Welcome to the Game Engine for the Web!

The Aves Engine is a professional game engine to build any type of web based 2D or 2.5D game by only using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, giving game studios the power to deliver stunning games for all kinds of genres on multiple platforms. It’s in a way similiar to Game Engines on PC or Console systems but utilizes many important patterns you need to consider when working in the web environment.

Let’s point out some of the highlights.

Really large Viewports

If you currently play any browsergame, this will probably look familiar to you. Most games have a fixed-sized viewport that is often only a few hundred pixels wide. This is followed by a couple UI controls and some static artwork. Still, this can look pretty awkward to gamers on their big monitors.

This small viewports probably were a good idea when screens where only 15" large, however, if you check your browser statistics, you should probably notice that people are used to large resolutions. Here is an except from our website statistics:

Think a moment about traditional console games and imagine starting up the latest AAA-Title to realize it’s displayed in a viewport taking a fraction of your expensive TV. This kind of sucks, doesn’t it? Why should we have those constraints in the browser world then?

So we really aimed for a different experience – games that can stretch up to the the size of your browser, even if you use a real large viewport. The Aves Engine takes care that your game automatically adapts to the resolution of the client’s browser and as you can see in our new Prototype video, we manage to keep the performance up, even with quad-hd resolution.

Action Surfaces

We already briefly showed you something we call Action Surfaces in the last demo where you were able to watch a video placed at a wall in a house. However, we really put this whole idea onto a new level and now have a widgetized system that is unbelievably useful and easy to use.

So again, what are action surfaces? As you know, the whole Web 2.0-Idea is actually about sharing and exchanging data using APIs. We have thousands of those in the web today and you can integrate data from Flickr, YouTube, Twitter or Google Maps on your website today by adding a few lines of code.

Guess what? Now you can integrate all those into your games with a mouse click!

If you want to display certain photos from Flickr on an object like a TV-Set you simply tell the Aves Engine that this particular object should have an action surface attached to it and that you want to fill this surface with some data.

This really is only drag’n’drop, your game designers will freak out, we promise!

Once an action surface is in place, pick a widget, which can be a public API or custom data you prepared and drop it onto the object.

You are done. Actually, not a single line of code needed to be written here.

Also making those kind of widgets is incredible easy. We took care that you can create new widgets within minutes with a very clean and straightforward API.

If you think about it, the possibilities are endless and the integration is painless. Best of all, this is actually a truly unique feature – you won’t see this in any Flash game.

Realtime World Editor

In our first video we showed a basic interactive world editor. Editors are actually really a pain to program. On the other hand, they are the necessary tools for your designers and coders to quickly change things. We took care of the heavy lifting here and bring you a realtime world editor that is really flexible and can be extended to your taste of complexity.

The editor let’s you easily organize and configure your game assets.
You can choose tiles and objects from your resource folder and then move, place or delete them in your live world. You can also edit the properties of all your objects and modify them in an very intuitive and easy to use UI.

While we use the editor mainly for administrative purposes in this example, you may also want to think of providing this kind of functionality to your users to for example furnish their virtual homes.

The Editor automatically loads all assets from the world you are currently focused on. So for example you have furniture in the house but Trees and Houses in the outside world.

Performance

Games were and will always be about performance. This is a golden rule from the traditional game industry which actually didn’t really made it to the browsergames industry yet. And that’s the reason why browsergames perform really bad on slower devices such as mobile phones or in the recently released iPad.

We took performance very serious from the beginning and we always succeeded on bringing a real good playing experience to mobile browsers.

When you think about it, which browsergame really has a lot of characters walking around on your screen? No matter if Flash or HTML, object animation is very limited. You will not find many games who feature more than 20 characters and often when reaching those limits, the games are really slowing down on desktop systems but are unplayable on mobile devices.

With some really neat tricks we were able to get hundreds of animated characters on a single viewport on standard desktop systems and still a very good playing experience on mobile devices with 10-20 characters walking around and interacting. This is very huge step compared to anything available right now.

Ready for Mobile

As indicated in the last sentence, we were able to make some great optimizations for the latest WebKit based smartphone generations, including devices running iPhone OS or Android. As it turned out, these optimizations were really necessary. It’s very tricky to perform on these devices. They often have much smaller CPU and memory power and slower JavaScript-Engines embedded in their mobile browsers. Anyways, we succeeded and you will be perfectly ready to build stunning games for mobile devices!

When and how to license?

We are in the early stages of the Aves Engine development bringing the pieces together while in parallel building the Open-World project Aves Community as a show case. We are happy to show interested investors, gamestudios and publishers working prototypes of the game engine to demonstrate performance and commercial prospects.

We are also currently handpicking a few studios who are going to be beta licensees in the beginning of 2011. They will get a headstart using our technology in one of their upcoming games.