I’m going to rant a little plus ask for clarification, as my rant may not be entirely on point. Shouldn’t we be calling this Super Mario fully Implemented in JavaScript? It’s my understanding that HTML provides little more toward this new form of game development than the canvas element, which offers up a flat pixel drawing surface to plop images and draw bitmaps and vectors onto (unless the Javascript is manipulating DOM elements, but that would be insane, and also, would have been able to be implemented in previous versions of HTML…). That’s a great advance for HTML, but I think this gives too much credit to HTML5, as if it suddenly has interactivity baked in. The lion’s share of the work of creating a game here is done with JavaScript. In fact, 99% of the files in the github are JavaScript files, and I would venture to say that not a whole lot of them are generating what anyone would recognize as “html” they’re managing image assets and placing them all on the canvas element. Once placed, the assets on the canvas can’t be address or changed, so the assets are being continuously juggled in that JavaScript code, waiting to paint the next state onto the canvas. Maybe this is nit-picky, but all of the JavaScript written here is near identical to the functional code you would write in any other environment, and indeed could have written for years in JavaScript, the canvas just gives you a place to paint it all in-browser. I’m not sure what power I speaking truth to with this little screed, but let me put it this way. If I had two people working on a project, an “HTML5 person” and a “JavaScript person” I know who would get top billing. (not that this would be a sensible division of labor)
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