Simple Games

Getting Started With Simple Games

I've been working with game development frameworks for about twelve years now, and Simple Games keeps coming up in conversations about lightweight browser-based titles. It's not the most powerful engine out there, but it gets the job done for small projects where you don't want to carry a lot of overhead. The basic setup involves pulling the framework from GitHub, linking the main script in your HTML file, and you're ready to go. I usually recommend creating a new project directory and running npm init first, then installing Simple Games with a standard package manager command. The documentation is pretty minimal, which means you'll spend time reading source code more than following tutorials.

What Are Simple Games

At its core, Simple Games is a JavaScript library designed for creating 2D browser games without the complexity of larger engines. It handles the canvas rendering loop, basic input detection, and sprite management out of the box. If you've worked with p5.js or Phaser before, the mental model is similar but stripped down significantly. The framework uses an entity-component style architecture where you define game objects as simple JavaScript classes. I found this approach cleaner than callback-heavy alternatives, though the documentation doesn't always make that clear. You extend the base Game class, override update and draw methods, and the framework handles timing and rendering. One thing that trips people up is the coordinate system. It uses a standard canvas layout with the origin at the top-left corner, Y-axis pointing down. I wasted about two hours on my first project debugging why my sprites were flipping vertically when I expected them to move upward. Once I remembered that canvas coordinates work differently than Cartesian systems, the fix was straightforward.

Setting Up Your First Project

Create a new folder for your project and open a terminal in that directory. Run npm init -y to generate a package.json file, then install the framework with npm install simple-games. You can also pull it directly from a CDN if you don't want to manage dependencies, though I prefer local installation for version control. This creates a basic game loop with a blue square that moves left and right with arrow keys. The structure is straightforward enough that you should understand it within an hour of reading through it. The biggest problem I encountered involves asset loading. Simple Games doesn't have a robust asset manager built in, so you need to handle image preloading yourself. I wrote a simple loader function that waits for all images to load before starting the game loop:

Another issue is the fixed timestep in the game loop. The framework runs updates at 60fps by default, which works fine for most games but causes problems if you need variable time steps for physics calculations. I had to modify the loop to accept delta time when building a platformer with gravity. The collision detection is basic AABB (Axis-Aligned Bounding Box), which means rotated objects won't detect collisions accurately. For my top-down shooter project, this wasn't an issue because sprites never rotated. But if you're building something with angled movement or circular collision areas, you'll need to implement custom collision logic.

Performance Considerations

Simple Games handles around 500-1000 sprites comfortably on modern browsers before you start seeing frame drops. Beyond that, you'll want to implement object pooling or spatial partitioning. I built a simple quadtree for one project that reduced collision checks from O(n²) to roughly O(n log n), which made a noticeable difference with hundreds of entities on screen. Canvas rendering is generally faster than DOM manipulation for game loops, but the framework doesn't automatically batch draw calls. If you're rendering thousands of identical sprites, consider using a single canvas with repeated draw operations rather than creating individual sprite objects. This reduced my render time from about 16ms to 4ms per frame in a particle system project. The memory footprint is small—typically under 50MB for a complete game—but image assets can add up quickly. I learned to compress sprites to PNG-8 format with palettes, which cut asset sizes by about 60% without visible quality loss on small 2D graphics.

When Simple Games Isn't the Right Choice

If you need 3D graphics, physics simulation, or multiplayer networking, look elsewhere. The framework doesn't support WebGL, and adding those features would require significant custom work. For a platformer with complex physics, I'd recommend Godot or Unity instead. For browser-based multiplayer games, Phaser has better networking examples and documentation. Mobile deployment is another limitation. Simple Games targets desktop browsers primarily, and while it runs on mobile browsers, touch input handling requires additional code. The input system is keyboard-mouse focused, so adding touch support means writing your own abstraction layer. Build tooling is minimal. There's no webpack integration, no hot reload, and no minification optimization. I set up a basic gulp pipeline to handle bundling and compression, but you'll be configuring that yourself. The lack of build tooling means smaller bundle sizes if you're okay with manual configuration, but it also means more upfront setup time.

Learning Resources

The official documentation covers basic usage but skips advanced topics. The GitHub repository has some example projects in the examples folder, which are worth studying. I also found the source code helpful for understanding how the event system works—particularly the custom event dispatcher that handles input events across multiple game states. There's a small community on Discord and a few YouTube tutorials, but most of what I learned came from reading issues on GitHub and seeing how others solved problems. The maintainers are responsive to pull requests, so if you hit a limitation, there's a chance someone has already addressed it in a fork. For someone starting out, I'd suggest building a simple Pong clone first to understand the game loop, then moving to a platformer once you're comfortable with state management and input handling. The framework's simplicity is both its strength and weakness—you'll learn a lot about game architecture, but you'll also feel the constraints quickly.