barebones HTML5 game template

This template supplies basic infrastructure that a good web game can be built on, so that as the game developer, you can just get on with writing that game.

fast start

• includes Toji's game-shim polyfills to smooth over browser differences
• easy to pull in some key libraries from github using James Burke's volo

easy 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

it should be easy to build higher-level, more specialized templates (e.g. for a simple canvas game, a game based on the Gladius engine, or an MMORPG) on top of this one.

prerequisites

• be sure node.js and npm are installed and in your PATH

• (optional) if you wish to deploy to github pages, ensure that git is installed and configured

• Use npm to install volo into your path, if it's not there already:

  npm install -g volo

let's get started

Create and configure a new copy of this game template:

> volo create myNewGame gladiusjs/html5-game-template
Downloading: https://nodeload.github.com/gladiusjs/html5-game-template/zipball/master
Downloading: https://nodeload.github.com/toji/game-shim/zipball/master

Take a look around:

> cd myNewGame
> ls
README.md       package.json    tools           www
node_modules    test            volofile

Add any libraries that you intend to use. volo uses github's search API to find them and grabs the latest released version.

> volo add three.js
Using github repo "mrdoob/three.js" for "three.js"...
Downloading: https://raw.github.com/mrdoob/three.js/master/build/Three.js
Installed github:mrdoob/three.js/master at js/three.js

> volo add stats.js
Using github repo "mrdoob/stats.js" for "stats.js"...
Downloading: https://raw.github.com/mrdoob/stats.js/master/build/Stats.js
Installed github:mrdoob/stats.js/master at www/js/lib/stats.js

Do any development you like, putting tests into the test/ directory infrastructure if you wish. (Not shown :-)

Build a minified version complete with an appcache file:

> volo appcache
(...)

Deploy the built version to the gh-pages branch of suitably named repo:

> volo ghdeploy
Log in to GitHub to complete action (your password is not saved. It is sent over SSL to GitHub and converted to an OAuth token)
GitHub user name: dmose
GitHub password: 
Contacting GitHub...
  (...)
To git@github.com:dmose/monkeyGame.git
e5dbfd4..1296c81  gh-pages -> gh-pages
GitHub Pages is set up. Check http://dmose.github.com/monkeyGame/ in about 10-15 minutes.

misc

• FAQ
• upcoming features (depending in part on user feedback): jshint, Mozilla Persona auth, Node.js server side piece

credits

Main developers: Dan Mosedale and James Burke

This template is based on, and still shares code with, James Burke's create-responsive-template for volo, and leans heavily on volo. Thanks to the contributors to both volo and create-responsive-template.

Thanks to Alan Kligman for helping crispify various parts of the the documentation and what we're shipping.

Thanks also to the authors of the following:

• node.js
• almond.js
• RequireJS
• r.js
• QUnit
• game-shim
• and, of course, git and github