HTML5 Games using Animate CC Overview

A long time ago, back in 2003-2006, I wrote a virtual book for Blazing Games which covered the creation of ten Flash games. When we closed down Blazing Games in September of 2014 the IP rights to the games on the site went to me, including the Flash Game Development book. With browsers moving away from Java (right now the Java games won’t work) and Flash (in 2020 support for Flash will cease), all these older games need to be moved to HTML5 which uses JavaScript. Browsers are also starting to support Web Assembly, which may be a book on it’s own depending on how well received this book and the follow up HTML Games using Create.js are received. When I say HTML5 I am talking about the combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript which happens to be the common usage.

As Flash is dying or dead (depending on when you read this), games created for it need to be ported to another language so I decided that it would be a good idea to revisit the 10 games that made up the book and port them to HTML5. Five of them (NIM, Nightmare Maze, Video Poker, Pent Up Anger, and String Along) were ported taking advantage of Animate CC to port them to HTML5. The other five games in the book will be covered in a second book HTML5 Games using Create.js which can be developed without purchasing any additional tools for your computer. This book will cover Bomb-NIM, Cribbage Square, 3D Tic-Tac-Toe, Lights Out, and “Dragon and the Sword”.

Chapter 1: Introduction – An overview of the book, and what you are reading right now. I am skipping a bunch of less-revevant sections of this chapter.

Chapter 2:Flash is Dead! Long Live Animate – Quick look at the history of Flash, how the new Animate CC is a replacement for Flash, and what Create.js has to do with all of this when creating JavaScript games using Animate CC.

Chapter 3: Procedural JavaScript – A very quick course on the procedural programming aspects of JavaScript with a brief look at how it compares to ActionScript.

Chapter 4: NIM – We finally get to our first game, which is a variant of NIM. This game tries to do as much as possible with Animate and as little as possible with JavaScript.

Chapter 5: Objects in JavaScript – we get into the object oriented nature of JavaScript which will be used for creating our own objects and a library that can be shared between similar games.

Chapter 6: Nightmare Maze – The game that became the first episode of my 46 part One of those Weeks game is created as we look at adventure games.

Chapter 7: Card Classes – Creating code to be shared between multiple games is a common activity so this will be demonstrated by creating a card class.

Chapter 8: Video Poker – The Card class that was created in the previous chapter is used to create a virtual Video Poker machine.

Chapter 9: Pent Up Anger – Making base game of Pent Up Anger

Chapter 10: Pent Up AI – How to create artificial players for a game is demonstrated by adding computer opponents to the Pent Up Anger game.

Chapter 11 String Along – Arcade games are demonstrated using a variant of the classic snake game.

Chapter 12: Conclusion – A summary of what was covered and a look at the second book in this series.