Web Native Game Development

The web has quietly become one of the most capable platforms for game development. Advances in WebAssembly, WebGL, and WebGPU have given developers tools that rival native desktop performance, while game engines like Unity and Godot have added robust web export pipelines. However, building games for the browser comes with its own set of constraints, including file size, browser compatibility, and the need to quickly capture and maintain the player's attention. Eric Dubelbor is a principal engineer at Pokey, which is a web games platform serving over 100,000,000 monthly users. He's also a game developer himself, with titles including Silly Skies and Village Builder. His unusual position building developer tools that power the platform, while also shipping games on it, gives him a rare perspective on what it actually takes to succeed in web game development. In this episode, Eric joins Joe Nash to discuss the history of web games from the Flash era to today's renaissance, how WebAssembly and WebGPU have transformed what is possible in the browser, the trade offs between different game engines for web publishing, and more. Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award winning community builder who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry's Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts. Welcome to Software Engineering Daily. I'm your host for today's episode, Joe Nash. And today, I'm joined by Eric Doubelbuur, principal engineer at Pokey and a developer of web based games. Eric, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for joining me all the way from the other side of the world at a dreadful time. Really appreciate you being here. So I wanna start by asking you, what was your journey into game development? How did you wind up at Poki? Oh, yeah. That starts a long time ago, actually. When I was 16, something like that, I played a lot of games, of course, on desktop. I actually never played Flash games or stuff like that. And I was very interested in, okay, how are games being built? So when I was very young, I already started looking into, okay, that's what I want to learn later. And I had a good friend of my parents who was a software developer, not in games. He was working on something completely different, but he knew how to write software. So he could explain me a little bit like, oh, this is how you do it. One of my favorite games back then was Half Life, the first, not the second. And that had an API to write bots for it so you could fight against in multiplayer, fight against, bots. And that's actually the first my introduction to programming was writing bots for Half Life in c plus plus Not the easiest thing at all, but it was very fun. I learned a lot about …