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Mozilla has partnered with developers at Little Workshop to launch BrowserQuest, a Zelda-inspired multiplayer roleplaying game built entirely on the open web stack – HTML5, JavaScript and CSS.
While BrowserQuest is a fun game to play, it was written as much to prove a point as to be a game – namely, that web developers no longer need to rely on Flash to create sophisticated online games. Using today's web standards, game developers can build impressively complex games that work across devices.
To give BrowserQuest a try, just head on over to the site and pick a username. BrowserQuest will work in most modern web browsers including Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera (provided you enable WebSockets), Mobile Safari and Firefox for Android.
In an effort to help game developers looking to build more serious HTML5-based games, the code behind BrowserQuest has been released on GitHub.
BrowserQuest's backend, which handles the real-time multiplayer aspect of the game, is written in JavaScript and runs on Node.js. As you would expect BrowserQuest uses the HTML5 Canvas element to actually render its 16-bit-style world and hooks into the HTML5 audio APIs for sound effects.
BrowserQuest is responsive as well, using @media queries to adapt to the size of your screen.
WebSockets – which are back, after being rewritten to fix some early flaws – handle the chat feature, which allows players to communicate within BrowserQuest. The final element in BrowserQuest's HTML5 puzzle is localStorage, which saves your progress as you move through the game.
Although designed as much to showcase the power of WebSockets as to be an actual videogame, BrowserQuest is addictive and can easily suck you into its world for an entire morning if you're not careful. (Not that we'd know.) There are also quite a few Easter eggs hidden away in its depths.
For more info on BrowserQuest either dive into the game, dig through the code or watch the screencast from developer Guillaume Lecollinet:
