Game Engines for the Web
13 March ’16
My son likes to play some of the casual games on Facebook. I am not a big fan of the ads he ends up watching to play the game. I don’t know if that bothers me more or less than the fact these games are made using flash.
So I figured what if I could make some of these simple games - without ads, and a lot less gaudy.
I started my search for game engines here. This was such a well written article I was ready to believe whatever they were going to say… but I also looked at this comparison tool.
CraftyJS
Best thing about Crafty seems to be its component oriented design. The Build New Games link above describes it well. This might actually be a good place for me to start. Need to compare this with CreateJS.
LimeJS
From the Build New Games review
Lime is a very “safe” choice in that it will for sure be able to handle just about any 2D game you could throw at it. But Lime is also a bit tedious at times, and also sometimes very general. Lime can be seen more as a “game framework” from which you could build specific game engines on top of. One area that Lime really excels is its node graph. Just about everything in Lime derives from the base Node class, and nodes can contain child nodes. This allows you to build complicated entities that can have many children, yet address them from a high level. For example you might add a character node as a child of a vehicle node it is riding in. The character node might also have an armor node that he is wearing. Whenever the parent vehicle node moves, the character and his armor will move right along with it, making them act as a cohesive whole.
MelonJS
Another good looking open source engine, with physics support. Check out this tutorial for creating a space invaders clone. Melon also seems to have more recent activity than some of the others.
ImpactJS
Mainly suited for 2D Platformers and action games. Plus it is not free. So maybe this is not going to be the first engine I try.
CreateJS
It seems like these libraries give you drawing tools, but the interactions have to be provided by the developer. This library may be great for animated websites, I think!
Wild Kratts games with CreateJS - http://pbskids.org/wildkratts/games/
With AngularJS
Not much on details here (which isn’t a bad thing), but a good inspiration for connecting up a game engine with Angular.
https://www.toptal.com/web/making-html5-canvas-based-game-with-angularjs-and-createjs