Selim Arsever - jQuery game development essentials

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• Performance of browsers' JavaScript engines has improved dramatically, with modern engines being ten times faster than the state of the art engines in 2008
• jQuery and other similar libraries made working with the DOM as painless as it can be
• Flash lost a lot of ground due, in part, to its absence on iOS
• W3C started work on many game-oriented APIs such as canvas, WebGL, and full-screen APIs

, jQuery for Games , provides an in-depth look at jQuery's functions that might be useful for game development.

, Creating Our First Game , implements a simple game with sprites, animation, and preloading.

, Creating Our First Game , with various techniques such as time-out inlining, keyboard polling, and HTML fragments.

, Looking Sideway s, codes a platformer game with tile maps and collision detection.

, Putting Things into Perspective , creates an orthogonal RPG with tile map optimization, sprite occlusion, and better collision detection.

, Looking Sideway s, by adding multiple levels using JSON and AJAX.

, Putting Things into Perspective , to support multiple players on multiple machines.

, Let's Get Social , integrates the platform game with Facebook and Twitter as well as creating a cheat-proof leaderboard.

, Putting Things into Perspective , for mobile devices and touch control.

, Making Some Noise , adds sound effects and music to your game with the audio element, the Web Audio API, or Flash.

One of the advantages of working with web technologies is that you won't need any complex or costly software to get you started. For strictly client-side games, you will only need your favorite code editor (or even a simple text editor, if you don't mind working without any syntax highlighting). If you haven't chosen any yet, there is plenty of free software around you that you could try, ranging from very old-school, such as VIM (http://www.vim.org/) and Emacs (http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/) to more modern, such as Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/) and Aptana (http://www.aptana.com/), Notepad++ (http://notepad-plus-plus.org/), or Komodo Edit (http://www.activestate.com/komodo-edit). These are only some of the available editors that you can find. For JavaScript, you don't need a very advanced editor, so just use the one you're more familiar with.