It’s been a while since I started making web games in JavaScript. In this post, I’d like to share tips that would be helpful for beginners wanting to do the same.
Learn JavaScript Outside of Game Development Alongside HTML and CSS
This might sound obvious, but I really recommend learning to program before learning game dev. For JavaScript, that means learning the fundamentals of the language and how it integrates with HTML and CSS.
Considering that JavaScript is primarily used on the web to make websites and web apps, I recommend that your first few projects be web related and not game related. Game development has a lot of domain specific knowledge to grasp. A beginner would easily be overwhelmed with having to learn programming, programming in JavaScript, HTML and CSS to make the web page on which the JavaScript will run and game development all at once.
You don’t have to learn everything in JavaScript either, just the core fundamentals. You’ll learn more obscure features during practice when building projects.
Learn That There are Two JavaScripts, The one That Runs in Node.js and The one That Runs on The Web
For some time, JavaScript was relegated to a scripting language used for making web pages built using HTML and CSS, interactive. However, when the Node.js runtime was released, it allowed devs to run JavaScript outside of the browser on their machines, similarly to other languages like C#, Python, etc… This enabled JavaScript to be used for more than just websites.
There were now two major environments where JavaScript could run, in the browser and in Node.js.
When creating a server side or command line application, you would write JavasScript that would run directly on the user’s machine with Node.js. However, even for JavaScript that was intended to run on a web page, you would still use Node.js, not to run the code but to install tools useful for transforming your JavaScript before it runs on a web page.
This is due to an innovation that was brought with Node.js: The ability to download packages directly from a package manager called NPM (stands for Node Package Manager). The days where you needed to import a library by linking it using a script tag in your HTML were over.
... continue reading