Using the Right Tools

Today there are tons of resources available to the noob game developer.  From pre-made texture art, to 3D models, to physics engines, to full-blown game studio environments like Unity.  Although there are a lot of tools out there on the internet, it's difficult to narrow your search down to the essentials needed to get started.  Enter Web game development!  Just in the last few years, HTML5 web games have really taken off and the web platform is becoming a major contender in the graphics/game development world.  At first there was only Flash, and although there are some cool 2D Flash games out there, I wanted more - true 3D worlds in the browser. 

Recently, WebGL has made its way into the spotlight as a tool to make the browser come to life with 3D graphics.  One of the premiere examples is QuakeLive , which runs Quake III Arena-style graphics in the browser. This was the first game that truly opened my eyes to the possibility of the web browser as a 3D gaming platform.  However I wanted to start from scratch and create my own simple 3D games, but at the time, there were no tools to help me.

Three.js to the rescue!

Three.js is a library for rendering fast 3D graphics in your browser.  It was created with the web developer in mind - someone who could get simple web pages up and running, but maybe did not know a lot about graphics pipelines, vector math, rotation matrices, real-time controls, etc..   

Even if you do not know web development, you can follow my blog series.  I will try to take you by the hand, as much as I can, and walk you through every step from creating a simple web page template in a text editor, to using the basic set-up code for Three.js, to actually putting elements of a real game together for a finished product.