At some point in the last month or so I became rather interested in the capabilities of HTML5 and the &lang canvas &rang tag. This was in part because I'd heard a good deal of talk of HTML5 being a flash killer. While I don't really have anything against flash as a concept, I was very interested in having at my disposal the capabilities of flash without the hassle of actually working with flash.
Because I'm rather cheap about computer-related hobbies, I have been trying hard for a few years now to create web games without putting any money into it. This meant fiddling with mxmlc and later haxe. Although both were nice enough, I never had the patience or focus to get anywhere with either. Part of the problem is that the four to forty seconds it takes either to compile even the simplest flash file are easily taken up by becoming distracted with very random things on the internet. The other part, a need for an actual web server, set up either on my desktop or elsewhere, to serve up the flash content.
Both problems are conveniently absent from working with &lang canvas &rang and javascript. The speed with which I can check the effect my edits have a great focusing effect, and it doesn't seem at all a waste to reload a web page to check out two lines worth of edited code.
The result of this newfound focus is below, in the dash-lined box. It took around two weeks, with no previous knowledge of javascript or the HTML5 standard to get to that point, and in order to spend less time on my next effort, I want to document carefully the steps (and missteps) that went into making this simple game work.
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