Comment by johncolanduoni 8 hours ago
He may have been serving a game in a canvas hosted in a Next.js app, but have done all the actual game (rendering, simulation, etc.) in something else. That’s a decent approach - Next can handle the header of the webpage and the marketing blog or whatever just fine.
My point isn’t that you absolutely need that, just that the negative effect on your game development are pretty minimal if you’re not leaning on the SPA framework for anything related to the game. If your game is going to be embedded into an otherwise normal-ish website, this isn’t a terrible way to go (I’ve done it personally with a game mostly written in Rust and compiled to WASM). You can get gains by splitting your game and web site bundles and loading the former from the latter explicitly, but they’re not massive if your bundler was already reasonably incremental (or was already esbuild).
Thanks for assuming I “read” about bundlers somewhere, though. I’ve been using (and configuring) them since they existed.
index.html with script files would still benefit from a bundler. You can have a very minimal react footprint and still want to use react build tools just for bundling.
What effect do you imagine Next.js has on a bunch of code manipulating an HTML canvas? For vanilla code directly using browser APIs it’s basically just a bundler configuration, and while it’s not optimally configured for that use case (and annoying for other reasons) it’s probably better than what someone who has never configured webpack before would get doing it themselves.
But like... so can an index.html with a script tag? Am I missing something, where did you read that there was a lot of work involving the header or an attached marketing blog?