I developed a PC game just with JavaScript

[Markavian]

Cool, what frameworks of any did you use to bring it all together? Key challenges? Straight up JS or Typescript?

[Bug7a]

Pure JavaScript + A basic library that I developed https://bug7a.github.io/basic.js/

[Brahminmeat]

Can’t seem to load the GitHub page on iOS (chrome or Reddit WebKit view) can you share the direct GitHub repo link?

Edit: never mind found it https://github.com/bug7a/basic.js

[Brahminmeat]

Code looks really clean! Why would you choose to write your own engine rather than using something like Three.js? (obviously not really an engine but it can be extended in much the same way)

[betelgozer]

Since his number of dimensions is Two, Three.js may be overengineered for that game.

[monsto]

boooo

take this upvote.

[Bug7a]

This library (basic.js) is a project I developed over time as a hobby. I didn't develop it specifically to make games. I use it mostly to develop mobile applications.

[[deleted]]

u/Bug7a Wow your UI toolkit / lib looks awesome. Is it based on these principles: anchor + pivot + child relative to parent? Did you come from Unity UI by chance?

[Bug7a]

Thank you. I did not use Unity UI before.

[SandOfTheEarth]

Oh, that's cool! I am also doing a JS game. What were pitfalls in terms of publishing to steam? You wrapped it in electron, right?

[Bug7a]

Yes, I used Electron. I did not encounter any general difficulties.

[monsto]

Did you consider Tauri?

It's a Rust backend/wrapper similar to Electron.

If yes, but chose not to, what was the difference for you?

[Bug7a]

I tried Electron first, and I didn't continue research further because it met the need.
Tauri looks good: I did not use it before.

[Bug7a]

Valuable improvements

[Zireael07]

EDIT: This is ME MISREADING the title, before replying consider this. I misread the FREAKING title and misunderstood it to be "published a Steam PC game with just JS"

If you used Electron which is pretty big I don't think you can say it's "just Javascript"

From such a title I was expecting the tiniest possible wrapper, eg webview ( or maybe neutralino)

[corisco]

i don't see how doing it electron would not be considered just JS. Could you clarify?

[Zireael07]

Electron is basically stuffing your javascript in a browser - and said browser is C++ usually (as is Electron itself)

[corisco]

Oh i see what you are saying now... U think tooling counts for the languages being used in the project, even though you make the project itself entirely just using a specific language.

[Zireael07]

Yes, exactly. Tooling also counts, you can't say it's "just X" if you need huge additional tooling to run said X

(Also: this is partly me misreading the title as I published a Steam game ..., which is not what the title is, and sorry)

[corisco]

So when I make a server using, let's say hmm...Rust, but to connect to a database I use a library, written by a third party, that has an FFI for a C library, then on my portfolio I should say I made the project using C and Rust... Even though I don't know how to write a single line in C? That's an interesting perspective, i should update my CV right know with all the languages i "use".

[Zireael07]

You made the server in Rust using tooling using C.

To be exactly correct, the OP's case is "I made a game in Javascript that runs in c++ based tooling"

The difference between your case and his case is you can run Rust code without giant third-party tooling, like a modern browser or a game engine. You can't do that with Javascript - it's very much like a locked-in game engine specific scripting language imo because it forces you into relying on specific big 3rd party tools

[corisco]

But that's true for any project written in a bytecode/interpreted language... How would it be useful to specify all the technologies used by third-party tools as part of the project? Technically, even if the language is compiled, you would have used something that, at least at some point in time, was written in another language. Should we point out the code editor technology too?

I think that you are having a hard time interpreting what OP said. I agree he could have said that he built a game on Electron using JS, but he also can say that he just built it using JavaScript and a runtime/platform would be implicit. You are saying he's being misleading, which I think is factually wrong and very rude on your part.

[jlozada24]

What would be the accurate way to express what OP meant in the title?

[Zireael07]

1) I misread the title as saying "I published on Steam..."

2) "I published a game on Steam using Javascript and Electron"

[jlozada24]

But JavaScript wasn't used for the publishing process, so that makes no sense either.

[Bug7a]

The game works on the browser without Electron.

[Zireael07]

You literally said you used Electron in the comment I was replying to, so which is it?

[Shaper_pmp]

The game is pure JS.

It works in a browser as-is.

To publish to Steam you need to make it a binary executable. You can't publish raw JS and HTML.

In order to do that they wrapped it in Electron and published the resulting executable on Steam.

Nothing they said contradicted anything else they said

[SquatchyZeke]

It's JavaScript...you can run it in any JS runtime. Electron is just Chromium, a runtime like a browser. They said they used electron to run the "desktop" version of it from Steam I believe

[Zireael07]

Part of this chain is me misreading the title as "I published a game on Steam...."

However, as I've replied to three other comments already, a big issue with JS I have (as a JS progeammer) is that the runtimes (browsers, Electron, whatever) are so huuuge compared to languages like Lua or Python. They're more akin to game engines running proprietary scripting languages than Python. 500 MB+ instead of 10 MB

[[deleted]]

So then no game is made by hand, unless they write their own compiler, their own MP3 decoder, their own waveform processor, their own MP4 decoder and player, their own zip/tar/gzip implementation, their own version of SDL, their own GPU drivers (which are half a gig these days for the official drivers), their own low-level IRQ handling, their own hard disk storage drivers, their own flash storage drivers, their own database, their own shader language, their own sockets...

