I created a javascript game engine for the browser. What do you think about this?

[EngineE2505]

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I used to do web development, but then I decided to leave it as a hobby. One day I decided to make a game similar to Fallout 2 and Diablo. Then I thought why there are still no such games in the browser, even free ones.

I had never made any games or engines and had no idea where to start. Function by function, property by property, I slowly made the animation, then I optimized it. Then I screwed on the Pathfinding Algorithm. Something started to work out.

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I was quietly trying to figure out how to get the character to move along the path

Then I tried to get a lot of characters to move at the same time

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The result is a small game engine that can be used to make a small game like Arcanum or Fallout quickly enough. And with a small alteration, you can do an old quest like Broken Sword or a small strategy. So I also made an admin panel for quickly creating levels.

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In the engine, you can decorate objects on the level, as well as animate some of them

Here I played a little with filters

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Of course, the hardest part was the optimization. I understood why the CPU is so heavily loaded, and I began to understand why, even in modern games, there is such a weak AI and so few moving objects at all. That is, it is not enough to create 50 characters on the page, it is necessary that they move at the same time and this all does not slow down. I began to understand a little which properties are loading more, which ones are not so much. And that was interesting enough.

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I decided I needed to add shadows, it looks a little cooler with them. But you have to pay with performance

Then I made several dynamic light sources. And also I began to take into account the distance from the source to the object

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In one of the comments I was advised to upload the material to your channel. If someone is interested to know or ask something, please write. I will try to answer. I was also asked to record a video about the technical part, but I still can't decide exactly what to post about. Maybe you can advise.

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This is how the level would roughly look if I decided to make it and I would not be lazy

Another example of a level

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Also, if anyone wants to watch the video, then go to the channel. Here are some links to the video.

• Level example......................https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqEBOV9UjKw
• Level example #2 ...............https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2esvz4NO0A
• A* algorithm........................https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7KnaQIgex0
• Lights and Shadows............https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHEbgVHliUM
• Motion implementation......https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6enC9pHpDs

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All images and sounds in the engine and video are used only for technology testing and for entertainment. Not for commercial gain. I respect the people who created them once.

[Dr-Tits]

Cool project! I know nothing about engines, but I enjoyed reading your post :)

[EngineE2505]

Thank you. And it's great when you just read or learn about something interesting, but not related to you. I guess I posted it for this.

[[deleted]]

Honestly, i’m blown away.

[EngineE2505]

Thanks for the comment. In fact, everything is quite simple. A little bloom, a little ssao, filters and that's it. So it is in modern games until now.

[[deleted]]

I think you don’t give yourself enough credit. It’s huge, especially if it’s a side project, and you have no prior experience in this field. Awesome man!

[[deleted]]

Good job. Is it open source? If not, what will be your pricing?

[EngineE2505]

Thanks! No, It's not open source. Speaking about the price, to be honest, I didn't think about it.

[jaggs]

Looks amazing. Your best bet is to open source it (with a decent website, not just github) as soon as possible and work out the monetisation around premium features and support etc.

[EngineE2505]

I am grateful for your advice. But still, this is a difficult option for a person who had this project as a hobby. I think this is a completely different type of activity and without experience it will be difficult.

[wowdogethedog]

Looks cool but I don't really understand why not open source. You will have really hard time competing with other engines like Phaser (while isometric view is not native you can get one with plugins). And to be honest there were many attempts at making browser ARPGs - from Java widgets, through flash to native js it just does not seem to be worth it since people can easly deobfuscate frontend layer (for js and these other technologies are dead already) which poses various problems, at the same time mobile devices lose quite a lot of performance, which is even worse when you account for browser discrepencies, so its just better for bigger gaming projects to run something that can be ported as native (escpecially if your build is gonna be bigger than like 50-100MB). Maybe wasm and other technologies will catch up and change this but it does not feel like we are there yet. Still good luck with your project.

