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Comment by TomGullen | Hacker News Reader

> I could try HTML5, but that precludes releasing high-performance desktop-ready games for Steam.

We develop Construct 2 (https://www.scirra.com) which is an HTML5 game engine. It can export to EXE via Node Webkit with very good performance, as well as the ability to export a multitude of mobile platforms as well.

One game we're excited to see released in the near future made in Construct 2 is "Penelope": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaynOYy2O54

The author is developing this game in Construct 2 for PC/Mac/Linux.

Some of our users have also submitted their games to Greenlight, here's a couple:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=184459...

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=929949...

These are all HTML5 games!

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Another example is ImpactJS, which allows you to write high-performance mobile-ready games!

http://impactjs.com/

It always makes me happy to see my game engine mentioned here. Thank you! :)

Just to chime in, I believe that HTML5 currently is as "cross-platform" as it can get, especially for games. Two examples made with Impact:

- Olympia Rising[1] - this game recently had a successful kickstarter campaign and will be released for various desktop platforms and maybe more later.

- XType Plus[2] - my own game coming to the Nintendo Wii U, using the Nintendo Web Framework. It's a pimped up version of this XType[3], which you can play in your browser right now.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/paleozoic/olympia-risin...

[2] http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2014/02/developer_interview...

[3] http://phoboslab.org/xtype/

Just thought since I have the opportunity I'd mention: My biggest problem with ImpactJS is that I'm required to pay before I'm allowed to try using it.

I've considered it a number of times but each time, that $99 barrier pushes me back towards the alternatives like Panda.js (which I believe is actually inspired by Impact). Not to mention Unity, which is free for some platforms.

If you offered a trial license, that would be awesome, although I understand you likely don't because of fear of abuse.

Actually, there's something I'd like to ask you re: that. Is there any chance of Ejecta being ported to other mobile platforms, Android in particular?

(Edit: for those unfamiliar with Ejecta: http://impactjs.com/Ejecta )

I do have a toy project that aims to be a cross-platform Ejecta eventually. It's written in C and divided in an OpenGL Canvas drawing library (so you essentially get the HTML5 Canvas API in native code) and a host application that provides the JavaScript binding.

Currently, there's only a host application for iOS. I don't know much about Android and have yet to figure out how to best couple the C lib with the Java code... or if I even need Java code to begin with.

I wanted to have a working Android host app first, before putting it on github and then building up the feature set on both platforms to where Ejecta is now.

I also thought about doing a kickstarter for this, but I'm not sure what exactly I could "sell", because the I want to have it open source anyway. If anybody wants to sponsor the development, get in touch :)

tl;dr: yes.

I wouldn't bother - Crosswalk does the job great for Android:

https://crosswalk-project.org/

It's based on Chrome for Android so you have a fully-featured browser engine available. iOS is the only platform where there isn't a good GPU-accelerated browser engine available that can run native apps, hence the use case. (P.S. we hope to support Ejecta in Construct 2 officially soon!)

Wait, Chrome? With its horribly slow 2D acceleration and aliasing? Why would you want that for your game?

Chrome for Android has GPU-accelerated 2D canvas and WebGL support now, and it's great for browser games! Probably the best mobile browser in fact.

From my own experience Crosswalk gives you about 60 fps for simple canvas based games on Android 4.3 and 4.4. It is an interesting framework to use.

Some time ago I built something similar to Ejecta (https://github.com/funkaster/FakeWebGL) aiming to have support for Android. It's using Spidermonkey instead of ScriptingCore, and it's written in C++. I haven't updated the code in a long time, but it shouldn't be too hard to update to the newer SpiderMonkey and at some point add Android support :) I just need the time (which between work and my side projects, is almost 0). If someone wants to help, the code is there, and I'll be happy to provide guidance and support.

Thanks for impactjs! I used it to develop this couple years ago: http://heartlight5.com Have fun!

What if I was looking for powerful ways to develop JS apps rather than games?

I like the ideas of C2, but I don't like developing on Windows and it seems like they won't release the tools for Linux soon.

Also worth mentioning the announcements of numerous other game engines, including Unity and Unreal, supporting HTML5:

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/03/18/gdc-2014-mozilla-an...

Thank you. I was going to come in here and say "Look I don't know if there are any HTML5 games on Steam, but how hard could it really be to package your game up in a fork of Chromium or WebKit?"

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