There are numerous ways for gamers to enjoy their pass time of playing games these days, whether it’s on a dedicated games console or by other means. Today we have news of HTML 5 gaming thanks to the multiplayer BrowserQuest.

Web browser giant Mozilla has teamed up with Web design studio Little Workshop to create the Web-based adventure game BrowserQuest, which according to Ars Technica has been developed using Web technologies and can be played within a Web browser.

Developers of such content no longer have to use plugins to create interactive multimedia experiences and user interfaces. These modern standards are making it easier for the creation of games, and BrowserQuest has been developed using JavaScript and HTML 5, which shows how the standards can be used to create browser games.

Using the HTML 5 Canvas element it has created a tile based 2D world, and HTML 5 audio APIs support the sound effects. WebSockets allow for communication with the backend server and local storage saves the players progress.

The titles remote backend allows for the real-time multiplayer gameplay, and was coded in JavaScript running on top of Node.js. This is balanced across a variety of Node.j.s. instances on three different servers. At the time of writing the backend was successfully allowing over 1,900 simultaneous players, which can be monitored via the games real time dashboard interface.

Developers concentrated on using widely supported standards so the game would be able to be enjoyed on a variety of different desktop and mobile browsers, which means it works just as well on a PC as it does on a tablet. Things will get even better as a number of Web standards are pending, which will improve support for creating games on the Web in the future.

These include features such as 3D graphics and support for game controller peripherals, and could eventually take the browser platform away from just casual gaming. For more information about BrowserQuest, see the Mozilla Hacks blog.