This is usually the part where books give a lengthy intro about HTML5 to increase their word count. This is not one of those books.

All you need to know about HTML5 is that it allows you to do stuff in your browser, regardless if it’s on a desktop PC or a mobile phone, without the need for extra plugins. And that includes making games. If you want a better intro to HTML5, head over to Dive Into HTML5.

As the title and cover of the book implies, we will introduce you to both HTML5 and game development by guiding you in making a shoot-em-up game similar to the classic video game 1942.

There are a number of HTML5 libraries and frameworks out there right now. For this afternoon workshop, we’ll be using Phaser, an open-source framework built on top of Pixi.js. It’s a higher-level framework: it’s bigger and may feel like you have much less control (i.e. magical) compared to other frameworks, but at the same time, you need far less code to get things done and this makes it suitable for a short workshop such as this one.