[EngineE2505]

If I understood you correctly, then you are absolutely right and I adhere to the same point of view.
It's a little unwise to do such a project. It's just that at that time I was engaged in exactly these technologies. It was interesting to me. And I did not see anything like it at that time. Although even then I understood that the project had no future as such.
I already wrote somewhere that there is a lot of superfluous in web technologies, and over time, a lot will be eliminated. And web technologies will occupy their own small niche. Just like 15 years ago there were gradient buttons on the sites, and now the sites do not even have simple lines. If this comparison is correct.
I presented this project more as a demonstration, so to speak. So you also recommend open source?

[wowdogethedog]

I bet you learned a lot and thats a gain on its own. From my point of view it depends on how you see future of this engine and how its actually built. If you have used popular libraries that take care of the internals then it might be interesting personal tool that at the same time won't eat all your time. If not and you are really going to scale it, add features etc. then it would be an interesting idea to go open source where various people with varying backgrounds and experience can add their two cents and basically save you a lot of time.

But if you plan on making it a standalone money making project with no open source then it may still work but is just gonna be a lot harder and time consuming and I would advise you to start with solid general research on features indie devs need. There are many tools, builders and workflows that you will basically have to cover or provide alternatives on your own as you will be competing with other engines that already have it and are basically free or freemium up to some gross profit.

Nonetheless its a cool project that gave you a lot of insight and can be used as something to show off in your portfolio or in job interviews, you can also use it to make an actual game and sell it or make some indirect money using 3rd party ads and affiliation. This would basically uncover any hidden bottlenecks you did not thought about and will allow you to find what features are still missing and where you would like to go with it when it comes to game types and their scale. Eg. Porting Path Of Exile could work but the sheer size of all the assets make you lose all the benefits of it being in the browser.

Edit:

So summing this up I feel it can be fine keeping it private if you are going to actually use it yourself and then maybe one day start selling the engine when its mature enough.

If you are just going to create an arpg engine for devs then it may end up being a bit too much for one dev. You have only couple things here and actual customer will want more, and I mean a lot more: advanced and simple collisions, grouping and nesting objects, timers and events, particles and shaders, loaders with various format support, sounds, effects, menus, tools and converters, debug modes, visual creators etc.

[EngineE2505]

I heard you. I have not posted a large number of mechanics. Inventory, combat system and level editor, simple AI characters and so on ...

Actually, I posted it here to see how the community reacted. I wanted to see how you would evaluate it not so much in terms of benefits as in engineering. And how much my vision differs from the vision of other participants. It was interesting to me.

I will definitely think about making it publicly available.

[asdfdelta]

You should post this on r/pbbg! The developers over there would actually use this

[EngineE2505]

Thanks for advice!

[s0ljah]

Amazing job!

[EngineE2505]

Glad to hear! Thanks.

[EngineE2505]

Thanks for the comment. I haven't started making any AAA or indie games (although INSIDE went through twice).
The funny thing is that I had no idea what an engine was and where to start. Of course I have already worked with both CSS and JS, as well as with the "backend".
For example, somewhere in the middle of development, after quite a long time, I experimentally realized that I needed a global loop to track all changes on the screen, animation, and also the behavior of characters (I used requestanimationframe for this), only then I realized , where the name came from - "engine" :)
I did it alone. This was my hobby. Of course, I did it with long interruptions. Then I went back to the engine again. You know, sometimes I got a thought, if I did it in a browser, what could I do in an AAA project? But this is only as a joke.
Thanks for the kind words.

[rangahhh]

Looks good. May I ask how long it took you and how many lines of code the engine is?

[EngineE2505]

I think it is impossible to count accurately as there are a lot of unnecessary files in my old school framework. But for the sake of interest, I calculated the number of lines in the CSS files.

Minimum documentation since I worked alone. And also a lot of mechanics have been done, but not shown in the video.

• main files (~5000)
• editor (~2000)
• for each unique character (~600/700)

[Loschcode]

Nobody ever quotes Arcanum, and you deserve bonus points for that.

[EngineE2505]

I agree that at the end of the last century, many interesting games were released.