The Gamepad API is a web standard that communicates with these devices-and, to my astonishment, it Just Works! That is, for modern browsers on major operating systems. Most modern video game consoles that have wired gamepads use USB as their physical layer and conform to a standard joystick protocol. It’s not news that you can capture keyboard and mouse input in a browser, but I was surprised to learn that you can also access connected gamepads. Look development renders from Restricted Airspace (That process is documented in detail on my blog.) I achieved this using a full-screen shader and other tricks built on Three.js’s EffectComposer. Three.js is capable of physically accurate rendering, but for Restricted Airspace I opted for a lo-fi look.
I will admit, the lack of operator overloading made linear algebra more tedious than I was accustomed to in C#, and my functional programmer brain still gasps at all the mutability, but overall, JavaScript and Three.js gave me what I needed to finish my game and have fun doing it. This meant that in addition to position, rotation, and scale, objects could have properties like “health,” “enemy type,” and “point value.” The combination of geometric and semantic data allowed me to really use Blender as a level editor. I was even able to embed game-specific data directly into the scene from Blender using custom properties which Three.js exposed via the userData property. Manipulating the scene is as simple as reading from and writing to a deeply nested JavaScript object.
The APIs are designed for ergonomics and ease of use. I exported models from Blender in the glTF format and loaded them without issue. It offers many conveniences and conventional semantics over the lower-level WebGL API. “Conveniences” may be too soft a word here-Three.js provides model loading, a materials system, a scene graph, cameras, a post-processing system, an animation solution, and handles audio. Restricted Airspace is a 3D game, and I used the excellent Three.js as my graphics library. Graphics: Three.js and WebGLĭebug render from an early prototype of the game
WHAT IS THE EASIEST VIDEO GAME FRONTEND CODE
The game itself will be exclusive to backers of the Wonderville Kickstarter campaign until August 2020 since I can’t yet share a public version of the game or its source code, this article includes only code snippets and screenshots. I’ve been calling the engine I made for this game Ajeeb, and I’m gradually releasing it online as I clean up and document its modules. The 3D art was modeled in Blender, which I also used as the level editor. I built most of the engine myself, with core parts written in TypeScript and game logic written in JavaScript. Overall, Restricted Airspace was developed and deployed using Electron. I hope you’ll find it illuminating, both as a peek into the game development process and as an exploration of the power of modern web technologies. I want to share parts of that journey here, focusing on the aspects of the pipeline I didn’t expect to be able to bring over to JavaScript because of my outdated assumptions about the web frontend as a platform. For better or worse, the stack of technology built for the web-a platform originally designed to share formatted text documents!-provided just about all the functionality I needed to build a powerful, expressive, and fun game development experience. Things just kept working, and working well. I fully expected to hit a roadblock and have to start over in Unity, but it never happened. I had rough prototypes of game-engine components here and there, and I decided to try to cobble them together for this project, mostly to see how far I could get.
I’m generally interested in game development tooling and workflows, and I’d been playing with various open-source, mostly web-based technologies to that end for a few years. I like Unity a lot-in many ways, I’ve built my career on it-but I wanted to try something different for Restricted Airspace. If you’re looking to get into game development, you could do a lot worse than this engine. Unity provides a cross-platform C# runtime for game logic, a powerful authoring environment to lay out scenes and levels, an asset pipeline that supports every major art package, and a vast ecosystem of tutorials and packages. My usual tool of choice is Unity, one of the two dominant game engines in widespread use today. I’ve been making video games for almost a decade, both as a freelancer and as an independent developer.
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