The Death of an HTML5 Game Breeds an Open Source Project

colinneagle writes "German social gaming company Wooga has thrown in the towel on its HTML5 project after seeing little return on the increasing amount of effort put into its Magic Land Island game. Some early success convinced Wooga to devote additional resources to the game, which was launched in October of last year. However, 'As the project continued to progress, so did the industry. Whilst the benefits of an open platform future are clear for games developers, it became clear halfway through Magic Land Island's development cycle that the technology wasn't yet ready for mainstream exposure.' The announcement sheds some interesting light on HTML5, as Wooga hardly holds back on any of the details behind the game's failure. The biggest barriers to HTML5's entry to the mainstream include internet connectivity and limitations on sound. The consensus? The time for HTML5 will come; it's just not quite there yet. In the meantime, Wooga has made the game open source so other HTML5 developers can learn from it."

Re:Yep.

[geekd]

I have written one HTML5 game http://magigames.org/runestone_defense.html [magigames.org] and I am working on another.

HTML5 runs fine on a PC, but is too slow on my iPhone 4s and my iPad.

I chose HTML5 because I wanted to brush up on my Javascript. If I wanted to make $, I'd have chosen Flash.

Making sure everything works in various browsers / OS is not too bad. I test in IE9, Chrome and Firefox on Windows 7, Chrome, Firefox and Safari on Mac, and Chrome Firefox on Linux. It can be time consuming to try them all, but once I nailed down the differences (mouse events in IE, most notably) it wasn't too bad.

Re:But Flash is dead, right?

[drkstr1]

Did you not read what I said? Our app runs better than all of our compition, even the ones written in Objective C! If I needed it to squeeze out every bit of performance, I would absolutely use Objective C. But if my app runs great already, why would I tie myself to that ONE platform? I suspect you are one to make decisions on ideology, rather than choosing the right tool for the job, so again, more money for me.