I loved the 8bit computer scene of the mid 80s early 90s. So the whole "HTML5 game" hype makes me giggle like a lil' kid.

We're back in the ol' days where anyone (with the inclination) could sit down on their computer, come up with some absolutely crazy, original, stupid, brilliant concept and code it up - and be published - suddenly going head to head with the big game dev companies!

I hope it lasts, and leads to some innovative new ideas: and we're not just swamped by the big guys.

In my first year of a programming certificate (1993?) I wrote several really bad games (in Pascal) that only my best friend and brother played.

The whole HTML5 game thing got me excited enough to try again and "Last Man Standing: A Zombie Apocalypse" was born.

Now, thanks to the power of the internet, a game that may have seen a couple of people play has had 20,000 hits, and sees, on the long tail, between 50 and 100 people a day (50% repeat visits).

That's not a lot of people, but it's a hell of a lot more than just my mate :) and I love the fact that there are people out there that like my game enough to come back to it :)

Absolutely. I'm digging up all the ideas I had back when I was too young & stupid to do anything about them. Something like this gives me that extra bit of inspiration to stop thinking about it and do it.

In fact, one of my fav ideas (originally intended for the Amiga) fits so beautifully with the new device form factor that it actually causes me physical pain when I think about it.

Are there any Phonegap-style templates out there to get people up and running quickly?

I'm going to be writing a tutorial on how to make a native Mac app with an embedded WebView pretty soon. Watch our blog for oupdates! :-)

Thank-you. I guarantee this will be very helpful to a lot of people.

Deskgap?

Slowly but surely, web programming is getting as powerful as normal programming. Java runs everywhere inside a virtual machine, web runs everywhere inside a web browser!

Have you experimented with the fps on Android or iOS? Just wondering if it's playable at all.

From the links out (to the JS game kit): http://impactjs.com/documentation/impact-on-mobile-platforms

Which largely mirrors my testing (though my code was by no means highly optimised). It's jerky enough at present that I'm trying to pick up Lua and use something like Corona for game dev. At the rate things are going though, I'd say it'll be more than feasible within a couple of years (as in there's enough support out there to make it worthwhile).

It's not playable on my Nexus One. When a bunch of monsters are on the screen it gets down to ~10 FPS. So close!