Licensing a html5 game

[masquerade]

I recently developed this game(my first game). An inspiration of snake game .I want to license that game. I want to know wether games like this can be sold on gaming site. It's not for money but all I want is more and more people to play my game.

I made the game using canvas, jquery, javascrit, html5, css. Also, I am facing problems with responsiveness of the game. It is not resizing on phones and other pc's. I will be happy to listen to any suggestions. Also, I am facing problems with responsive web designing on canvas.

I would be grateful if I can get some suggestions to develo my career.

Some pics of my game:

 

[mattstyles]

You can use services like itch.io and I think gamejolt to host your games for you (obviously anything that requires a backend will be more difficult but I dont think that applies in your case). There are loads of these such sites that just give you an area to publish your game, I think most let you try and sell your game (I'd guess they keep ad revenue and possibly a percentage, dont know).

As for licensing your game, selling your game to a publisher is usually far harder.

Please dont be disheartened by my following comments, finishing any game is an incredible achievement, but, finishing a game to a point where people are going to pay for it is another step up. You've done incredibly well to finish a game, but it probably needs a little more polishing before it is in a place where publishers might pay you for it, I'd say it is unlikely that publishers will ever pay for a straight snake clone. The services I mentioned earlier let you upload, so, if all you want is some coverage then that is the way to go.

If you have it hosted somewhere then fire over the link, if you want better critique to learn from we really need to play your game.

From your screenshots you could do with a bit of graphical help, a little bit of work on laying out and styling your UI will go a long way. Being responsive with a canvas element can be tricky, if you just want your game viewport to scale to the screen then it usually becomes easier and most 2d rendering libraries (such as Pixi, or, if you use Phaser, which is a full-blown game engine rather than just rendering) support doing this sort of thing pretty much automatically for you.

But, seriously, great work on getting a game finished, its a big achievement.

[paala]

ha ha this game can be done in 10 min

[masquerade]

23 hours ago, mattstyles said:

You can use services like itch.io and I think gamejolt to host your games for you (obviously anything that requires a backend will be more difficult but I dont think that applies in your case). There are loads of these such sites that just give you an area to publish your game, I think most let you try and sell your game (I'd guess they keep ad revenue and possibly a percentage, dont know).

As for licensing your game, selling your game to a publisher is usually far harder.

Please dont be disheartened by my following comments, finishing any game is an incredible achievement, but, finishing a game to a point where people are going to pay for it is another step up. You've done incredibly well to finish a game, but it probably needs a little more polishing before it is in a place where publishers might pay you for it, I'd say it is unlikely that publishers will ever pay for a straight snake clone. The services I mentioned earlier let you upload, so, if all you want is some coverage then that is the way to go.

If you have it hosted somewhere then fire over the link, if you want better critique to learn from we really need to play your game.

From your screenshots you could do with a bit of graphical help, a little bit of work on laying out and styling your UI will go a long way. Being responsive with a canvas element can be tricky, if you just want your game viewport to scale to the screen then it usually becomes easier and most 2d rendering libraries (such as Pixi, or, if you use Phaser, which is a full-blown game engine rather than just rendering) support doing this sort of thing pretty much automatically for you.

But, seriously, great work on getting a game finished, its a big achievement.

Thanks for the suggestions. 

Here is the link to my game: http://mahesh.hostingsiteforfree.com/snakey/snakey.html

I still have a few doubts:

1. What does licensing of a game mean?

2. If I were to make a game that is actually good enough to sell, what would be the things that I should get my hands on?

(As of now, I am good with html, css, javascript, jquery, canvas)

[mattstyles]

Quote

1. What does licensing of a game mean?

I think you're just after a definition of selling your game to a publisher? 

There are a variety of ways to sell your games, although based on your snake game, you may be a little way off that yet. Do a quick Google search, I'd guess it boils down to whether you can get paid upfront to develop a game, work for free and hope to sell at the end, or do some sort of revenue/ad share with a publishing network. Pros and cons to each approach.

If you just mean what license should you slap on your game, technically you dont need one at all but it is a good idea to have one, solely to try and protect your IP. Again, a quick google search will go into more detail than I'm able to. (I have a lawyer to check this stuff for me).

Quote

2. If I were to make a game that is actually good enough to sell, what would be the things that I should get my hands on?

Again, I'm not clear exactly what you're after here.

Your snake game loads and plays fine. The button-tapping is crazy for a game like this, you need to add keyboard control, and you need to learn a fair bit about UI design or get someone to do that for you, but, it seemed to do what a snake game should (I couldnt actually hit the buttons quick enough to get an apple, but it certainly knew when I smashed into a wall ).

