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Ludei promises to reduce HTML5 dev time with CAAT toolset

And has a little dig at Wooga

Ludei promises to reduce HTML5 dev time with CAAT toolset
HTML5 game development platform Ludei has launched a new open source game engine, designed to accelerate product time-to-market.

The Canvas Advanced Animation Toolkit – or CAAT for short – operates as a complete gaming framework based on JavaScript, working with Canvas, CSS and WebGL.

Its apparent time saving qualities, however, stem from the pre-designed sections of code deployed within, with Ludei claiming many titles across multiple platforms have already tapped into CAAT pre-release.

Out of the bag

One such release is Ludei's own Sumon – a number guessing game available on iOS, Android, Facebook and Chrome.

"The CAAT has always been our secret weapon, quietly sitting in the background of our development stack, waiting to be set free on developers," said Ludei president Joe Monastiero.

"It basically completes version one of our platform – CocoonJS for API acceleration and enhancement; the cloud compiler for cross-platform builds; our monetisation engine for bridging native payments and ad networks; and now our CAAT game engine.

"If someone does not believe that HTML5 works for performance gaming, don't give away your source code. Contact us first. Seriously."

Me-ow

Monastiero's parting words appear to be aimed squarely in Wooga's direction. 

Back in June, the social gaming company decided to make its HTML5 project, Pocket Island, open source.

When we spoke to Monastiero a few weeks later, he explained that this decision was likely "a PR move."

"Wooga probably reached a point in time where it realised it wasn't going to be able to deliver the app with acceptable performance and monetisation tools and the firm decided to be the Good Samaritan and pass what they had off to the world to play with," offered Monastiero.

"We've delivered apps from a single codebase to both the App Store and Google Play – with complex animations and multichannel audio – that were 100 percent coded in HTML5. My guess is that Wooga did not realise there were options to do exactly this."

CAAT is available now from Ludei's website. It's open source, so developers are free to enhance and modify it as they see fit.
Staff Writer

PocketGamer.biz's news editor 2012-2013