Download: CocoonJSAudioPlugin

How to use: Just put the CocoonPlugin as the first entry to register and you can use everything else of the SoundJS-library just as is in CocoonJS now.

createjs.Sound.registerPlugins([createjs.CocoonJSAudioPlugin]);

//this will allow me to play 3 parallel instances of jump.ogg
  createjs.Sound.registerSound('jump.ogg','jump', 3);

But the reason for this post is that I want to write about another indie game that friends of mine are currently developing called ‘Commander Cherry’s Puzzled Journey’.

Description

Commander Cherry’s Puzzled Journey is a hybrid motion game, using the PlayStation 4 Eye camera® and the Dualshock 4® controller simultaneously. The game is currently being developed by Grandé Games for the PlayStation 4. The genre can be described as “Yoga-Action-Platformer”. The player is shaping the platforms with his body silhouette, which is captured and isolated by the PlayStation 4 Eye camera. Furthermore, the player has to fit his silhouette into given shapes and thus perform energetic space Yoga figures. The Dualshock 4 controller is used to control Commander Cherry in a classic platformer manner.

My thoughts

I had a chance to play the game myself and while it is still in a very early stage, I could already see the fun this game could bring, especially when playing with two or more people, trying to create specific shapes. As I said the game is still in a pretty early stage though, but if you liked what you saw, give those guys a thumbs up, share it, or follow them on twitter. I’m certainly excited to see more.

or play it here: PLAY HERE

It even works on the iPad!

Some screenshots:

direct link: http://labs.indiegamr.com/olines/index.html

For bluring I used this filter: Link – but still: For those kind of operations HTML/JS is unfortunately still way behind flash in terms of performance.

Audio != Audio

While most browsers and devices already do support audio in general, that doesn’t mean you can just play any audio file in any modern browser. The following table briefly lists the support for Audio-codecs.

As you can see there is no single codec and format that is supported by all browsers and devices. In addition to this not every device does support the WebAudio-API and some devices only allow audio-playback upon a user-interaction or only allow playing one sound at a time. So what should you do? Setup an audio file for any codec and then check the browser’s support before loading and playing the file? While this would be currently the only way to do it right, this not only sounds like a lot of work, but also is. What about browsers that don’t support the audio-element at all? – Implementing a flash fallback is no easy task as well.

SoundJS

One possible solution is SoundJS – SoundJS is a JavaScript framework that will take care of all the compatibility issues with audio on different devices and even adds the ability of a flash-fallback should the browser support no audio. You would still have to provide different files for each sound to ensure that a soundfile is available for each device depending on the codec support but besides this, playing a sound with SoundJS can be done with 2 lines of JavaScript:

var src = ‘mySound.m4a|mySound.ogg’;
createjs.Sound.registerSound(src);
//…after the sound was loaded, it can be played by:
createjs.Sound.play(src);

What I also like about SoundJS is that it features a plugin-system, so you can write your custom playback-plugin for individual needs, for example I used it to write a CocoonJS-plugin for it.

howler.js

Another solution is howler.js, it is also released under the MIT license, so you can use it free in any of you projects it works very similar to SoundJS. One advantage over SoundJS is that it is very lightweight with only 9kb and offers pretty much the same functionality as SoundJS – with one exception though: howler.js features no flash-fallback, but if you are targeting mobile platforms, this should be no problem.

var sound = new Howl({
  urls: ['mySound.m4a','mySound.ogg']
}).play();

Another thing I like about howler is the support of sound-sprites:

var sound = new Howl({
  urls: ['sounds.mp3', 'sounds.ogg'],
  sprite: {
    blast: [0, 1000],
    laser: [2000, 3000],
    winner: [4000, 7500]
  }
});

// shoot the laser!
sound.play('laser');

SoundManager 2
A third option is SoundManager 2, (github), just like SoundJS it features a flash fallback if HTML5 audio is not supported. SoundManager2 is used by popular site like SoundCloud, last.fm or the Nyan Cat site. The focus of SoundManager2 is more on implementing audio-players on web-sites as it also features UIs for audio playback. Sounds are played like this:

// create "mySound"...
soundManager.createSound({
  id: 'mySound',
  url: '/path/to/an.mp3'
});

// ...and play it
soundManager.play('mySound');

Comparison

As you can see, all three frameworks have their pros and cons, you should check out their sites and see what features you need for your project. The following table is just a very brief overview on the differences:

*this doesn’t mean that you cannot use it for other cases, it’s just my personal evaluation

A last word: Beware of MP3!

What a lot of people probably don’t know: MP3 is not free!
Implementing mp3 into your app/game is no problem, but what you should know is that if your game is ‘distributed’ (technically that includes 1 user playing the game in his browser) more than 5000 times, you have to pay an mp3 codec royalty of $2500. But not only because of the licensing I would suggest you to use Ogg Vorbis(.ogg) or AAC(.m4a, MP4), OGG and AAC do have a better sound-quality while encoded with a smaller file-size than their MP3-counterpart.

If you want to learn more about the workflow of implementing audio into your html5- (mobile-) app/game and additional information on creating and publishing an HTML5 game, you should checkout my book at: http://indiegamr.com/zerotoappstore/

So today I’m making a small book introduction on the book Instant EaselJS Starter by PACKT Publishing, written by Fabio Biondi.

The main goal of the book is to provide the most basic information needed to instantly start creating nice looking HTML5 canvas-application. The techniques explained in the book have no special attachment to “gaming”.

The book consist of the follwing five sections

1. What is EaselJS? – A brief overview on the library, what you can do with it and why it is so great.
2. Installation – A short set of instructions on how to setup EaselJS for your project.
3. Quick start – Teaching the basics with a typical ‘Hello World!’-application.
4. Top 8 features you need to know about - This section explain the use of the eight more important features with examples.
5. People and places you should get to know - Introduction additional places to get help and find resources for your projects.

The Book’s main learnings

Again a small, but hopefully helpful file: CocoonJSAudioPlugin.js
As the native SoundJS-Plugins: WebAudioPlugin.js and HTMLAudioPlugin, don’t seem to go hand in hand with CocoonJS (yet?) I took the time and wrote a CocoonJSAudio-Plugin based on the HTMLAudioPlugin, may this be of help to someone.

Download: CocoonJSAudioPlugin.js

How to use: Just put the CocoonPlugin as the first entry to register and you can use everything else of the SoundJS-library just as is in CocoonJS now.

createjs.Sound.registerPlugins([
     createjs.CocoonJSAudioPlugin,
     createjs.WebAudioPlugin,
     createjs.HTMLAudioPlugin
   ]
 );

Download: easeljs_cocoonjs_touchfix.js

(updated version to work with EaselJS 0.7+, thx to Jonny)
How to use: Download JS-fix and implement it through a script-tag somewhere after the EaselJS-script-tag and your done!

Hope this helps someone, comment for any issues,cheers!

If you use an older version of EaselJS: easeljs_cocoonjs_touchfix_pre_0.7.js (for pre-EaselJS 0.7)

Github: https://github.com/olsn/SublimeText2-EaselJS-Completion

DemoImage: 

Long story short: This is probably the most senseless piece of code I have ever written and most likely will ever have written:

onComplete = function(e) {
  //...doing some other stuff

  // at this point everything is
  // loaded and ready to go
  // ...but ... you know ... the client ...
  setTimeout(
    function() {
      $('#loadingCover').hide();
    }, 3000
  );
}