5 ms·

Udacity adds HTML5 Game Development Course

114 points by vignesh_vs_in 14y ago

vignesh_vs_in 14y ago
blog post by course instructor Colt McAnlis http://mainroach.blogspot.in/2013/01/the-past-and-future-of-game-development.html http://mainroach.blogspot.in/2013/01/the-past-and-future-of-...
- muyuu 14y ago
  Looks great, but I guess NaCl isn't covered in the course.
  - j_s 14y ago
    Pardon my ignorance, but where is NaCl in HTML5?
    - muyuu 14y ago
      That's why I don't expect it to be covered, despite NaCl being his main area and it being a course on game development.
CodeCube 14y ago
Whoa, interesting ... I'm particularly curious as to what performance improvements he will go over. I've been working on a little html5 game engine myself. It lets you use sprites in a retained mode like API, while still giving you an immediate mode interface to manage the game logic. It's still pretty early, need to do more work on some samples and documentation, but there are some docs there in the wiki :) https://github.com/joelmartinez/flatredball-js https://github.com/joelmartinez/flatredball-js
thurn 14y ago
I'd be really curious to know which libraries, frameworks, or engines they intend to employ. Just yesterday I started learning the melonJS canvas game engine and it's been a lot of fun so far!
- krsunny 14y ago
  According to the blog post in a link from this thread they are using https://code.google.com/p/gritsgame/ https://code.google.com/p/gritsgame/
- vignesh_vs_in 14y ago
  box2d.js is the only external script that is going to be used (confirmed by the instructor).
manish_gill 14y ago
Just noticed the design change on Udacity. Interesting, but I preferred the old one.
- droithomme 14y ago
  There's something seriously wrong with the new design. Clicking on just about anything results in a 5-15 second loading time for pages, it feels like it is bogged down in database queries for routine page access. Furthermore, some class pages have out of control javascript that pummels most browsers and pins CPUs. Wasn't like this at all before the new design, which seems to not have been tested.
  - cdman 14y ago
    Hey droithomme, could you please email some concrete examples (like I'm on page X, do Y after which there is a long delay) to attila [at] udacity.com? We're trying to iron out all the issues as quickly as possible.
- mhurron 14y ago
  The course catalog looks very much like Coursera's, which isn't bad. The UI for a specific class, the unlabeled boxes above the videos to display progress, is horrible though. The list to the right side of the video was far clearer. Each unit of a course is accessed via a drop down now, as opposed to the collapsible list that used to be to the right of the videos. Also, they seem to have lost all their orange.
ameen 14y ago
While HTML5 hasn't been employed heavily by the gaming industry, signs of it are showing up. Gas Powered Games' recently teased "Project Mercury", their next-gen cloud powered Modding Tool & Web platform – http://youtu.be/kuGdQqUhKD4 http://youtu.be/kuGdQqUhKD4 Such projects are possible only due to HTML5/WebGL, and the innovations on top of it. In a couple of years, we'd be seeing mainstream studios shipping AAA Games as Web-based applications.
jiggy2011 14y ago
HTML5 gaming is an interesting frontier but I am sceptical that we will see a resurgence of the sort of the casually played (and developed) amateur games that we saw during the hayday of newgrounds and similar sites. In retrospect Macromedia made a stroke of genius with Flash in bundling design & animation tools, sound editors and a code editor into the same IDE. All of this combined in an easy-to-pirate package along with the thousands of tutorials and code samples available online made game development almost shockingly easy. Myself and a more artistic friend could literally sit in his bedroom and crank out a complete game over a weekend by taking turns at the computer and drinking heavily. No thinking about "engines", writing asset import code , muddling through JS patterns/frameworks or being stumped by cross browser quirks. Deployment and getting instant feedback was as simple as uploading the .swf to deviantart.com and spamming the link to all of our contacts via MSN messenger. All of the .js game dev stuff by comparison looks like hard work.
- jastanton 14y ago
  I'm curious, do you think it was the IDE that was the game changer (excuse the pun)? If JS had a game dev IDE with bundles sound editor etc... do you think it would be as popular as Flash?
  - jastanton 14y ago
    Or do you think that because games now have a higher bar we will see fewer but better JS games?
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    I can't say for certain but I would wager it was certainly a significant part of it. You could put a programmer or an artist down in front of it and it was intuitive enough and gave an "integrated" feel which was also probably part of what made Visual Basic popular. Basically the interface felt "empowering" to the newbie in a way that something like vim doesn't. For example, you could create an animated sprite and with a couple of clicks transform it into something that you could manipulate directly in the code as an object. No importing third party libraries or creating "sprite sheets" was required. I'm not sure if the bar for games has become significantly higher apart from in the AAA area, plenty of successful indie titles still look like SNES games. A games/multimedia specific JS IDE that dealt with as much of the crap surrounding the JS ecosystem as possible could certainly have a chance of being popular. Though I think something built around http://love2d.org/ http://love2d.org/ with easy browser publishing might be better in some ways.
krsunny 14y ago
What is everyone's favorite HTML5 game engine? So far out of all that I've tried I like the Isogenic game engine: https://github.com/coolbloke1324/ige_prototype https://github.com/coolbloke1324/ige_prototype
- jamesbritt 14y ago
  I'm liking create.js and easel.js
- Yhippa 14y ago
  I've been using Scirra's Construct 2 (http://www.scirra.com/construct2 http://www.scirra.com/construct2) and like it so far. I do programming for my day job but I like how this abstracts things that I need to do to make a game like tying art assets to game rules so I can focus on the game design and less time on learning lots of subsystems. Curious to hear about other game engines as well.
- laserDinosaur 14y ago
  I highly recommend Construct 2: http://www.scirra.com/construct2 http://www.scirra.com/construct2 It takes care of most of the heavy lifting when developing games for HTML5, but it still has a very open and powerful scripting language (unlike something like gamesalad which is more like using pre-built blocks). Edit - Ha, beaten by 1 minute.
  - Yhippa 14y ago
    Have you made anything using it yet?
- JDDunn9 14y ago
  I like gameQueryJS.com as there's almost no learning curve if you know jQuery.
- drhayes9 14y ago
  Current favorite: ImpactJS. Closed source, costs $100 to get started, but comes with a nice level editor and a very involved community. Great for making 2d games.
zachgalant 14y ago
This looks like you need to have experience coding to take this class. If you're a beginner or know a beginner who is interested in HTML 5 game development, you need to check out http://codehs.com http://codehs.com We teach you how to program from the ground up and get you as quickly as possible to creating awesome games in the browser. The whole time, you get personal help from tutors who answer your questions and give you feedback on all of your programs. You can make some really fun games really quickly. Here are some demos: http://codehs.com/demos http://codehs.com/demos
duhroach 14y ago
Thanks for your interest in the course!! Re: Jiggy2011 - All game dev is hard-work; JS is easier in some ways, harder in others. We've had good 2D IDE's for 20 years now to make 2D games; Making the runtime HTML5 isn't new (especially with the ability to export SWF to JS with easel.js) Re: CodeCube5 - We'll be covering perf on rendering, input, sound and overall entity processing Re: muyuu - NaCl is awesome! Html5 is awesome! Web game development is a win either way; NaCl is great for devs who have an existing codebase, HTML5 generally works for most others.
plumeria 14y ago
Why is it still unavailable today Feb. 4th??

