Cory Ondrejka Reveals Facebook Game That Researches HTML5

Cory Ondrejka has revealed on a Facebook engineering blog post what he has been working on since January with Bruce Rogers, presumably at the stealth startup Walletin acquired by the social network in November. Their JSGameBench provides a measurement of the limits of Hypertext Markup Language 5 for creating games on diverse platforms.

Version 0.1 of this game encourages players to draw sprites, awarding points based on the number drawn. While that happens on the front end, JSGameBench collects data on application performs on different browsers and hardware configurations. Means and averages will effectively become measurements of how much and what kind of HTML5 code that different devices and software combinations can handle.

Ondrejka clarifies that JSGameBench doesn’t signal that Facebook is making games — nor acquiring them for that matter — but rather is providing research to the game development community:

We think the best way to share knowledge is through code and examples, so we will continue to refine JSGameBench and experiment with what is possible. We also believe there is a knowledge gap in game development we would like to help fill. There are great teams and companies building on the Web, creating app store games, and building games for consoles. They face difficult but largely different challenges.

What do you make of the so-called JSGamebench application on Facebook? Does this help the social network achieve the goal of focusing on mobile development this year?