Optimize your HTML5 games

The performance of your game can be crucial to its success. At best, a poorly-performing game will elicit angry feedback from players. At worst, it can hurt your artistic vision for the project; it sucks to have to scale back a big idea because of performance limits.

Fortunately, there are some tried-and-tested techniques that you can use to speed up your code, fix performance bottlenecks, and turn your game from sluggish to sleek.

A flame chart, a special type of chart that clearly identifies frequent code paths

In Chapter 9 of HTML5 Games: Novice to Ninja, veteran JavaScript game developer Earle Castledine shares his favorite tips for supercharging game performance. From discovering where performance problems are hiding, to fixes to make code run faster, to rendering speed boosts, there are plenty of practical takeways in this chapter.

And what's more, while the tips outlined in this chapter are obviously aimed at game developers, many of the tips could prove useful for other JavaScript-heavy applications, so they're well worth checking out.

HTML 5 Games: Novice to Ninja

Create impressive and engaging, cross-platform games from scratch. You'll learn how to dissect the elements that make successful games and develop practical skills in game design, loops and user input, animation, maps, collision detection and AI, mathematics, game physics, and much, much more.

Optimize your game today!

Start your subscription today and you'll get access to this book, plus 300+ other web design and development books in SitePoint Premium!

New subscribers can currently get 60% off for the first three months. That’s $3 a month to access all of our tech books and courses — grab the deal here.

Until next time,
James at SitePoint