We founded Game Closure around the idea that HTML5 is the right technology choice for building successful iOS and Android games, and for the past two years we’ve been working to make that a reality. Today I’m proud to announce our public release of Game Closure “DevKit”, for mobile game development with Javascript. It is 100% Free and Open Source, and we intend for it to stay that way.
This is a technology that already powers dozens of games, and has been battle tested against literally hundreds of mobile devices by millions of players around the world. This is not a science project, or “pretty good for an HTML5 game engine” — the GC DevKit is a damn good mobile game engine that you can compare alongside the best of them. It is the only truly production-ready mobile game engine with such strong roots in JavaScript.
If you’re ready to dive right in, please check out the github repository, and the documentation!
Also, check out Kiwi Run, an early GC DevKit launch title. You can go ahead and play the game directly on the web, or just download it on your iOS (iTunes store) or Android device (Play Store). Kiwi Run is a fantastic game with nearly a million players since release two months ago, and I hope it will make the potential and possibilities of DevKit real to you!
Ethos
- GC DevKit is the best 2D mobile game engine in the world. If we find a weakness or this turns out not to be true, we’ll fix it.
- Web Technology is Great. We want to piggyback off of the fantastic technology created every day at Apple, Google, Facebook, Adobe, Joyent, Microsoft, and other innovative companies in the Javascript and Web space. We don’t want to re-invent our own debugger, profiler, editor, version control, art software/pipeline, so we didn’t.
- GC DevKit is always production ready. It is incredibly stable; check out Kiwi Run’s rating, it’s a 4.7 across many thousands of reviews. We made sure that the core engine is fast, 8000-sprites-on-the-screen fast. We created a UI system that can handle every aspect ratio, size, and type of device, and tooling to go with it. We made the process of distributing games on the App Store and Play store easy.
Licensing
We chose a dual-licensing strategy with the GPLv3 and the Game Closure Free License (GCFL) (you can read more about both on our licensing page). We tried very hard to make the core of the GCFL fit on a single page; it does, and it’s incredibly easy to read and understand. The idea here is to make sure that everyone who is benefiting from our ecosystem is also contributing back their modifications and improvements to DevKit. But we also want to allow studios and developers to create proprietary, closed-source, and for-profit games, completely free of charge.
Contributors
Our primary goal here is to get this technology in the hands of many, many developers, and along the way we’d also like to build a strong community of collaboration and participation. We have a guide for Contributors that outlines our Contributor License Agreement (CLA) which is very similar to the agreements you see in most open source projects, like nodejs, dojo, and Apache. The goal is for us to retain ownership of the code base so that we can protect users under both the GPL and the GCFL. The CLA and the licensing is designed so that users under either license will need to contribute code back for the good of the entire community.
Other than our required CLA, we intend to run the github project similarly to other Open Source github projects out there, complete with branches, pull requests, a mailing list… the works.
Join us!
Game Closure is hiring javascript hackers and (mobile) engineers. If you are interested in working here, either full-time or as an internship, please check out our jobs page. Thanks!