Today, we’re releasing version 0.1 of an HTML5 game template (the github repo). This template provides basic infrastructure so that as a game developer, you don’t need to do a bunch of busy work to get started: you can hit the ground coding. As no particular engine or framework is assumed, it is usable for any sort of game.

More details, from the README.md:

Fast Start Includes Toji’s game-shim polyfills to smooth over browser differences

Easy to pull in key libraries from github using James Burke’s volo Easy to Build & Deploy Builds minified game configured for browser appcache using UglifyJS and almond.js

Trivial to deploy to a live server (currently supports github-pages) Default Best Practices Help Your Codebase Scale

Structured for maintainability using RequireJS

Includes pre-configured QUnit test harness Easy to Specialize

Higher-level, specialized templates can easily be built on top of this. We will build one specifically for the Gladius engine in the near future. One could imagine others like a side-scroller template, or a simple canvas game for new JS developers.

See the “let’s get started” documentation to get a quick sense of how it all fits together.

Note: This template is currently focused entirely on the browser-based pieces of a game. Making it easy for a game to offer a Node-based server-side component is likely to be in scope in the fairly near future.

Your Thoughts & Feedback

We’d be grateful for all feedback about this template, whether in blog comments or github issues, or pull requests. To help make this template more useful, we’d especially love to get your thoughts on a couple of specific issues:

Would you prefer to be responsible for your own game loop, or would you prefer to use a default gameloop provided by the template? Please add comments to this github issue.

If you’ve worked on an HTML5 game, what did you find to be the most annoying hurdle when getting started? Please add comments to this github issue.

Next Steps

We’ll be evaluating the feedback we get, prioritizing issues into the 0.2 github issue milestone, and then digging into another iteration, to be available in the next several weeks. Feel free to join us in IRC in #games on irc.mozilla.org if you want to discuss further.