Intro to Chapter 10: Game Development

I do hope to finish this game since I have it quite close, but I need to finish the book first. I considered using sprites for the ships, star, and missiles, but decided against it to practice rotation and see what canvas could handle. Also, the original version didn't exactly use image sprites, so I stuck with entirely two-dimensional shapes in canvas. Anyway, on with a couple of paragraphs:

Ajax-driven game development brings together the challenges of scalability and performance, but often allows developers to push the boundaries of current web technologies. Just as with console or computer games, users will put up with stricter minimum requirements in order to have the better experience with the more advanced technologies available, properly used.

This chapter will focus on Universe Conflict, an implementation of Space War!, one of the first digital computer games, created in 1961 on the PDP-1 computer, as recreated using the canvas HTML5 element and Ajax (shown below). This allows the two players to battle each other from different machines, as opposed to the same one as in the original and ports since then. The game has very simple rules and a simple setup. Two ships, each controlled by a user, try to shoot each other without getting pulled into a star in the center of the screen.

Sidenote: you can see the rendering in action in this simple demo of Universe Conflict, which just allows you to click a button and fly each ship around the screen using the arrow keys. Not terribly exciting, since I took the networking bits out, haven't created gravity, and only works in Opera and Firefox for now (Safari has some flickering and keyboard issues that I just haven't bothered to fix yet), but it should give a decent idea of how canvas can handle animation. I haven't tested this a whole lot, so if it sucks for you, let me know.