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The Death of an HTML5 Game Breeds an Open Source Project

Posted by Soulskill on from the game-devs-take-heed dept.

colinneagle writes "German social gaming company Wooga has thrown in the towel on its HTML5 project after seeing little return on the increasing amount of effort put into its Magic Land Island game. Some early success convinced Wooga to devote additional resources to the game, which was launched in October of last year. However, 'As the project continued to progress, so did the industry. Whilst the benefits of an open platform future are clear for games developers, it became clear halfway through Magic Land Island's development cycle that the technology wasn't yet ready for mainstream exposure.' The announcement sheds some interesting light on HTML5, as Wooga hardly holds back on any of the details behind the game's failure. The biggest barriers to HTML5's entry to the mainstream include internet connectivity and limitations on sound. The consensus? The time for HTML5 will come; it's just not quite there yet. In the meantime, Wooga has made the game open source so other HTML5 developers can learn from it."

8 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. I'd settle for by ackthpt · · Score: 4, Funny

    Nethack 3D! 8^)

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  2. But Flash is dead, right? by crazyjj · · Score: 4, Funny

    Didn't they get Steve Jobs' memo?

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    1. Re:But Flash is dead, right? by gaspyy · · Score: 4, Informative

      I hate to break it to you but many apps in the AppStore, including award-winning ones are built in Flash and packaged as apps.

      The whole crusade against flash is just the new generation rebelling the old one, not completely unlike the nosql movement.

    2. Re:But Flash is dead, right? by drkstr1 · · Score: 4, Informative

      I hate to break it to you but many apps in the AppStore, including award-winning ones are built in Flash and packaged as apps.

      And the ones that don't suck aren't.

      We have a Flex AIR app that compiles to iOS and Android (plus all the other usual suspects). It runs better than _any_ of our competitor's, especially the ones based on HTML5. Oh, and the HTML5 based apps look like crap, in addition to running like it.

      Now I realize that coding in pure native has the potential to be faster, but in practice, your developer is the limiting reagent. We greatly benefit from the cross platform capabilities and rapid development (scale-9 slicing + solid vector graphic framework+ countless other things I have been spoiled with over the years), and all without any noticeable degradation in performance.

      I hope more people are as closed minded as you, because that means more money for me.

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  3. Please, no sound by Hatta · · Score: 4, Informative

    Sound in web pages has been an abomination since the moment it was introduced. I never want to have to go searching through dozens of tabs looking for the one website that thinks its so important that it needs to blare audio at me. Anything that plays audio without the explicit consent of the user is incredibly impolite.

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    1. Re:Please, no sound by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's a game, not a webpage. It's perfectly reasonable and expected for it to play sound at you at random times.

      What is really needed is a clean separation into apps and pages. Google is pushing for that in Chrome, but other browsers haven't really picked it up yet.

  4. Compile, make packages, offer download by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

    You can't run C++ from a browser using any sort of standards

    You can if you code to SDL (the de facto standard for 2D games' I/O), compile it for Windows, Mac, X11/Linux, and Android, and then offer binary packages (msi, dmg, deb/tgz, apk) through standard HTTPS. The only browsers you won't hit with this method are Safari for iOS, IE for Windows Phone 7, IE for Windows RT, and browsers for game consoles.

  5. Re:Yep. by geekd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I have written one HTML5 game http://magigames.org/runestone_defense.html and I am working on another.

    HTML5 runs fine on a PC, but is too slow on my iPhone 4s and my iPad.

    I chose HTML5 because I wanted to brush up on my Javascript. If I wanted to make $, I'd have chosen Flash.

    Making sure everything works in various browsers / OS is not too bad. I test in IE9, Chrome and Firefox on Windows 7, Chrome, Firefox and Safari on Mac, and Chrome Firefox on Linux. It can be time consuming to try them all, but once I nailed down the differences (mouse events in IE, most notably) it wasn't too bad.