114 points by vignesh_vs_in 14y ago

blog post by course instructor Colt McAnlis http://mainroach.blogspot.in/2013/01/the-past-and-future-of-game-development.html http://mainroach.blogspot.in/2013/01/the-past-and-future-of-...

muyuu 14y ago
Looks great, but I guess NaCl isn't covered in the course.
- j_s 14y ago
  Pardon my ignorance, but where is NaCl in HTML5?
  - muyuu 14y ago
    That's why I don't expect it to be covered, despite NaCl being his main area and it being a course on game development.

CodeCube 14y ago

Whoa, interesting ... I'm particularly curious as to what performance improvements he will go over. I've been working on a little html5 game engine myself. It lets you use sprites in a retained mode like API, while still giving you an immediate mode interface to manage the game logic. It's still pretty early, need to do more work on some samples and documentation, but there are some docs there in the wiki :) https://github.com/joelmartinez/flatredball-js https://github.com/joelmartinez/flatredball-js

thurn 14y ago

I'd be really curious to know which libraries, frameworks, or engines they intend to employ. Just yesterday I started learning the melonJS canvas game engine and it's been a lot of fun so far!

krsunny 14y ago
According to the blog post in a link from this thread they are using https://code.google.com/p/gritsgame/ https://code.google.com/p/gritsgame/
vignesh_vs_in 14y ago
box2d.js is the only external script that is going to be used (confirmed by the instructor).

manish_gill 14y ago

Just noticed the design change on Udacity. Interesting, but I preferred the old one.

droithomme 14y ago
There's something seriously wrong with the new design. Clicking on just about anything results in a 5-15 second loading time for pages, it feels like it is bogged down in database queries for routine page access. Furthermore, some class pages have out of control javascript that pummels most browsers and pins CPUs. Wasn't like this at all before the new design, which seems to not have been tested.
- cdman 14y ago
  Hey droithomme, could you please email some concrete examples (like I'm on page X, do Y after which there is a long delay) to attila [at] udacity.com? We're trying to iron out all the issues as quickly as possible.
mhurron 14y ago
The course catalog looks very much like Coursera's, which isn't bad. The UI for a specific class, the unlabeled boxes above the videos to display progress, is horrible though. The list to the right side of the video was far clearer. Each unit of a course is accessed via a drop down now, as opposed to the collapsible list that used to be to the right of the videos. Also, they seem to have lost all their orange.

