Playcraft, a new HTML5 gaming engine, is ready to launch into beta. This 2D engine is designed to leverage HTML5 and JavaScript to allow developers to create casual games that will run not only in browsers with high performance, but also work capably on mobile platforms like iOS and Android.

I spoke with CEO Martin Wells and he believes that on mobile, browser-based gaming with HTML5 and JavaScript is still a long way away from prominence because of performance in mobile browsers. He says that “The canvas performance and draw performance of modern browsers is great. It’s as good as Flash or better, so that’s not really an issue. If we talk about HTML5 on mobile, then it is a serious issue. And up until iOS5, canvas draw calls on Mobile Safari performed at what 1/10 of what you would expect a desktop browser to do, because Apple hadn’t implemented any kind of hardware acceleration in the drawing, so it was going to be slow. Since iOS 5, they really fixed canvas drawing speed, so that’s now a much more viable platform for building an HTML5 game and having it run a mobile game.” Android is a completely different story with all the OS and browser fragmentation that exists there.

However, what Playcraft Labs is doing as a bridge until this point where mobile browsers could handle HTML5 games on their own is to package apps built in the engine as native apps for iOS and Android. “We provide an application framework…that you take your HTML5 game and you package that inside our framework, and then we intercept the canvas calls and the audio calls, and we implement those using native functionality…and we implement that using OpenGL.”

While no titles that use Playcraft are available on the App Store , I asked if getting Playcraft apps approved would be an issue. Wells claims that Playcraft Labs has discussed this issue with Apple, and that the word they’ve gotten was that as long as updates don’t fundamentally change the nature of the app, they’re good to go. Spacetime Studios’ Legends series of games do these kind of in-app updates without an update to the client app itself, so it is hypothetically allowable. He calls this “adaptive gameplay” where developers are “changing the game based on stats they’re getting from players, and even individually modifying the game on the fly.”

Martin Wells has a bold vision of the future of HTML5 gaming, and what Playcraft could eventually herald, of the browser being the app store as technology improves. “I think you’ll see the carriers on Android deploying their own app stores. And I think over time that’ll progress to HTML5 driving app stores spreading everywhere.” Will this happen? Who knows, but Playcraft Labs is trying to build the tools to help shepherd it along. The Playcraft beta can be signed up for now.

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