Some better graphics in your game would help so some knowledge of graphics theory would help. Using a library is a great idea, but try to learn the theory about how and why it works.

If you want general advice about creating games then:

* Be persistent in your learning, keep learning new things and new ways.

* Accept that creating a game is hard, really hard. Lots of user input, lots of rendering usually, keeping performance high, these are not trivial concerns.

* Creating a game is multi-discipline, you have to think about how people will play your game, code it, probably do some visual design. Unless you have a team you'll be dealing with multiple concerns other than 'just' coding, so better brush up on those skills too. (the design of a game makes or breaks it, not the visuals, not the code—snake is enduring because the basic game premise is compelling, the visuals are largely irrelevent in making snake a success).

* Try to finish things. Finishing your snake game is great, however, "you never really finish a game, you just stop working on it" (not sure where that quote comes from), you can add graphics, better user input, better sound, multiplayer, etc etc etc. Learn when to finish and when to continue.

* Game engines, rendering engines, libraries, frameworks— they come and go. Learn the basics of programming, then the slightly harder stuff, then the specific stuff (in this case JS specific patterns and quirks), then some advanced stuff, then learn how other languages solve problems differently to your 'core' language, then learn more basics, then more hard stuff, etc etc etc. Programming takes a long time, I once heard that it'll be at least 10 years before any programmer is worth his salt, although a general rule of thumb I've heard is 10000 hours, at 8 hours a day with a 5 day week thats 5 years to get good at stuff, and programming is hard man, hence the 10 year estimate! Commit to this and you're potentially in it for the long haul, you gotta love it.

 

There are lots of good pieces of advice around but I guess the best one would be:

* Do what you love doing.

Don't focus on selling games (not at this stage, possibly not at any stage), focus on making games you'd love to play (and hopefully love to develop) and hope that people will also love them enough that you might, at some point, get paid for it.

 

[masquerade]

21 hours ago, mattstyles said:

I think you're just after a definition of selling your game to a publisher? 

There are a variety of ways to sell your games, although based on your snake game, you may be a little way off that yet. Do a quick Google search, I'd guess it boils down to whether you can get paid upfront to develop a game, work for free and hope to sell at the end, or do some sort of revenue/ad share with a publishing network. Pros and cons to each approach.

If you just mean what license should you slap on your game, technically you dont need one at all but it is a good idea to have one, solely to try and protect your IP. Again, a quick google search will go into more detail than I'm able to. (I have a lawyer to check this stuff for me).

Again, I'm not clear exactly what you're after here.

Your snake game loads and plays fine. The button-tapping is crazy for a game like this, you need to add keyboard control, and you need to learn a fair bit about UI design or get someone to do that for you, but, it seemed to do what a snake game should (I couldnt actually hit the buttons quick enough to get an apple, but it certainly knew when I smashed into a wall ).

Some better graphics in your game would help so some knowledge of graphics theory would help. Using a library is a great idea, but try to learn the theory about how and why it works.

If you want general advice about creating games then:

* Be persistent in your learning, keep learning new things and new ways.

* Accept that creating a game is hard, really hard. Lots of user input, lots of rendering usually, keeping performance high, these are not trivial concerns.

* Creating a game is multi-discipline, you have to think about how people will play your game, code it, probably do some visual design. Unless you have a team you'll be dealing with multiple concerns other than 'just' coding, so better brush up on those skills too. (the design of a game makes or breaks it, not the visuals, not the code—snake is enduring because the basic game premise is compelling, the visuals are largely irrelevent in making snake a success).

* Try to finish things. Finishing your snake game is great, however, "you never really finish a game, you just stop working on it" (not sure where that quote comes from), you can add graphics, better user input, better sound, multiplayer, etc etc etc. Learn when to finish and when to continue.

* Game engines, rendering engines, libraries, frameworks— they come and go. Learn the basics of programming, then the slightly harder stuff, then the specific stuff (in this case JS specific patterns and quirks), then some advanced stuff, then learn how other languages solve problems differently to your 'core' language, then learn more basics, then more hard stuff, etc etc etc. Programming takes a long time, I once heard that it'll be at least 10 years before any programmer is worth his salt, although a general rule of thumb I've heard is 10000 hours, at 8 hours a day with a 5 day week thats 5 years to get good at stuff, and programming is hard man, hence the 10 year estimate! Commit to this and you're potentially in it for the long haul, you gotta love it.

 

There are lots of good pieces of advice around but I guess the best one would be:

* Do what you love doing.

