want a huge pile of (as in million+ LOC) game engine running on top of a broken scripting language. And for what in exchange? So that the installer's gone and assets are delivered on demand? MMOs have been doing this for years on the desktop.

In short, if you do it for fun, please use whatever feels good. If you do it for the money, please do your research and don't make my browser freeze -- I'll just go to Kongregate where the former publishes their games.

"The very fact that we're seeing so much html/js game dev"

We are? Games that make money? Most games may not need the raw speed of native, but they do need the raw latency. If a game is being programmed in a garbage collected language you're gonna have a bad time.

I'm currently developing a game using Impact.js, and it's no picnic having to work within the limitations of the browser.

Which is sort of my point. There's so much we haven't explored in the compiled world, but we're busy reinventing all the same things in a slow fragile sandbox.

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