Building a JavaScript-Based Game Engine for the Web

Google Tech Talk June 11, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Paul Bakaus. There are many professional game engines out there for consoles, PCs, and mobile handhelds. However, there is one big empty gap, even in 2010: Not a single game engine targets desktop and mobile browsers natively without the use of plugins. In this session, Paul will talk about the challenges of building a pure browser-based gaming engine, how web programming concepts like event-driven architecture need to be considered, and what it means to fully utilize the open web stack—HTML5, client- and server-side JavaScript, external Stylesheets, server-side JavaScript and, of course, Canvas—to squeeze every millisecond of rendering time. We will go into the details of our own upcoming Aves Engine for isometric real-time games and will give you a very solid idea of what needs to be done to build graphically rich, real-time, full featured games for the web. Paul Bakaus is the CTO of the Germany-based startup Dextrose AG, and his corporate work mostly focuses on UX, UI and tricky JavaScript challenges. He is best known for creating jQuery UI, the popular official UI framework for jQuery, where he was the driving force behind many of its plugins.