Humble Mozilla Bundle Brings Indie Games To Your Browser
Humble Bundle has another, well, bundle, but this time it's doing something different, new, and quite exciting. The name that has, for some, changed the way you buy games and support game developers, especially indie ones, is now pioneering another with a collection of 8 titles. These aren't just games you can play on your PC or, in some cases, mobile device. These titles can spring at you right within the confines of one of the most used programs on your computer: your web browser.
The web, and in particular, web browsers, have come a long way. From delivering just text, then images, and then moving pictures and sounds, now the web has exploded into uses that we could only dream of less than a decade ago. Now we can use the web and our web browsers for almost anything. And by "anything", we also mean playing games. Not just your casual, Flash-based or Facebook games, mind you. This latest Humble Bundle proves that you can get a bit more serious with gaming on web browsers, thanks to a few new technologies.
WebGL is OpenGL for web browsers. If that didn't make much sense, this simply means that WebGL gives developers the ability to harness the capabilities of a device's graphics chip even from within a web browser. asm.js is a subset of the popular web-oriented Javascript language that Mozilla has designed to make web apps that use Javascript perform just as fast as native code. While these two pieces are technically enough to create games like those found in this Humble Bundle, the ever popular Unity tool, particularly its WebGL Exporter, takes away the tediousness of trying to develop for multiple platforms, including web browsers. The results are just incredible, as you can see from the demo snippet below.
For those unfamiliar with the way Humble Bundle works, you can pay what you want for the whole bundle and you can even decide to split the amount between the developers and some charities. However, there is a specific amount to beat, currently at $5.08, which rises as time goes by. If you pay more than that average, you get access to more games, including ones that will be added later on. A bit new to the system is an even higher tier, which not only gives everything mentioned previously but also includes one special game.
If you're a bit interested in trying out these games before paying for them, a few demos are available for free for you to see what they can offer. Although these browser games will work in any modern browser, as Mozilla says, they just scream on Firefox.
SOURCE: Mozilla, Humble Bundle