HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
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
engine is $99 per developer and is available at
http://impactjs.com
.
Impact comes with a powerful level editor called Weltmeister that enables you to easily create layered, par-
allax scrolling tile maps and place and edit entities (game objects).
Figure 26-1
shows the Weltmeister in action
with the jumpnrun demo provided with the engine.
Figure 26-1:
The Impact.js Weltmeister.
Impact is a programmer game engine, and although the Weltmeister is a great tool to create levels, most of
your game will be built in your code editor writing code and creating entities. Impact is designed around a clas-
sical inheritance model and a module system that makes it easy to manage dependency loading among objects.
When you are ready to release your game, Impact provides a system for packaging your game into a single
JavaScript file for release, a process Impact calls
baking
.
As you would expect from an HTML5 game engine, Impact is designed to play on mobile devices. Sz-
ablewski even went so far as creating a way to build and package your game in iOS and have the graphics run
using hardware-accelerated OpenGL instead of the mobile Safari canvas. This is called iOSImpact and enables
you to publish Impact games in the Apple App Store written entirely in HTML5. The mobile HTML5 company
AppMobi has used this technology to build its DirectCanvas open-source project, which is discussed in the next
chapter, to allow other game engines to publish natively on iOS.
