If you’re reading this, then it’s safe to say that you’ve probably played a browser-based game before. It might have been while waiting for a download to finish, during a break, or even is something that you like to come back to fairly regularly. The sheer ubiquity and pleasant simplicity of these games have allowed the online game market to grow immensely over the years. Tie-ins with the Facebook community (ie. Farmville & Mafia Wars) have generated quite a lot of hype fairly recently with some of them reportedly reaching somewhere around 60 million users each month.
Good ideas tend to spread to other mediums so we’re now seeing some of these games being ported to mobile devices. Games like Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies, and Bejeweled have found their way to the iPhone and other mobile devices even though their predecessors were simple Flash-based games that gained popularity with people who played the game in their web browser.
Here's a teaser of the Biolab Disaster game with an encouraging quote from the Guardian.
With the introduction of HTML5 comes another viable platform for creating these games. Parallels to the great flixel Flash-game library are being released that solely use HTML5 and other functionality built into every modern web browser. One that caught my interest is the Impact game engine. It comes with a library of common game-related functions, a level editor, and various other tools so that making a game in HTML5 doesn’t have to be done from scratch each time. You can check out the first game created using the Impact engine, Biolab Disaster. Impact is a commercial product that sells for $99 so I’m definitely curious to see if this catches on, and if it allows for further development.
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Games have been a part of the advertising repertoire for some time now. Companies like Nikelodeon, Adult Swim, PETA, and countless others offer web-based games while companies like Burger King and Doritos have even made the leap over to game consoles (XBox 360 owners should probably check out Doritos Crash Course. It’s free and yet tastefully Doritos-branded… sorry about that awful pun). The big companies aside, these HTML5 game libraries empower the web designers of the world (with knowledge of JavaScript & a good idea) to create games, and I can’t help but be excited about that.