Mozilla has teamed up with Web design studio Little Workshop to develop a Web-based multiplayer adventure game called BrowserQuest. The game is built with standards-based Web technologies and is designed to be played within a Web browser.
With the technical capabilities offered by the latest standards, Web developers no longer have to rely on plugins to create interactive multimedia experiences and application-like user interfaces. As we reported earlier this month, modern standards are making the Web an increasingly viable platform for game development.
BrowserQuest, which is built with JavaScript and HTML5, is a compelling demonstration of how existing standards can be used to create browser games. It uses the HTML5 Canvas element to render a tile-based 2D world, HTML5 audio APIs to support sound effects, WebSockets to facilitate communication with the backend server, and localStorage to save the player's progress.
The game's remote backend, which enables the real-time multiplayer gameplay, was coded in JavaScript and runs on top of Node.js. The load is balanced across multiple Node.js instances on three separate severs. At the time this story was written, the backend was successfully handling over 1,900 simultaneous players. The status of the BrowserQuest backend can be monitored through the game's real-time dashboard interface.
The developers focused on using widely-supported standards so that the game would work well across a wide range of desktop and mobile browsers. It works just as well on a tablet device, for example, as it does on a desktop computer.
The future looks even brighter, as there are a number of pending Web standards that will greatly enhance support for building games on the Web in the future. Features like 3D graphics and support for game controller peripherals, for example, could eventually take the browser beyond the realm of casual gaming. You can refer to Mozilla's wiki to see an overview of the work that the organization is doing to improve browser-based gaming. For more details about BrowserQuest, see the Mozilla Hacks blog or check out the backend server code on GitHub.
