A simple starting point for 2D JavaScript games

learnjs.io

21 points·sethvincent··9 comments

I really like this kind of approach to 2D games JavaScript development.

I'm regularly using CraftyJS to develop 2D games but I feel like there's something wrong in the development process. The library is huge and therefore hard to maintain, and I'm only using a little part of it.

By using a "gameloop" library and npm + browserify to define dependencies you can include whatever rendering library you want (pixi.js, three.js, etc.).

I wouldn't personally call Crafty "huge", but it certainly is monolithic in the sense that the bundle comes with two renderers, input management, game loop, sound, entity-component system, and so on. Which is a bit, ironic given the main goal of ECS is to decouple systems.

IMO it would be a much nicer library if it was just the ECS, with add-on modules for rendering, sound, etc.

Why do you need npm or even a server for this?

Modules. NPM is the largest JavaScript dependency manager, and it is one of the easiest to install (because it comes with Node).

Where's the demo/download/repo link?

It might still take a few minutes for gh-pages to build the site, but here's the example repo: https://github.com/sethvincent/simple-game-example

I wasn't going to put up a demo since it's so little, but yes, that would be useful. Setting up the repo with github pages now.

Really awesome run-through, thanks for posting!

Cool! I'm glad you liked it.

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