14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla recently unveiled its Game On initiative. The group will focus on bringing games to the browser by leveraging standard web technologies such as JavaScript, the proposed HTML5 and, of course, WebGL.
While the project is still very much in the early stages, there has already been some progress and contributors have already presented some ideas and even solutions for making the web a better place for games.
"While the Game On 2010 team is getting the first line-up of awesome judges ready, others are busy bringing you JS audio libraries, demo code for a retro 2D game and an overview of the powers of WebGL," Mozilla's Pascal Finette wrote.
For example, Mozilla notes, one developer ported the SFXR sound library to JavaScript. The simple library is designed to recreate the sound of old 8-bit games and has already been ported to a number of platforms, including iOS and ActionScript 3 used in Flash content.
One of Mozilla Lab's own developers created a demo of a top-down classic RPG-style game to showcase some of the ways standard web technologies could be used for games.
You can check out his work here, but don't expect to be blown away by the graphics, this is just a proof-of-concept and all of the work went into the underlying technology.
Mozilla is also continuing work on making WebGL a web standard, an effort the open-source company pioneered and was later joined by Google and other players in most of the related fields, like hardware manufacturers.
Meanwhile, the Game On 2010 competition is full on and developers are encouraged to submit their creations. Mozilla says that all entries are welcomed since the goal is just to demonstrate the power of HTML5 and JavaScript. The competition will end on January 11, 2011