Dear All,

Whilst happily plodding along still practising my C# my mind did start to wonder about web development. Although I am aware of many languages and engines/tools for creating Desktop PC games etc one thing I fancy looking into are embedded website games. I do not mean flash, I understand that HTML5 and WebGL are a sort of emerging standard now?

As you can tell I have literally no idea about this side of things, it would just be cool to have something you could play through web be it on a PC or tablet etc. Cannot seem to find much info on this topic really. I do not like the idea of users having to install plugins like Unity player either as personally I don't like installing plugins etc on my own PC.

Any advice or links would be appreciated.

Thanks

With Unity 5 you get WebGL as additional build target. Basically you are able to build your game to a format that a HTML 5 ready browser can display out of the box.

How exactly that works, or by when all Browsers have new versions ready that support that IDK, I was never that interested in web games.

Still, keep in mind that with Unity 5 due for release this year, the Unity Web Player will go the way of the Dodo (or at least will only be staying as some kind of deprecated "compatibility" technology until all non-HTML5 compliant browser versions have been deleted from Disks worldwide).

I recommend looking into Emscripten. It is basically a C/C++ compiler that outputs to JavaScript using HTML5 canvas or WebGL. It also wraps OpenGL and SDL making your code ultra portable.
We have already used it commercially for our web games at work and it has proven to be a very good solution

Thank you both for your replies, after looking into it a bit further I've decided it's going off on too big a tangent for me at the moment so I'm not going to pursue it. I am sorry for wasting your time but hopefully the topic will come up on another posters search and answer a question :)

Well, I am sure lots of people will disagree, but I think at the current point in time waiting for the new web technologies to spread further (better support in browsers, better install base of HTML 5 enabled browsers, better support by tools, engines and frameworks) might be a wise decision if you are a newcomer interested to get into web games.

When you get time and interest to look into it again in a year or so, things might be very different... or not. But at least you will have to fight less teething problems when using the new technologies... I guess.

Generally, you are ok with most of the common HTML5 functionality on most modern browsers so long as you are not targetting mobile.

Mobile browsers are an absolute disaster right now as Gian-Reto pointed out.

As for other browsers, before you dive in you might want to take a look at "can i use" which shows you which browsers support which features, and plan out your architecture of your game around what is supported, rather than what might be cool to play with, if you want anyone to ever play your game.

Good luck!

A lovely resource is the HTML5 Game Engines page, found here: http://html5gameengine.com/

There are a lot of options, but each come with their own positives and negatives. Spend time exploring the community, pricing, and features surrounding each engine.

Myself and a colleague are using ImpactJS to great success right now. We've found it to be an excellent choice for a 2D, web-based project.

Cheers!