Introduction

This is usually the part where books give a lengthy intro about HTML5 to increase their word count. This is not one of those books.

All you need to know about HTML5 is that it allows you to do stuff in your browser, regardless if it’s on a desktop PC or a mobile phone, without the need for extra plugins. And that includes making games. If you want a better intro to HTML5, head over to Dive Into HTML5.

As the title and cover of the book implies, we will introduce you to both HTML5 and game development by guiding you in making a shoot-em-up game similar to the classic video game 1942.

There are a number of HTML5 libraries and frameworks out there right now. For this afternoon workshop, we’ll be using Phaser, an open-source framework built on top of Pixi.js. It’s a higher-level framework: it’s bigger and may feel like you have much less control (i.e. magical) compared to other frameworks, but at the same time, you need far less code to get things done and this makes it suitable for a short workshop such as this one.

Who is this book for?

This book is for people who want to learn the basic concepts behind creating games. As a workshop manual, it is also for experienced developers interested in introducing those concepts to those people. With these in mind, here are some possible setups for using HTML5 Shoot ‘em Up in and Afternoon:

• Self-study - AKA your run-of-the-mill tutorial where you just go through the book from cover-to-cover. Web developers with extensive experience in JavaScript will find the code in this book easy and fairly straightforward. Novice programmers might not get the same pleasant experience, especially those who have not yet coded in JS enough to understand its quirks.
• Pair or Small-group Study - Spend an afternoon teaching game programming to your daughter / cousin / nephew. It’s recommended to go through the book once or twice beforehand to make sure things go smoothly. (Unless of course you want to expose the kid to the reality of “spend minutes or hours looking for the copy-paste typo” software development.)
• Workshop - What this book was originally written for. Gather a group of people interested in making games in HTML5 and go through the tutorial at a slower pace. An experienced instructor (i.e. worked with Phaser for some time, gone through the tutorial multiple times) can lead a workshop of 20 without a hitch, but for larger groups or groups with less programming experience, you may need to get a few extra mentors to help.