Pile-o-Gears — Speed coding with Jaws

Pile-o-Gears is a simple, yet addictive platformer built by Christer Kaitila using the Jaws engine. Just another platform game, you say? Not quite! Consider that this particular game was built in only 48 minutes (with some help from existing code)!

The smooth framerate and limited development time fed my intrigue of Jaws, a 2D game library which supports both canvas and DOM-based elements. The simplicity of syntax and separation of game logic is thoughtfully done. A basic game setup in Jaws looks like so:

jaws.start({
    setup: function() {
        // Initialization code -- called once
    },
    update: function() {
        // Game logic -- called each game tick
    },
    draw: function() {
        // Drawing logic -- called each game tick, AFTER update()
    }
});

In particular, separating the update() and draw() method calls allows you to optimize your repaints which can slow down your intervals—something we will cover in-depth in a future tutorial here on CreativeJS. Jaws is far from alone in the JavaScript game engine arena, but it will be great to see what else can be made with it.

Do you have any experience with Jaws or other gaming engines? We’d love to hear your experiences! Also be sure to give Pile-o-Gears a few minutes of your time to play (so you can be awesome, too) and read up on Christer’s experience while you’re at it.