Tools for game development

On this page, you can find links to our game development tools articles, which eventually aim to cover frameworks, compilers, and debugging tools.

asm.js

asm.js is a very limited subset of the JavaScript language, which can be significantly optimized and run in an ahead-of-time (AOT) compiling engine for much faster performance than your typical JavaScript performance. This is, of course, great for games.

Emscripten

An LLVM to JavaScript compiler; with Emscripten, you can compile C++ and other languages that can compile to LLVM bytecode into high-performance JavaScript. This is an excellent tool for porting applications to the Web! There is a useful Emscripten tutorial available on the wiki.

Firefox Profiler

The Firefox Profiler lets you profile your code to help figure out where your performance issues are so that you can make your game run at top speed.

Toolchain for developing and debugging games

How does this differ from normal web app debugging? What specialist tools are available? A lot of this is going to be covered by Will in tools, but here we should provide a kind of practical toolchain tutorial for debugging games, with links to Will's stuff:

  • Basic tools overview
  • Shader editor
  • Performance tools (still in production, estimated early 2014)