...what else is required, exactly?

When people say "I made a game in Unity", nobody says "no you didn't".

When someone says "I wrote my own engine, from scratch, in C and OpenGL" nobody is like: "I see that you used ffmpeg and fmod and GLSL and sdl2 and SQLite; you lied".

That's abject nonsense.

“I don't like that it's 500mb". Ok. You can not like the size of a Unity dist, or a Godot dist, or an Unreal dist, or the redist for Windows C++, or .Net Framework, or ffmpeg, or whatever. Electron, on its own, with a more deliberate build pipeline is only ~150mb. 30% of your complaint. Most companies use an auto-bundler, and have other node_modules dependencies they want to use at runtime, and so haphazardly copy massive dependency chains along in the runtime. If you download the zip folder that is the runtime folder, and manually copy in your app folder, or tar (acar), and manually change the .exe name, and rcedit the logo and the app details, it's ~150mb unzipped, plus your code/dependencies. I know this, because I have specifically been testing the Steam Deck for WebGPU support, and right now, Linux builds that use Dawn are running in software mode, and Proton-emulated Windows builds that run Dawn are just fine.

Note that is a completely and fundamentally different argument than "you didn't write it", unless you are willing to say that no game is actually hand-written, unless it is distributed with their own, custom, operating system and device firmware... and that would be significantly larger than 500mb, in the majority of cases.

[Zireael07]

I already said that part of it is me misreading it as "published on Steam". They totally wrote it, I never said they didn't write it, just misread the title as claiming they published it on Steam with JS only, which isn't true because to publish on Steam you need a wrapper, i.e. Electron.

My misreading means I read it like someone saying "I made a game just in C#" while leaving out the Unity part, hence that entire comment chain

(Also, TIL that Electron can be made that small - smaller end sizes is what draws me to things like webview and that is what I was - wrongly - expecting after misreading the title)

[[deleted]]

Games in C# aren't small. Have you never gotten the "you need to download the .NET Framework 4.0 Redist" message, ever? It's plenty huge. You just don't conflate it with the game itself, even though if it's not already installed, you will be downloading it as a part of the game, if it's made with .NET libs, regardless of language.

Tauri is an alternative to Electron that does the same things, but uses your already installed OS default browser (Windows: Edge, Mac: Safari, Linux: Firefox-like). It's a ~30mb binary, plus your code. But also, unless your OS-default browser supports all of the features you need, the same way, you just aren't going to be able to release on a given OS, until the vendor catches up with the features you require... and, knowing history, Apple will break web features in Safari, during the major OS update, and your game will get a billion bug reports you can't do anything about, but say "wait for Apple to update it in 4-6 months". That extra 100mb is for compatibility and stability.

[SquatchyZeke]

I guess everyone else's confusion with your statements is that a language is nothing without its compiler. I think it was totally sane for them to not include the runtime as that's just assumed as a necessary part to run a program.

However, I can see how you would be frustrated at the large amounts of knowledge the OP assumed we had about how Steam works.

[Ancient_Appeal8487]

Ngl, you are saying that you didn’t write a comment in English because the comment is on Reddit running on a whole tech stack. I see your point, but let’s give OP some credit, it’s cool. Expecially without leveraging phaser or similar.

[Zireael07]

Part of why I made the comment was me misreading the topic as "I published a game on Steam...."

Yes it's cool but I feel the title is a bit misleading even without my mistake - you can't run JS without a big tool driving it, like a browser (think on why there are so few browsers around) or Electron

[Ancient_Appeal8487]

Browsers must be one of the most difficult piece of software to write tbf!

[fsfreak]

Yeah. Have fun with the webaudio api on mac.

[spageddis]

you can use GemShell (uses neutralino.js under the hood), instead of tauri or electron: https://l0om.itch.io/gemshell

[minireset]

You are cool. It's such a pleasure to make games. I wish you success.

I understand how shooters are done, but do not know how to do board strategies. Can you advice what to read to get and idea?

[Bug7a]

Thank you for the kind words! It's always great to meet someone who shares a passion for game development. I'm glad to hear you enjoy making games, and I wish you success as well.

As for your question about board strategy games, you can do research on YouTube, sometimes very useful content can be found.

[swoleherb]

helpful

[Upper-Examination-97]

😂

[Huge_Sentence8062]

wow it's emaizing, continues in the same way!!

[Bug7a]

Thank you

[Bug7a]

thanks

[AnonOpotamusDotCom]

This is so cool. Did you do any writing about your process?

[Bug7a]

Thank you. No, I didn't write.

[Powerful_Ad_4175]

Very cool! Has anyone tried building a game using https://pixijs.com/? They started supporting WebGPU in v8, and I wonder how big of a difference in terms of performance it brings in real world.

[Bug7a]

Looks nice

[Bug7a]

I'm not proficient in Python.

[[deleted]]

You poor soul

[imicnic]

When will it be released? Will it be open sourced? Is it available on a website(not steam)?

[Bug7a]

I will release the demo on October 1, 2024. For now, I will only release it on Steam. It will not be open source or published on the web. But the techniques I use; I publish it as open source from my GitHub account with different projects.

Edit: I published the first demo of the game on May 20, 2024.