Build JavaScript games with Excalibur JS

In this meetup presentation, we'll talk about Excalibur JS as a great library for making browser games. We'll cover some high level features of the library, then see Mega Man and Zelda style demos.

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*** DISCLAIMER ***
These demos are only prototypes and not officially supported by anybody.

Mega Man demo:

Zelda demo:

[ErikOnarheim]

Great video! I'm glad it's been working well for you!

[stevecastaneda]

This is awesome! I feel like it should be a prerequisite to do it from scratch, like in Pizza Legends, to appreciate the abstractions that Excaliber provides.

[TruthTrill]

Wow I think I'm going to get into coding!

[ErikOnarheim]

Always bet on JS, it pretty much runs everywhere!

[jugibur]

Thanks for your introduction and the demo projects! But if I see correctly, you have since moved away from ExcaliburJS and are now programming everything yourself from scratch without a library. If so, why did you decide to do this and what do you miss about ExcaliburJS?

[BRBS]

Excellent overview of Excalibur, Drew! I was eyeing it as well, but my only fear would be its heavy use of classes and OOP patterns. I have nothing against OOP, but as a Frontend dev I'm more comfortable with a functional/composable approach. Especially since JavaScript has quite a few quirks regarding the "this" keyword context and the fact that it is prototype-based language that only mimics OOP with syntactic sugar.

Have you noticed any weird issues regarding that? And thank you for your many videos of JavaScript Game Dev!

[Flohhupper]

Have you heard or maybe even used the LittleJS library by any chance?

[andreujuanc]

I tried phaser and I hated it so much, docs are horrible as well.
Then I found excalibur and I got a prototype working in an hour.
PD I'm not a game dev.
10/10 would recommend

[rebelmachine]

Inspiring stuff, Drew! I tried out Excalibur JS after your Mega Man video and I really like it so far! How do you like it compared to Phaser? I'm still not sure which library I like working with more...

[patrickjohnson]

What is the best game engine to make mobile game and game for steam that uses javascript?

[atrex]

Great video thank you! I know someone already asked if you had tried Phaser but i'm very curious as to how you'd feel about the differences between that and Excalibur. I've enjoyed working with Phaser but the ECS concept of Excalibur is intriguing, has that been helpful?

[MikeyOfLegend]

Could I use vector art like a Night in the Woods like game with this engine?

[Buzz-Entertainment]

Hi! Could you explain how we can create procedural levels with Excalibur?

[awhmts]

Do you have any examples using react on top of it

[ulrich-tonmoy]

Why not use Tauri instead its faster and smaller

[Derrickasaur]

Pet peave: it should be called Excalibur TS not "JS" since its a TS codebase. TS codebase makes it difficult for JS purists to work with (aside from common debugging/compiling issues that TS introduces not being able to easily read the source is problematic) and so for us its better not to conflate the 2 languages; even if TS is a technically a superset; I liken it to choosing between C# vs JS or C++ vs JS. IMO JS strength is its wild west of loose types and flexible functions which makes it ideal for rapid iteration/prototyping (and longterm maintainability if you keep clean and modular patterns) so if I can't have those I'd rather use C++ where there is tangible performance benefit to those increased rules.