How to make a game in Javascript?

Question

I know object oriented PHP and Java, and I can code Javascript fairly well at the moment.

However for the life of me I'm not sure how Google's made a game in JavaScript.

It seems to be compressed (the code) so I can't really see what's going on.

I thought javascript it was only single threaded too, making game development even harder.

I've seen the GWT, but I thought that was more for designing interfaces, I didn't really see any game development in there. If someone could direct me to some sort of toolkit, or open my eyes to how people are coding games in Javascript, I sure would appreciate it!

Answer 1

This SO question on a javascript games framework should help and google turned up gameQuery and GameJS...that should at least provide some insight into what's being done.

This site also has a gallery of javascript based games...

Answer 2

Google (if you are thinking of the pacman game), used HTML5's new feature which supports a kind of 'threading' called WebWorkers. You can also use timeouts and such to pretend to be using threads, though in reality they aren't.

Writing a game in Javascript is similar to how you would do it in C. Or rather, messy C with most things in one file. You have to just define all your components in the one javascript file (or multiple if you are using WebWorkers) and press your go button. Graphics are largely done with HTML5's canvas 2d element or if you are really on edge, the canvas 3d WebGL system which isn't really supported properly in all modern browsers yet.

In fact, you can make a game simply by setting up one big Canvas 100% width and height, and then program your entire system in that javascript file, ignoring the fact that you are on the web (if you please). Most usual drawing, threading, database, networking, etc... standard game 'features' are already built in to the latest HTML 5 spec.

Answer 3

It's really hard to make complicated game in Javascript now, mostly because of browsers incompatibility. But google guys made port of quake 2 to Javascript with GWT.

To make your own game you can use HTML5 canvas or better vector graphic (VML for IEs and SVG for others) maybe with raphael.js library as abstraction layer. Also you can use some physics engine like Box2DJS

3D Javascript game is not an option now, because WebGL is under development.