The guys at Mozilla Labs launched yesterday the Game On competition, geared at kickstarting development of web games based on open technologies, including the nascent
WebGLw. As you may know, Flash is the cornerstone of nearly every game available on the net today, with more complex games like Quake Live opting for proprietary plugins not compatible with all browsers, and others like Minecraft preferring to use the ubiquitous Java plugin.
But recent advancements in HTML standards, plus the furious race to develop much faster JavaScript engines, have made possible for game creators to finally leave plugins behind and code games to run directly in any browser that supports the latest standards, an excellent example being
Biolab Disaster. With almost all browsers now capable of running these games, and Mozilla encouraging further development, true web games will begin to be the rule, rather than the exception.
Further information is available at the site linked above. Naturally, all games must run on Firefox 4 (which this competition also helps promoting), but apart from that, the rules are pretty relaxed, as expected from Mozilla. The deadline is on January, 11th 2011, though some people have been working on a concept for some weeks now, and I hope they share something with us ;)
via
Asa Dotzler and
Mozilla Links