Preparing the development environment

The environment for developing HTML5 games is similar to designing websites. We need web browsers and a good text editor. Which text editor is good is a never-ending debate. Each text editor comes with its own strengths, so just pick your favorite one. I personally recommend text editors with multiple cursors, for instance, Sublime Text or Brackets. For the browser, we will need modern browsers that support the latest HTML5 and CSS3 specs and provide us with handy tools for debugging.

There are several modern browser choices on the Internet now. They are Apple Safari (http://apple.com/safari/), Google Chrome (http://www.google.com/chrome/), Mozilla Firefox (http://mozilla.com/firefox/), and Opera (http://opera.com). These browsers support most of the features that we will discuss in the examples in the whole book. I personally use Chrome because it has great built-in developer tools. The powerful developer tools make it popular with web and game developers.

We will also need Android phones and an iPad/iPhone to test the games in mobile devices. Simulators may also work, but testing with real devices gives closer results to real-world usage.