So I spend my days running a small development studio focusing primarily on mobile devices at the moment, so as most people in the industry I’ve been looking forward to the iPhone SDK announcement that was expected at WWDC. And then we were told to write web 2.0 web pages and call them iPhone apps. Wow…just…wow. In the runnings for greatest finale of the week this end to the WWDC keynote is up there with the ending to The Sopranos. There’s no way to write games with AJAX, atleast not good ones is there?
Well actually, yeah you can…possibly.
Later versions of Safari support the wonderful Canvas object which can be used via javascript (technical details here) which allows you to handle drawing to a set space of the browser window. Most of the basic functions needed for a 2d game are there - you can clear the canvas, draw your images (backgrounds, characters etc.) and what not just fine. Throw in a timer for updates and you really have everything needed for 2d game development. I’m looking forward to trying this method out on an iPhone on the 29th (it’s certainly doable on the new Safari 3 beta, though the older version on my mac doesn’t like it as much) and I’ll report back then (most likely with a small test game).
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