Author Topic: Building games within the browser (Read 12506 times)

JL235 · « **on:** March 21, 2011 »

For the last 6 months me and my brother have been building an online platform for building games called Play My Code (linky) and were looking for feedback from developers.

The idea is that to build a game today you need to:

download tools
install & setup tools
build your game
work out distribution
find hosting and upload
get others to download & play

If your building a browser game then the list gets longer due to all of the boiler plate code you need to write. You need to get your canvas setup with your JavaScript, handle keyboard and mouse in a cross browser way, and handle lots of other cruft like if someone using IE 8 or below visits.

Play My Code aims to compress all of this down to make building games as easy as possible.

All of the tools are online and run within the browser, so no downloads are needed. The games are written in our own language which compiles straight to JavaScript (for speed). We also use our own language because it means the games are safe to embed on other websites (no user tracking, alerts, ads, popups, redirects and other annoying but legit JavaScript) and because we feel JavaScript isn't good enough for building games (for example our language provides classes and some static analysis for finding bugs).

Once built you can then embed any of our games on your blog or site. The idea being that if you want to build a one-off game then you can do that on PMC and we'll host it for you.

So far the site is still in beta with lots of features still being implemented (I'm currently starting on sound support). But today you can build games and embed them elsewhere. So if anyone here is interested then why not head over to Play My Code and try it out.

We also have a sandbox here that you can use without having to signup (you do need to signup to save your projects).

Thanks!

Hotshot · « **Reply #1 on:** March 21, 2011 »

Very good stuff

LittleWhite · « **Reply #2 on:** March 21, 2011 »

Looks really great.

Is WebGL supported ?

JL235 · « **Reply #3 on:** March 21, 2011 »

Quote from: LittleWhite on March 21, 2011

Looks really great.

Is WebGL supported ?

No, and there is a lot of debate about how we would support it. I would really, REALLY love to include a 3D engine. But the issue is that we don't want to exclude IE 9 users. We especially don't want to segregate games into two categories based on what features they use. If it is included in the future then it would probably have to be via an extra module on the side. Also building a 3D engine (especially a decent one) is no small feat!

What will almost certainly happen is that we will silently use WebGL instead of the canvas for 2D graphics, especially if Safari on the iPhone receives WebGL support.

padman · « **Reply #4 on:** March 21, 2011 »

That looks truly interesting. I shall investigate deeper.

Shockwave · « **Reply #5 on:** March 21, 2011 »

This is really nice, I've had a play with the games on the site and they run really nice in chrome.

What a great idea!

Of course my favourite example is the metaballs, I'll have to have a play and see what I can do!

combatking0 · « **Reply #6 on:** March 21, 2011 »

I'll have a look at this and promote it to my Game Builders' Club if it is suitable for their age-group.

It sounds interesting.

va!n · « **Reply #7 on:** March 22, 2011 »

Wow! Very amazing and interesting project you are doing! Examples running very smooth in Firefox 4.0! I will take a deepter look, when having some more time! This project and its language has real potential! *thumbs up*

Btw, will you add sound support?

JL235 · « **Reply #8 on:** March 22, 2011 »

Quote from: va!n on March 22, 2011

Btw, will you add sound support?

Yup, and I was actually going to start on it today until I found FF 3.6 and some IE9 specific bugs (damn IE!). My plan is to get sound all fully built by next week.

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

JL235 · « **Reply #9 on:** June 02, 2011 »

For those interested, sound support has now been added to PlayMyCode. Currently we only support mp3 and wav (for cross-browser reasons), but you can go make something noisy today.

benny! · « **Reply #10 on:** June 02, 2011 »

Cannot connect to PLAYMYCODE at the moment? Any ideas why?

JL235 · « **Reply #11 on:** June 02, 2011 »

Quote from: benny! on June 02, 2011

Cannot connect to PLAYMYCODE at the moment? Any ideas why?

No idea, it's working fine for me right now (and I haven't altered the sites code over the last few hours).

Maybe the server was acting up for a few minutes?

benny! · « **Reply #12 on:** June 02, 2011 »

Strange. Still cannot connect. Pinging it without problems. A tracert fails somewhere in Amsterdam. Hmmm ...

JL235 · « **Reply #13 on:** June 02, 2011 »

It must be a DNS issue. This is worryingly strange.

benny! · « **Reply #14 on:** June 02, 2011 »

Quote from: JL235 on June 02, 2011

It must be a DNS issue. This is worryingly strange.

Indeed strange. I bet there is a problem with some server inbetween me and your host.

Since

Code: [Select]

ping www.playmycode.com

works, the resolving of the IP (67.215.66.132) seems to work at least here.

Maybe I try to use a web proxy just for testing.

benny! · « **Reply #15 on:** June 02, 2011 »

Yup. That's it. I used a web proxy and could access your page. That's really strange. Is it a big company that hosts
your service?

JL235 · « **Reply #16 on:** June 02, 2011 »

Quote from: benny! on June 02, 2011

Yup. That's it. I used a web proxy and could access your page. That's really strange. Is it a big company that hosts
your service?

No, it's hosted by a tiny one.

However when I visit the IP you get it takes me to an OpenDNS page saying the server handling that ip has failed. It's also not the ip for my site (or at least I get entirely different ones when I ping and have used different IP's to access it in the past).

Maybe it's a DNS outage near where you are?

Raizor · « **Reply #17 on:** June 02, 2011 »

That's some really cool stuff JL235! I hope this takes off for you and you get a lot of people producing things using your platform. Nice work

JL235 · « **Reply #18 on:** June 02, 2011 »

Quote from: Raizor on June 02, 2011

That's some really cool stuff JL235! I hope this takes off for you and you get a lot of people producing things using your platform. Nice work

Thank you! Were planning to add some more much needed features in the future too, like fullscreen, making it make more and more sense to use PMC over something else.

JL235 · « **Reply #19 on:** September 29, 2011 »

For those interested, lots of new bits have been added onto Play My Code over the last few months. We've moved to a new server, hosted by Linode, who are just excellent (if your ever thinking of getting a VPS, just go with them).

Today we updated the IDE to include a new docs browser, so you can look through the API whilst programming, on the same page. But we've also added lots of new additions to the API since the last post here, such as you can now draw on Images, different blending modes, apply transformations when drawing, better in-game timers, and lots of API tweaks (this is several months worth).

The site is really starting to come along, and we've had a lot more people signing up, and lots of small games getting built.