In the era of the advancing game industry, almost all gamers know how to use JavaScript to create games or applications. Maybe you have already heard about JavaScript libraries or engines. However, this blog will provide you with a list of the best JavaScript game development engines and their unique features. When a game developer creates a game, choosing the most relevant engines becomes a pertinent decision.
If you are a novice in game development, then it is best to know the main features of each engine. It is because sometimes game developers are forced to change the engine in the middle of the development process. The reason for this is because developers have no specific information about other engines before. If you had known which JavaScript game development engine is best, you would develop your games without a doubt in your mind.
In addition to 2D games, thanks to technological improvements, today, 3D games are also available in JavaScript engines. This situation leads to the great diversity and number of game development engines, making it choose the best engine for gamers. Therefore, it is significant to know which engine supports 3D computer scenes and geometric figures. You should also need to distinguish these engines according to HTML5, 3D rendering, and WebGL support. Another thing about knowing JavaScript engines is to be able to choose free and charged engines. If you are just getting started in the game development, it is best to work with more comfortable and free game engines.
Related: 9 Steps To Become a Game Developer
Factors affecting the game development
If you want to know which game software or language is the most appropriate for your needs, some factors should be considered:
-Game development team configuration & management
As a game developer, you need to follow multidisciplinary team management and configuration for the development of software games. It means that this process should require administration and coordination among members working for creating a game.
-Game asset management
This element allows gamers to develop the vision of a game, including music, sound effects, soundtracks, and 3D texts and scenes.
-Quality of game architecture
Game architecture is crucial to support gameplay, helping to determine problems or errors through concealment, exploration, and skill testing. You can call it a blueprint of games depicting design and investigating system parameters before the production.
-Game design document management
This factor is also one of the most important factors influencing the game development. A game team develops and edits the GDD management during the pre-production of games. It changes depending on the genre of games and game development studios.
-Game test management
This kind of management contributes to testing a game at various steps of the development. It allows game developers to be sure about each parameter and feature of a game.
-Game engine development
This factor is crucial because a game engine helps developers to concentrate only on logic and experimentation of the game.
-Programming practices
If you have a good game programming practice, you are likely to succeed in the creation of a game. This practice is the main skeleton of the development process because it helps a programmer to decide which coding architecture or game engine is best for each game.
Related: Java Game Development: What is The Best Programming Language for Games?
Babylon.js
One of the best JavaScript game development engines is Babylon.js. It is a 3D engine that displays 3D graphics in a web browser by using JavaScript. Babylon.js uses also HTML5 to display these graphics in the web browser.
Its source code, which exists on GitHub and distributed via the Apache License 2.0, is generated in TypeScript. After all these operations, you can convert it into JavaScript. This game engine is the right option for you because any web browser, which supports HTML5, interprets its user code and 3D engine. You can also use WebGL for 3D rendering.
The most exciting thing about Babylon.js is that you don’t need to install it on your computer since you can do and complete all developments within the browser editor.
Let’s review some of the essential features of this JavaScript game development engine.
-Animation. It allows game developers to animate any object with only one line of code. That makes animating objects with Babylon easier.
-Advanced rendering. Babylon provides gamers with Post Process FX, HDR image-based lighting, and Physically Based Rendering support.
-GUI system. This system helps you to create incredible 2D interactive layers and menus.
-Virtual reality. You can easily create virtual reality in your browser via WebVR helper.
Phaser
Another best JavaScript game development engine is Phaser that is a 2D game framework. Gamers can use this software without any charge to make HTML5 games. It is good that you can create games for mobile phones and desktop by using this engine.
Photon Storm is the developer of Phaser game engine. Phaser also allows you to render on desktop and mobile thanks to the usage of Canvas and WebGL renderers. Apache Cordova and PhoneGap provides the opportunity to compile games to mobile operating systems such as Android and iOS.
If you want to use Phaser, you need to have only a web browser supporting the “canvas” HTML tag. Safari, Chrome, Opera, Firefox, and IE9 are examples of such browsers. You can develop games for scripting by using JavaScript or TypeScript. In this engine, you can also find some useful elements, including input control, sprite sheets, game physics, and images.
Pixi.js
This JavaScript game development engine allows game developers to have multi-platform support with a single codebase. This codebase helps in to deliver transferable experiences. It also has WebGL support if you don’t have that on your desktop. Pixi plays a significant role in creating interactive graphics design, HTML5 games, applications, and websites.
Thanks to the asset loader of Pixi.js, you can quickly load and handle incoming assets as it has animation data, graphics, fonts support. Easy API and Photoshop quality and color modes make pixi.js. It is also crucial to create user-friendly interactions with the help of multi-touch interactivity.
PlayCanvas
As one of the best JavaScript game development engines, PlayCanvas is a 3D game engine that is open-source. Its proprietary cloud-hosted creation platform helps to edit from different computers at the same time by having a browser-based interface. Web browsers, including Firefox and Chrome, which support WebGL, are accessible to run PlayCanvas.
Using this game engine allows you to hand 3D audio and animations, as well as physics simulations. It also contributes multiple game developers to edit any project simultaneously.
PlayCanvas has recently added some new features to strengthen its usability. You can benefit these features, including entity-component system, powerful audio API, asynchronous asset streaming, one-click publishing, physically based rendering, shard chunk system, GPU skinning, and so on.
Kiwi.js
This JavaScript engine is an open-source framework to develop 2D and HTML5 games for mobile and desktop. Thanks to WebGL and Canvas support, you can quickly release applications and sports via the Chrome Webstore and CocoonJS.
Kiwi is considered one of the best game engines. It is because of some unique features such as broad distribution, flexible game objects, entity system, multi-touch support, state management, full display list, and file management.
Cannon.js
This JavaScript game development engine is also an open-source game framework whose is the creator is Stefan Hedman. Unlike other drivers, Cannon.js is written through JavaScript from the beginning to the development of its features.
This web game development engine includes different types of geometric shapes: cylinder, plane, polyhedron, box, particle, sphere, and heightfield. Its physics engine supports Gauss-Seidel constraint solver, discrete collision detection, and rigid-body dynamics. With WebGL, you can use the renderer to form physics-based 3D scenes.
Three.js
Three.js is API (Application Programming Interface) and a JavaScript engine that game developers can use to form and display three-dimensional scenes. You can benefit from this JavaScript game development engine through a web browser. GitHub hosts its source code in a repository.
Gamers can also create GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) and 3D animations through JavaScript. Because of the existence of WebGL, you can form different and complex three-dimensional computer graphics in a browser.
Final Thoughts
Some features make Three.js one of the best JavaScript game development engines. The diversity of geometric figures, such as 3D text, extrude, cube, torus, sphere, plane, and tube, is one of the unique elements of Three.js. Additionally, game developers are capable of experiencing other features: various light effects (spot, shadows), shaders (full OpenGL SL), utilities (3D math functions), animation effects (armatures,keyframe), computer scenes (fog), debugging, data loaders (binary, JSON), and computer effects (anaglyph, parallax barrier).