Hydra is a Javascript game engine for mobile browsers. It's been used in several commercial HTML5 games:
- Block Dream (source)
- Fruit Link (source)
- Snow Bound (source)
- Blast Effect (source, WebKit only for now)
- Playstore Games (Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and Vietnamese card games)
Work on Hydra has stopped, but the lessons learned on this project are going toward Flambe, a framework for rapid development of mobile and desktop games.
Hydra aims to be fast:
- Animations are implemented as CSS transitions, which can be hardware accelerated.
- All game updates are performed on a single setInterval callback.
- Games are compiled with Google's Closure Compiler in "advanced" mode, allowing aggressive inlining and dead-code elimination.
Hydra also aims to be functional:
- Animations can programmatically be started, paused, and sequenced together.
- Games are composed from scenes, entities (which live in scenes) and tasks (which act upon entities).
- Has the usual collection of utility functions and classes, supplemented by the massive Closure Library.
- Needless abstractions are avoided, you should still know how to work with the DOM and skin your game with CSS.
Hydra currently has three heads:
- iOS 3+ (iPhone, iPod touch, iPad)
- Android 2.1+
- Desktop browsers: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera
Hydra is still undocumented, filled with broken glass, and will eat your first born child. If you still want to try to tame it:
Download the Closure submodule:
git submodule init
git submodule update
Use Rake to build an example project:
cd projects/chain
rake
The "chain" (Blast Effect) and "ski" (Snow Bound) games are probably the best places to learn your way around by example.
rake by itself will build the entire game for all supported browsers. For
development, you can use rake js to only build for the browser specified by
DEFAULT_TARGET. rake css will build only the CSS.