What is good language for web-based games?

Question

I'd like to play around with writing some very small, simple web-based games (checkers, Conway's Game of Life, etc). I started looking into Java applet tutorials, but my years of frustration with freezing Java applets had me wondering if there was a better||easier development language to invest my time. What's a good "starter" language for web game development?

Answer 1

You're better off using Flash, or the new version of Silverlight is getting to a good point you could start to do some excellent things with it.

Answer 2

Flash is the platform of choice for small web-based games. As someone else has said, Silverlight may finally be reaching a state where it's usable for this as well. From what I understand, Sun is doing a renewed push with Applets but I think it may be too little, too late.

edit: link for posterity: OSFlash.org

Answer 3

Simplest: JavaScript
Most used: Flash
Up and coming: Silverlight
On the decline: Java, Shockwave

Advice: If you're doing something simple, Javascript is fine. Flash is a good option from there, as there's a lot of examples to learn from. Silverlight is good, but you'll have fewer examples to take advantage of.

If you want to be able to take advantage of many gaming portals, however, to get your game out to more people--Flash is really what most of them have focused around, and it'll be harder (not impossible) to distribute to others if you're not using Flash.

Answer 4

Do you want to just create a client-side game? Then Flash or Silverlight would do.

But you probably want to keep track of high-scores and other statistics. For this the clientside game should call a web service so the browser doesn't have to switch pages. In that case, using C# for the server-side code and Silverlight for the client will keep you focused on a single development language.

Answer 5

Javascript + canvas tag for graphics works nice. IE doesn't have it yet, but it will.

Answer 6

Focusing in on the "starter language" bit, I find it hard to recommend anything other than Silverlight. The combination of the Visual Studio IDE and the wealth of documentation make it very newbie friendly. Somebody even built a basic 3D rendering engine you can use.