Thursday 7 March 2013

Meteor Blast HTML5 - Game Complete

In my last post talked about my HTML5 game Meteor Blast, now I've finished it and released it in both tge Chrome Web Store and Play Store for Android

To start with the good, I'm pretty happy with the Chrome version. It's a new-style packaged app which was easy to create, 99% of the code was unchanged, the only unsupported feature of the web version was localStorage which needed changing to Chrome storage, which took a bit of code restructuring but works in a similar way.

As a packaged app it works offline by default, and launches in a standalone window, which looks more app-like than a hosted app. I developed the game to work with touch so I expect this version works nicely on the Chromebook Pixel, but I haven't had a chance to try it yet.

Less successful was the port to Android via Phonegap. It took a long time to get this working, I hit some resizing bugs that I had to edit the Cordova source code to get around. I managed to get performance on my Nexus 4 reasonable by stripping out some effects but it's far too laggy on most other devices to call it a success. I can't say for sure that I optimized the game as much as possible, but I wouldn't attempt making an Android game with Phonegap again - at least not one that requires a good frame rate to play well.

So my dreams of developing fully cross-platforms with HTML5 have been slightly tarnished, but I'll be interested to look into other solutions for porting across platforms.