We attended the third and final Web-Based Games Round Table session hosted by Brian Robbins at the GDC this morning. It was focused on the production/design aspects as opposed to the commerce and community issues of the previous two sessions.
Rob and I were pleasantly surprised to find ourselves in discussions about DHTML and other standards-based approaches to web games (like SVG) with none other than Mozillians Brendan Eich, Stuart Parmenter, Vladimir Vukićević, and Mike Shaver.
If I had done my research while here in California, I would have found posts like this and this from Vlad and Mike and we might have been able to talk longer than we did about our ventures into game programming in SVG. For those just joining the fray, here are some non-fancy game demos I've put together using SVG and JavaScript:
Rob also has a great post on this topic.
As we discussed, one of the major problems we've seen thus far is that though it's definitely possible to whip up a game using nothing more than a text editor, getting beyond a trivial DHTML or SVG game would be greatly facilitated if there was improvements to the tool chain for indie developers with a budget of zero. Real game development in these technologies will not prosper without the proper toolset. While applications like Inkscape certainly help, where are the free JavaScript+PHP+HTML+SVG IDEs?
Yes, I know, I'm greedy...