Fast-paced 3D shooting game
Banana Bread is a first-person shooting game demo developed by Mozilla as an experiment. The reason was to see if a 3D game can run in a browser by using Emscripten to JavaScript and WebGL. It’s fully open source so that developers can use it to develop their web-based video games.
How to play
Banana Bread is not an exploration game. You’re confined to the arena and must defend yourself from fast, attacking enemy bots. Choose between the Arena, Two Towers, Lava Chamber, Future or Lava Rooms. When the game starts, you’ll find yourself in the arena. Fast-moving green bots will attack you immediately.
Use your mouse to look around and to shoot. Keyboard numbers 1 to 5 let you choose your weapons, and 9 toggles to third-person mode. Like many other games, WASD enables you to move up, left down and right, respectively. You can modify the map by pressing E to enable edit mode. Press 0 to access options like adding another bot or changing the resolution.
Troubleshooting
Banana Bread will only run on up-to-date browsers and won’t launch if it detects that crucial features are missing. It works on stable releases of Firefox and Chrome, but should run on any browser supporting Pointer Lock, WebGL, compressed textures, fullscreen and typed arrays.
The game won’t run on Internet Explorer since it doesn’t support WebGL, and older versions of Safari won’t run it either, lacking the Float64Array. For any gameplay or development issues, you can check the FAQs on the website.
Game development
Mozilla used the famous Cube 2 game for this experiment. It was compiled into JavaScript and WebGL to run in a web browser, using only standard web APIs and no plugins. It incorporates many visual effects, like water reflections, glare, particle effects, skeletal animation and many more. It has a fast performance on the web and features an in-game editor.
Open source game experiment
Banana Bread is a first-person shooting game with excellent 3D and realistic sound effects. You are confined to a single area where you have to defend yourself against attacking enemy bots. It is an open-source project by Mozilla to test if this type of game can run successfully on the web without plugins.
