In early 2010 I made my first plane jam game called AF 337. I loaded it into GameMaker HTML5, pressed a button, and it was working in the browser, no extra effort required! I think it’s running a little slower than the native version, but I’m pretty pleased with the performance of a completely unoptimized port!
Granted, this is a VERY simple game. I tried the “one button port” approach with 9 of my GameMaker games, and only this one managed to be as simple as just pressing a button. I hope to report on more of the issues I’m having, but some of it so far has to do with Z-indexing and perhaps how it interrelates with code in the Draw event. I think. On the other hand, they’re fixing bugs daily, so maybe when I try again later it’ll work.
A really big issue I’m having right now is that sometimes a game will work in Windows, but in HTML5 it’ll just crash immediately. The problem is I have no way to really debug it when this happens. The code is all minified, so errors come back like “Undefined variable ‘kv’”, which isn’t helpful at all. What I’d like is a debug mode where I have access to the unminified JavaScript so I can use the great Webkit debug tools to track down issues. I spoke with Russell Kay of YoYoGames on Twitter about it and he said that there might be something coming soon to help with debugging.
(Note on 11/23/11: The above issue is now fixed in GameMaker HTML5. Woo!)
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Good game, I want to play it more but it crashed my browser twice already. This raises a major concern for me with GM HTML 5, which I’d like to use professionally, assurance of pro-quality debugging tools. If a game is crashing on some devices or browsers and there’s no comprehensive way to test this, it could be a business killer.
The other issue I see so far is lack of touch-support but I imagine both are going to be sorted out in the studio version.
Just keep in mind, I did literally zero optimization and almost no testing on this game. But yeah — once GM introduces better debugging features like the one I propose, that should be a lot better.
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