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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 w

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.
- AshleysBrain 14y ago
  Our startup's IDE, Construct 2, attempts to do just that for HTML5: http://www.scirra.com http://www.scirra.com Do you think that's in the right direction?
  - krapp 14y ago
    I've used Construct 2, it's definitely good stuff.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    Interesting, though you seem to be going for a "no coding required" approach which always ends up hitting limits pretty quickly. Do you support an easy way to add custom JS code for logic that the in built tools cannot handle elegantly? Also interested in how this works, do you generate JS code or do you have a JS engine which reads settings from other files?
    - AshleysBrain 14y ago
      There aren't any hard-coded limits, and you can do things like make recursive functions with unique local variables at each call. We have a JS SDK for custom code too: https://www.scirra.com/manual/15/sdk https://www.scirra.com/manual/15/sdk
  - manveru 14y ago
    Do you plan making a linux version?

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.

AshleysBrain 14y ago
Our startup's IDE, Construct 2, attempts to do just that for HTML5: http://www.scirra.com http://www.scirra.com Do you think that's in the right direction?
- krapp 14y ago
  I've used Construct 2, it's definitely good stuff.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Interesting, though you seem to be going for a "no coding required" approach which always ends up hitting limits pretty quickly. Do you support an easy way to add custom JS code for logic that the in built tools cannot handle elegantly? Also interested in how this works, do you generate JS code or do you have a JS engine which reads settings from other files?
  - AshleysBrain 14y ago
    There aren't any hard-coded limits, and you can do things like make recursive functions with unique local variables at each call. We have a JS SDK for custom code too: https://www.scirra.com/manual/15/sdk https://www.scirra.com/manual/15/sdk
- manveru 14y ago
  Do you plan making a linux version?