Starting a game in HTML5

So recently I have become interested in HTML5 and the new Canvas tag from a development perspective. Browser adoption is starting to catch up to the standard (although Firefox's Canvas element is still slow compares to IE9 and Chrome which is a bit lame) and HTML5 is starting to look like an attractive game/simulation development option.

My plan is to build a top down, tile based game with A* pathfinding and smooth tile scrolling. I want it to have all mouse driven interactions (following the golden rule of casual development), simple vector based graphics (created in Inkscape), and simple and laid back game play.

Starting development in such an early technology can be a bit of a dark alley. Sure there are some enterprising developers creating some game libraries for HTML5 development (such as MelonJS) and some examples/tutorials on the subject, but over all the whole thing feels a bit mysterious.

My intention is to create my own simple game framework built directly on HTML5 without using an existing game library for HTML5 and without resorting to any conversion technologies. The idea behind this is that I am not making a game for the sake of creating a game, but for the sake of learning the technology of HTML5 for multiple potential applications.

My current progress has looked at how to structure the game and what sort of IDE to use to comfortably write HTML5 content. I have settled upon Netbeans 7 as my IDE of choice. It supports HTML5 editing and has all of the tools that I need. I simply created a php project and removed any files it generated/configured my ftp settings to automatically upload the files to my webserver. It allows me to remain organized in my coding!

The only external library I am using as of late is jQuery. This is simply too helpful to pass up as it really simplifies a great number of javascript tasks such as trying to include external js files in js files (I was looking for a way to do include style statements to make the code more manageable, but some structural changes needed to be made because the call is asynchronous).

Here is a wip shot from the current title screen that I am using for testing. The game centers around a smiley face (simple art assets) on a quest to gain happiness after losing the love of its life in an IM conversation.



Here is some of the very basic and potentially horrible html5 im using:





Journey of a Grin







<h2>Journey of a Grin</h2>

Unfortunately your browser does not support the HTML5 canvas element!