As you’re building your own browsergame, you will stumble across a variety of technologies and approaches that you can use to set your game apart. Some creators use Javascript to achieve this through enhanced interfaces, and others build interesting gameplay mechanics.
One interesting element that has recently come into play in the realm of Javascript is the canvas element – it allows a user to draw whatever they want to inside of it, using nothing but Javascript. The canvas element is still in it’s infancy at the moment – and therefore, not supported 100% across every browser. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t do cool things with it(and Firefox 3 supports it, so there’s no reason not to encourage your users to upgrade).
Sebastian Schaetz, a Building Browsergames reader, has recently created something using the canvas element that I thought was pretty cool: a 3D starmap prototype.
You can take a look at the prototype itself here, and read Sebastian’s blog post about it here. It’s important to note that the code to create the starmap is open source, under an MIT license – which means that as long as you preserve the licensing information, you are free to do whatever you want to with the code.
Now, if you’re building a browsergame based around the mafia or a medieval-styled RPG, this might not be all that useful to you – but if you’re planning on building a game that’s space-oriented, you might want to keep this in mind.
Hey, have you built something cool that you think other browsergame creators could benefit from? Send me an e-mail about it at buildingbrowsergames@gmail.com!