Written by Social gaming platform Zynga takes a lot of flak for its overbearing management practices and obsession with metrics over user experience. While those rumors may or may not be true, there is more to Zynga than calculating sessions lengths and daily average users. In fact, Zynga’s Germany branch is one of the global leaders in HTML5 development and creating dynamic mobile Web games. We chatted with Zynga Germany CTO Paul Bakaus about how Zynga approaches HTML5, what are the limitations of the spec and if we will ever see a Facebook app store.
Zynga has a variety of open source HTML5 projects in GitHub along with several new HTML5 game releases, including Words With Friends and Zynga Poker Mobile Web. As many Web-based game developers will tell you, those are not easy to create. See below for our interview with Bakaus and what Zynga is doing to move the HTML5 spec and ecosystem forward.
Zynga’s HTML5 Products
There are now four HTML5-based Zynga games on the market: Words With Friends, FarmVille Express, Zynga Poker Mobile Web and CityVille Express. These games deliver load times comparable to native apps and, “utilize HTML5 tools such as WebSockets and CSS3 to deliver a seamless gaming experience and create fluid animations without slowing down game-play,” according to the company.
But there is more to Zynga’s contributions to HTML5 than just games. Its open source repository includes the Zynga Jukebox that helps game developers deal with the multi-layer audio limitations of HTML5 along with the Zynga Viewporter that has an essence of responsive design to it, fitting apps to the browsers they are in. One of the biggest problems, as Bakaus describes below, in HTML5 is seamless scrolling. The Zynga Scroller aims to eliminate that problem. Everybody talks about the great native scrolling in apps like Path. Bakaus hopes to give HTML5 the same capability.
Check out our interview with Bakaus below.
On background
A little bit about my background. I’m actually a developer myself. I started as a UI developer and back then we specialized in JavaScript and UI and many years ago I joined the jQuery team, one of my first gigs, and became the creator of jQuery UI. So back then John Resig asked me if I could build the UI for jQuery. Started jQuery UI got a lot of notice from jQuery UI and started learning how JavaScript works and how people use elements on the Web and how to drive it with a reasonable performance. I then moved on to consumer projects in Japan to transform Flash applications to JavaScript and finally I started Dextrose in 2010 with a friend of mine for the purpose of creating HTML5 games.
Back then we were looking for the creation of a full blown HTML5 game community and realized that the tech was there but it wasn’t any shared tech build so we started building an HTML5 engine prototype that was called Aves Engine that would really show the world what we could do with HTML5. We put up YouTube videos and I was talking at conferences about it and really made a lot of impact back then as really the first (tie)-based HTML5 engine that would show what they Web could still offer in the future.
Later that year Zynga acquired us to work on the full blown product. So, we threw away our prototype and started from scratch for the real solution for game systems to use. So, now when we are in a place where we have built up our development studio here in Germany that focuses on delivering HTML5 tech for the whole company and we are producing tech of the future here. It is a lot of research and a lot of fun as well.
A lot of challenges of course but right now we are really at a point where we have a full blown engine. We started it in house and what we can do is super exciting and let’s hope that we can get out a lot of what we are doing here soon.
Zynga’s philosophy on HTML5
Every decision we make on tech is really to connect people through our games. So, we are really want to bring our games to anywhere our players are. I think there is not a conscious decision for one tech or another, it is really what can deliver the job best. At this point we really are looking at HTML5 to drive a lot of this because HTML5 gives us a lot of advantages that native and Flash programs just cannot give us. The cross-platform aspect of it, bringing the game to many people on different platforms is really what is killing it for us.
Also, usually you would have to port an existing game that runs on Web and native to smartphones and tablets and maybe something else as well. We don’t have to do with that HTML5 and that is super exciting.
Limitations of HTML5 for games
There are a couple of limitations, to be honest. There are certainly sound issues. Sound is still a trouble for many game devs. One of the things that I don’t recommend doing right now because it is just a matter of market share is going for WebGL. So, actual 3-D games have proved complicated at this point and it is also because the WebGL spec isn’t completely reading for consumption at this point, I think. Other than that I think today, even though there are some rough edges with the HTML5 spec because it wasn’t really created with games in mind, I think it is the right time now to start doing games. I don’t think anyone should stop building games right now or being kept up by people who say HTML5 is not ready. I think, you know, if you look back to the [1980s] when people were first creating games for the Atari and Commodore 64, we got so much less possibilities back then and people were really creative in creating games. There is so much more we can do already in HTML5 and I think the only thing left is developers jumping on it and trying not to be scared away. I think now is the time to build games.
What is keeping developers from embracing HTML5 right now?
I think there are a couple of reasons. One of them is for classical game engineers to jump on the open web stack might prove a little bit difficult because it is a completely different environment. Before, if you have been working on an XBox game for instance, there wouldn’t be any resolution difference or platform differences. There would be any cross platform code you would have to write. Writing a completely different code, not writing event-driven code like you would do with JavaScript. It is simply a very different mindset to start with.
Another big reason is that HTML5 wasn’t created with games in mind. HTML itself is really a presentational language originally meant to do documents. That is one of the things we are doing now as well, to actively work with the vendors in the W3C to work with game engineers and push for the spec in terms of game development. I think a lot of people are still scared by the fact that it is not a language that was created for game. I think that is mostly the reason.
Article From:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2012/02/interview-how-zynga-is-transfo.php
