Professional HTML5 Mobile Game Development

Using a Commercial Engine

Although there might seem to be a little incongruity to the idea of using a commercial engine on a platform all about standards and openness, there are significant benefits to using a commercial engine over an open-source one: a dedicated team working on the engine and better and more up-to-date documentation and tutorials (in general).

The most obvious downside to commercial engines is that they cost money; however, the currently popular HTML5 engines are relatively inexpensive (the cost of 1–2 console games if you want to put it in perspective) or will take a percentage of revenue once your game is making money, so cost shouldn’t be the largest concern you have.

The primary downsides of commercial engines revolve around the restrictions placed on development and distribution. Most of the HTML5 engines are licensed per developer, which means that anyone who helps you on your game needs to have a license as well. Second, although the nature of HTML5 means that you always have some sort of source code for the engine you could theoretically modify, for engines that rely on an IDE to build and export games, you may not have code that can easily be modified. Instead you need to work within the limits of the functionality baked into the engine.

Impact.js

One of the most popular commercial HTML5 engines out there, Impact is the product of a single developer, Dominic Szablewski, and was one of the earliest commercial HTML5 game engines to gain wide appeal. The ...