Web Game Developer's Cookbook Review

12/28/14

This review is a long time coming. I finished this book well over a month ago. I enjoyed it immensely.

The Original Plan

The original plan was made when I first got the book for my birthday earlier this year (June 20th). It was exactly something I mentioned to my friend as something I feel would be useful for learning game development and/or programming: content full of code examples to make various genres.

My plan was to devote time to each recipe to actually implement them as I read through them. I would then think of some simple change to make to the recipe to make it my own, and to show an understanding of what was being taught.

I did not do this at all.

What Actually Happened

The majority of my reading is done on the bus now-a-days, and doing anything other than reading is a hassle I haven't yet taught myself to deal with.

So, I read this book on the bus, and that was that. I also really enjoyed reading it, and slowing myself down in reading to make time to implement it was something I wasn't interested in doing.

However, nearing the end of the book, there was a UA Game Developers Club Game Jam. I brought this book to use as introductory inspiration and reference to begin the jam. I put the example games repo on my site.

We didn't explore too much before we decided to focus on Crafty, and we didn't use the book for much reference there, because, having not read that chapter yet, I didn't understand how to get the game working (it uses node.js magic).

I've settled a fairly long way from all the concepts and ideas introduced in this book....

Why I Enjoyed It

The book was exactly what I wanted as a introductiong to both actually doing some game programming, and to actually doing javascript programming. It gave me real, working, samples of code that I could run myself and edit as I desired.

It also introduced me to a wide variety of javascript libraries, only some of which I have heard of before. Quite a few of them were things I was interested in finding and exploring:

• impress.js: powerpoint presentations made in javascript
• node.js: server-side javascript (I've been trying to focus on this)
• crafty.js: HTML5 component-based game-engine
• game.js: GameJS is a javascript port of pygame, which I used to make games in python
• HTML5 Audio Site/Blog: a place to keep up-to-date on audio standards on HTML5

And that's just the stuff I can remember (the book's at home and I'm at my brother's in Wisconsin). All of this stuff came with examples, and warnings of the frustrations you can expect. I think it has helped me build a better-than-nothing debug intuition with javascript and the libraries I'm using. This intuition isn't great, but it's a good start.

TL;DR Conclusion

Want a good introduction to game programming in javascript? Or just programming in javascript? Try out The Web Game Developer's Cookbook.