Don't focus on selling games (not at this stage, possibly not at any stage), focus on making games you'd love to play (and hopefully love to develop) and hope that people will also love them enough that you might, at some point, get paid for it.

 

Thanks for the reply.

To simply put my questions:

1. I wanted a license so that I could protect my code and nothing more to it.

2.I know that my game has got a very bad UI design and at the bottom at graphics. By asking a game which could be sold, I just meant that I want to learn pro- development.

The reason I made my game in canvas was because I didn't have any guidance of what I should use. Ijust went to w3 schools and learnt the command usage of canvas and did it. Now, if I were to improve my UI design and graphic skillls, I don't know what I should learn? A lot of names like phaser, pixi etc., are present in this forum. I just wanted to ask from your experience, what would you consider to be the best for game development. 

As far as my game goes, there are keyboard controls(W - Up, A - Left, S - Down, D - Right, Shift - Pause, Enter - Resume)

[mattstyles]

Quote

As far as my game goes, there are keyboard controls(W - Up, A - Left, S - Down, D - Right, Shift - Pause, Enter - Resume)

Ah, my bad, I just tried using the cursor keys.

Quote

I wanted a license so that I could protect my code and nothing more to it.

A notice distributed with your code to the effect of 'All rights reserved' or something like 'Redistribution prohibited' technically constitutes a license and an intent, whether it would stand up or not is a different argument. A quick google search will give you plenty of licenses for general use, someone else might be able to give you an actual license name (80% of my code is open source, using either MIT, ISC or sometimes BSD-2 Clause, but, obviously, that I want redistributed and not 'protected', my professional stuff is all done paid for upfront and the client owns the code, not me, although usually I'm free to reuse that code in other projects, but reusable stuff is usually library stuff so either does not get distributed as source or is open source so, yeah, not really useful to you in this case).

Quote

I just meant that I want to learn pro- development.

Best way to learn pro development is to be a pro try to get a job writing games. Freelancing or contract work is for very experienced folks only i.e. if you have to ask how to be a freelancer, you are not ready to be a freelancer. Dont try to be an exception to this rule.

Learning barebones canvas is absolutely the right decision to make off the bat. The lessons will serve for rest of your career/hobby.

When I said frameworks come and go, I really meant it. Some frameworks are very opinionated, this means that stuff you learn for them is largely only useful for that framework-usage, you cant really take that knowledge with you when you move on to a different framework. Learning the basics of programming, and then the basics/specifics of your chosen language, well, those skills will stay with you and they are skills that can be used in any framework you end up using.

For 2D development Phaser is superb and its documentation and community is such that it is a great framework to learn how to do stuff i.e. you will be able to get a lot of help along the way.

I'm not a fan of frameworks personally, I prefer to stitch together libraries. To that end I find Pixi very good for 2D stuff, I'd like if it was even more modular as I dont always use all of it, but those changes are being made (I have rolled my own renderer but I wouldnt really recommend it, not from scratch anyway). I tie this with my own keyboard input library (I couldnt find one that suited me so rolled my own), my own update loop (or game loop, or tick) code (again, I chose to roll my own for a couple of reasons) and I like a Functional Reactive approach to coding (you'll probably hear MVC or MVVM patterns bandied around for app structure, I am not a fan but they are by far the most popular currently) so most popular frameworks do not suit me. For physics I find myself using P2 a lot, although Matter.js I also found very good, many physics engines are a little too opinionated about how to render an app for my liking, which is why I turn to P2 more often than not, you can bolt on rendering pretty much however you like and structure your app almost pretty much how you want (other physics 'engines' are more prohibitive). For networking I tend to stick to socket.io (Phaser handles all the stuff I've mentioned here, apart from networking which is beyond its scope).

For 3D stuff, or general rendering, I like the stackgl projects with its glut of modules. I like this style of development and I trust the guys behind it, they create superb code. Again, your mileage might vary. I can tell you straight away that stackgl is not easy to get in to.

TL:DR

Starting with the basics of canvas is a superb choice. If you feel more comfortable now you might want to poke around how Phaser and Pixi (Phaser currently uses Pixi for rendering) use canvas to get the rendering done. They both take away much pain from development. Both have excellent documentation, so start there, and find some tutorials, follow along, learn, adapt to your own needs.

 

[SkyzohKey]

Hey !

I didn't read the entire thread but saw you wanted the "best framework for building efficient HTML5 games". I would advice you Panda.js as I used it since the first game I made with HTML5, and this is a really powerful framework, but also the simple to get started i found. However, it seems that Panda.JS development is paused, you'll have to ask @enpu about this for more information as he is the Panda.JS author.

That was my two cents post. Hope it'll be useful