Foundation Game Design with HTML5 and JavaScript

Foundation Game Design with HTML5 and JavaScript teaches you everything you need to know about how to make video games. If you’ve never done any programming before and don’t know where to start, this book will show you how to make games from start to finish. You’ll learn all the latest programming technologies (HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript) to create your games. All written in a fun and friendly style with open-ended projects that encourage you to build your own original games.

Foundation Game Design with HTML5 and JavaScript starts by showing you how you can use basic programing to create logic games, adventure games, and create interactive game graphics. Design a game character, learn to control it with the keyboard, mouse, or touch screen interface, and then learn how to use collision detection to build an interactive game world. You’ll learn to make maze games, platform jumping games, and fast paced action games that cover all the popular genres of 2D gaming. Create intelligent enemies, use realistic physics, sound effects and music, and learn how to animate game characters. Whether you're creating games for the web or mobile devices, everything you need to get started on a career as a game designer is right here.

• Focused and friendly introduction to making games with HTML5.
• Essential programming and graphic design techniques for building games, with each chapter gently building on the skills of preceding chapters.
• Detailed case studies demonstrating techniques that can be used for making games in a wide variety of genres.

What you’ll learn

• Get a thorough grounding in HTML5 and good programming practices, with minimal prior programming experience required.
• Discover how to build logic, adventure, and 2D action games in a wide range of genres.
• Master collision detection, Enemy AI systems, player control, basic physics and easy trigonometry.
• Make use of modern JavaScript programming techniques to build robust games that are quick to make, easy to maintain, and simple to extend.
• Understand the strategies for making games fun to play and easy to build.

About the Author

Rex van der Spuy is a video game designer and writer. He’s written Foundation Game Design with Flash, Advanced Game Design with Flash and Foundation Game Design with AS3.0. Rex has designed games and done interactive interface programming Agency Interactive (Dallas), Scottish Power (Edinburgh), DC Interact (London), Draught Associates (London), and the Bank of Montreal (Canada). He also builds game engines and interactive interfaces for museum installations for PixelProject (Cape Town). In addition, he created and taught advanced courses in game design for the Canadian School of India (Bangalore, India). When not writing about games, making them, or playing them, he amuses himself by building “experimental, autonomous, self-aware, multi-cellular parallel universes” out of “shoe boxes, scotch tape, spare milk bottle caps and bits of string”. He claims, that this is “a lot more entertaining than you might think,” but we’re skeptical.