Documentation

New here? The Create a Game video and the Installation & Getting Started tutorial are probably a good starting point. They give you an overview of how to build a game with the engine.

If you are stuck with anything and can't seem to find an answer here, try asking in the Forums or in our #impactjs IRC channel at irc.freenode.org.

For offline use, this documentation can be downloaded as ZIP archive.

Books

HTML5 Game development with ImpactJS by Davy Cielen and Arno Meysman features step-by-step guides for developing an RPG and a Side Scroller with Impact. It also covers many advanced topics such as debugging, analytics, leaderboards and publishing your game on Facebook and various AppStores.

Jesse Freeman's Introducing HTML5 Game Development walks you through the whole process of creating a game with Impact. It covers everything from setting up your working environment to packaging your game for release.

If you speak Spanish, also have a look at Luis Quintana's book Impact o Phaser. It's a walkthrough of building a complete game with Impact or Phaser.

Video Tutorials

• Create a Game - Building the game Pong from start to finish
• Working with Weltmeister - How the level editor works and how you can create your own entities to be used by it

Topics

• Installation & Getting Started - Installation instructions and a basic overview how Impact is structured into modules and classes
• Weltmeister - Everything about the Level Editor
• Working with Assets - Referencing and loading image and sound files
• Collision - Entity vs. Map and Entity vs. Entity collisions
• Animations - Learn how to animate entities and background maps
• Impact on Mobile Platforms - How to deal with different mobile devices
• Debug - Enabling and extending the Debug Panel
• Baking - Packing up your game for release
• Drop Source Code - Source for the example game Drop
• Entity Pooling - How to enable pooling for certain entities to relieve the GC
• Physics with Box2D - How to use the Box2D Physics engine with Impact
• Tools - Tools, libraries and services that work nicely with Impact.

Class Reference

The Class Reference lists all properties and methods for each of Impact's classes. If you are already familiar with the grand scheme of things, this is where you can look up the details.

Core and System

• Core - Module definition, module loading and the ig.main() and utility functions
• Class - Base Class for all classes
• System - Hosts the current Game object and maintains the run loop.
• Loader - Preloads all assets (images and sounds) and starts the given Game when done.

Logic

• Game - The main hub for your game. It hosts all currently active entities, background maps and a collision map and takes care of updating and drawing everything.
• Entity - Interactive objects in the game world are typically subclassed from this base Entity class. It provides animation, drawing and basic physics.
• EntityPool - Entities can be pooled and re-used if needed
• Input - Handles all Keyboard and Mouse input.
• Timer - Timing stuff.
• Map - Base class for CollisionMaps and BackgroundMaps.
• CollisionMap - Trace objects against a 2D Tile Map

Graphics

• Image - A wrapper around image resources (png, gif or jpeg). It takes care of loading and scaling the source image.
• Animation - Animate Entities and Background Map tiles with an Animation Sheet
• AnimationSheet - Load an Image as Animation Sheet and specify the width and height for each animation frame
• Font - Load a bitmap font image and draw text.
• BackgroundMap - Draw a 2D Tile Map

Sound

• Sound - Loads a sound file to be used as background music or game sound.
• Music - Provides functionality to play background music and create a playlist.
• SoundManager - Loads sound files for ig.Music and ig.Sound.