HTML5 Game Development Tips From Gamzee

Sean Soria of Gamzee has posted a guest blog over at Facebook chronicling the hoops they jumped through to make a speedy, isometric game in HTML5 that would run acceptably on mobile.

It’s great post in postmortem format that covers the some of the nitty gritty of what they ran into.

They also have a great list of takeaways:

  • We validated that you can make a cool, rich isometric game in HTML5 and have it be cross-platform.
  • We learned that if people can play a game on any device, a lot of them are going to do it primarily on mobile or tablet.
  • We learned that HTML5 cross-platform games require a lot of experimentation.
  • We learned that as great as HTML5 is, some things still aren’t quite there yet;
  • That designing a cross-platform experience means you need to think about the user experience on all devices from the ground up (in your game design);
  • That you shouldn’t have a game on mobile that does a lot of stacking or overdrawing;
  • And that you’d better love CSS and be good at it.

Read the full post on the Facebook blog

If there were one thing I might disagree with, it’s that CSS3 still has better performance over Canvas for large numbers of sprites – that has changed in iOS 5.0, and while they allude to it briefly, they still go on to talk about how much better CSS3 performance is. (Here’s my proof)


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