Building your own games online can be profitable as well as fun. With Adobe’s long-standing Flash software nearing the end of its life and the world wide web transitioning over to HTML5, now is an excellent time to learn how to make games for this new framework. Learning to do this, can be quite difficult, but the HTML5 Game From Scratch Step By Step Learning JavaScript course from Udemy aims to make this task easier by teaching you the basics and walking you through building a simple game.
Course Overview
After a brief course introduction and along with an accompanying PDF document containing instructions on how to download the software required for this course, the lecturer gets started immediately by showing you how to set up the basic framework for creating your game using JavaScript. The two software utilities used in this course are Brackets and Codepen, both of which are free. The lecturer also provides you with source code and images along the way, which are required to build the test game for this course.
The game you ultimately create is essentially your own take on Pac-Man. After showing you how to load in the individual images for Pac-Man and his ghost adversaries, the lecturer begins to teach you how to program Pac-Man how to move. This may not sound particularly complicated, but it’s more complex than you probably expect. When you press up on the keyboard, obviously you would expect Pac-Man to move up, but how does the game know that? Configuring to work properly requires you to program the game to adjust Pac-Man’s numerical location on the screen. This course will also show you how to change the character image depending on the direction you move.
Later on, the course teaches you how to program a wide range of interactions between different characters and items in the game. This is how you will program Pac-Man and the ghosts to stay on screen and not disappear into oblivion. It’s also how you will be able to learn to program the ghosts to turn into just a set of eyes when Pac-Man eats them, or for Pac-Man to die when a ghost touches him.
Conclusion
The course moves along at a pace I personally feel is comfortable, and it felt easy to replicate the lecturer’s action while attempting to use the software myself. Just know that almost the entire course is spent in the Brackets code editing software. The lessons are also teaching you to type and manipulate code to make the game work how you want it to. At the same time, you will also be learning parts of the programing language. This isn’t the course’s primary purpose, but as you will be using the code to program your game you won’t have any choice but to learn some of it along the way.
If you have always wanted to learn how to make your own online game, then this course seems to be an excellent place to start. It won’t teach you how to make the next AAA gaming title, but you will learn to create relatively simple games, and as anyone that grew up with a Nintendo can attest, these too can be enormous fun.
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