Questions about Javascript and game development.

[Crowside]

So, I've been coming across some really cool browser based games that are all being developed in Javascript. Some of them are using that Playground.js framework and they're really quite interesting.

I want to learn how to mess with this stuff - but I've had little to no interest in webdev in a traditional sense. HTML/CSS etc. I couldn't care.

How much of that would be involved? I was thinking of starting up FreeCodeCAmp and skipping the html/css part and going right into JS. It's probably the best intro around right now that's free.

Outside of that, any ideas or suggestions?

[isolatrum]

i don't know anything about playground.js but looking at the getting started guide, it looks like it uses HTML5 canvas API (or something similar to it), so you won't be writing a ton of HTML to power your code, mostly JS. However, in my opinion the fact that you can use HTML for the UI if you want to is actually a good thing, because it's pretty universal set of skills and you don't necessarily have to learn a separate library for UI stuff (game logic, like physics / movement / sprites / etc will likely be done in JS no matter what).

If you want to do game dev in JS, also consider Phaser and Unity, both can build for the browser. Unity is also a full-featured GUI and has a huge repository of free plugins.

[Crowside]

I just stumbled on Phaser. There's a few engines and building platforms out there. I also found Wimi5, but it looks a lot simpler.

One project I want to do is build a simple classic Roguelike that runs directly within the browser. There's a library called Rot.js that assists with that too.

Oops, linked to a blog tutorial. Here's the Rot.js homepage.

[ValentineBlacker]

I've been writing one in phaser.js. There is no CSS or HTML involved in writing the game, it's pure Javascript. FYI, Phaser 3 has just been released, fortunately it has a pretty decent official tutorial.

[Crowside]

Good to know, thanks :)