Meltdown! is not really a game yet, but it is doing many of the things games do. For one, it has a functioning game loop now. If you go to the web page here, at the time of this writing you will see it displaying some text with a running counter on the canvas. Google Chrome says that it is running very close to its desired frame rate of 60 fps (Frames Per Second). I am liking Google Chrome’s developer tools more and more as this project continues. If you don’t need a running assessment of frames per second, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the code works just fine on Internet Explorer 9.

I also realized today that at the end of Udacity’s “HTML5 Game Development” course, you don’t have a functioning game! This is a huge oversight in my opinion. I suspect that the instructors just ran out of time, probably due to trying to do too much too quickly. The whole course should probably be redone with a very simple game in mind (a single bouncing target with one turret gun to shoot at it, perhaps) that is developed from start to finish as the course progresses. It could still have all of that wonderful stuff about atlases, asset loaders, physics engines, audio, etc., but everyone would also have a working game when they finish.