ameen 14y ago

While HTML5 hasn't been employed heavily by the gaming industry, signs of it are showing up. Gas Powered Games' recently teased "Project Mercury", their next-gen cloud powered Modding Tool & Web platform – http://youtu.be/kuGdQqUhKD4 http://youtu.be/kuGdQqUhKD4 Such projects are possible only due to HTML5/WebGL, and the innovations on top of it. In a couple of years, we'd be seeing mainstream studios shipping AAA Games as Web-based applications.

jiggy2011 14y ago

HTML5 gaming is an interesting frontier but I am sceptical that we will see a resurgence of the sort of the casually played (and developed) amateur games that we saw during the hayday of newgrounds and similar sites. In retrospect Macromedia made a stroke of genius with Flash in bundling design & animation tools, sound editors and a code editor into the same IDE. All of this combined in an easy-to-pirate package along with the thousands of tutorials and code samples available online made game development almost shockingly easy. Myself and a more artistic friend could literally sit in his bedroom and crank out a complete game over a weekend by taking turns at the computer and drinking heavily. No thinking about "engines", writing asset import code , muddling through JS patterns/frameworks or being stumped by cross browser quirks. Deployment and getting instant feedback was as simple as uploading the .swf to deviantart.com and spamming the link to all of our contacts via MSN messenger. All of the .js game dev stuff by comparison looks like hard work.

jastanton 14y ago
I'm curious, do you think it was the IDE that was the game changer (excuse the pun)? If JS had a game dev IDE with bundles sound editor etc... do you think it would be as popular as Flash?
- jastanton 14y ago
  Or do you think that because games now have a higher bar we will see fewer but better JS games?
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  I can't say for certain but I would wager it was certainly a significant part of it. You could put a programmer or an artist down in front of it and it was intuitive enough and gave an "integrated" feel which was also probably part of what made Visual Basic popular. Basically the interface felt "empowering" to the newbie in a way that something like vim doesn't. For example, you could create an animated sprite and with a couple of clicks transform it into something that you could manipulate directly in the code as an object. No importing third party libraries or creating "sprite sheets" was required. I'm not sure if the bar for games has become significantly higher apart from in the AAA area, plenty of successful indie titles still look like SNES games. A games/multimedia specific JS IDE that dealt with as much of the crap surrounding the JS ecosystem as possible could certainly have a chance of being popular. Though I think something built around http://love2d.org/ http://love2d.org/ with easy browser publishing might be better in some ways.

krsunny 14y ago

What is everyone's favorite HTML5 game engine? So far out of all that I've tried I like the Isogenic game engine: https://github.com/coolbloke1324/ige_prototype https://github.com/coolbloke1324/ige_prototype

jamesbritt 14y ago
I'm liking create.js and easel.js
Yhippa 14y ago
I've been using Scirra's Construct 2 (http://www.scirra.com/construct2 http://www.scirra.com/construct2) and like it so far. I do programming for my day job but I like how this abstracts things that I need to do to make a game like tying art assets to game rules so I can focus on the game design and less time on learning lots of subsystems. Curious to hear about other game engines as well.
laserDinosaur 14y ago
I highly recommend Construct 2: http://www.scirra.com/construct2 http://www.scirra.com/construct2 It takes care of most of the heavy lifting when developing games for HTML5, but it still has a very open and powerful scripting language (unlike something like gamesalad which is more like using pre-built blocks). Edit - Ha, beaten by 1 minute.
- Yhippa 14y ago
  Have you made anything using it yet?
JDDunn9 14y ago
I like gameQueryJS.com as there's almost no learning curve if you know jQuery.
drhayes9 14y ago
Current favorite: ImpactJS. Closed source, costs $100 to get started, but comes with a nice level editor and a very involved community. Great for making 2d games.

zachgalant 14y ago

This looks like you need to have experience coding to take this class. If you're a beginner or know a beginner who is interested in HTML 5 game development, you need to check out http://codehs.com http://codehs.com We teach you how to program from the ground up and get you as quickly as possible to creating awesome games in the browser. The whole time, you get personal help from tutors who answer your questions and give you feedback on all of your programs. You can make some really fun games really quickly. Here are some demos: http://codehs.com/demos http://codehs.com/demos

duhroach 14y ago

Thanks for your interest in the course!! Re: Jiggy2011 - All game dev is hard-work; JS is easier in some ways, harder in others. We've had good 2D IDE's for 20 years now to make 2D games; Making the runtime HTML5 isn't new (especially with the ability to export SWF to JS with easel.js) Re: CodeCube5 - We'll be covering perf on rendering, input, sound and overall entity processing Re: muyuu - NaCl is awesome! Html5 is awesome! Web game development is a win either way; NaCl is great for devs who have an existing codebase, HTML5 generally works for most others.

plumeria 14y ago

Why is it still unavailable today Feb. 4th??