Professional HTML5 Mobile Game Development

Considering HTML5 from a Mobile Perspective

One of the phrases that you hear a lot these days is “mobile first.” This phrase means considering mobile devices as your primary target and considering support for additional browsers later on. This might not seem obvious with mobile browsers, as of 2012, barely in the double digits of overall usage, but it’s more than just a numbers game. Considering mobile devices first means you start with a number of significant constraints and work out from there.

Mobile devices have small screens and screens of different sizes and aspect ratios. They have limited processing power and bandwidth and often have limited storage. All these constraints force you, as a developer, to optimize your web app—make it more adaptable; make it load faster and be more performant. Not surprisingly, these are all things that can bring a better experience to users with desktop browsers as well. Web developers have been a bit lazy, viewing their projects on 30-inch monitors connected to fat Internet pipes and running on four-core multithreaded processors. Most likely a good portion of your target demographic for casual web games doesn’t share the same hardware specifications. Considering the mobile usage of your site as a primary consideration can help you move away from that attitude.

Understanding the New APIs

The family of specifications tied together as “HTML5” is a large family, and some pieces you couldn’t care less about from a game perspective. Are advances ...