Alteil:Horizons is a groundbreaking HTML5-powered turn-based tactics game raising money on Kickstarter. The game is powered by CSS3 Animation and transitions, giving excellent hardware accelerated support across browsers and it uses Angular.js as a front-end framework.
This allowed us to use pretty much anything we want in the front end, and we started with flash, then looked at unity and even considered the unreal engine. The selling points of these were the graphical superiority and the idea that web games are slow. That said, flash development was a bit complex and had optimization techniques were of little value add for a turn based game. Unity and similar games were awesome but the idea of forcing a user to install a component to play our game felt like it defeated the purpose of a web game.
I ended up asking people to test out the web anyhow, because all of the downsides such as speed were just theories. When my staff tried out our these proof of concepts in reality, I couldn’t be happier. We tested to see how much the DOM could take before there was any human noticeable slowdown and it was well beyond anything we’d ever throw at it with our most complex scenes.
With that settled, and the fact that the dom was actually a reasonable choice, I continued along my separation of concerns routine. Knockout was my first choice but it simply didn’t handle a project of our scope as well as I’d like. When I looked at angularJs, it had everything i wanted. The server would send in a json update using socketio (well, checking the best and moving all the way down to long pooling if needed) and everything would just bind. Mock data was as sinch too. I was able to have everyone focus on their specialty and not have to be bogged down by things that weren’t relevant to what was immediately in front of them.
From a business standpoint, it’s a lot easier to find people who developer for the web than almost anything else. Even our end users picked it up like nothing, and I asked someone in our game’s chat to throw togetherhttp://cards.apocoplay.com/ for me. He did it almost instantly.
AngularJS is one of the most powerful tools in my product’s pipeline.