Squid is a lightweight library for rapid development of interactive web experiences.

Squid utilizes the HTML5 canvas element and provides base objects and common helper functions to speed up development of custom HTML5 animations, games, and visual effects.

I started developing with the canvas element in an effort to learn about game development. Using HTML5 meant I could develop games and create interactive content in my favorite language and instantly share my creations with friends and family through my website.

After many experiments and a few attempts at larger projects, I found myself rewriting much of the same code over and over, albeit with slightly different implementations. While I certainly rewrote many of the same functions and architecture from scratch, a lot of code was copied and pasted from previous projects, and then heavily altered to fit the particular project. I realized, as any half-assed programmer would, that I needed a clean, generic solution that I could use over and over as a base these projects.

There are plenty of HTML5 libraries and frameworks already built, tested, and used by many with great success. Some of these projects have large teams, are well-funded, and offer much more functionality than I could ever dream to add to Squid. For anyone looking for a full, commercial- grade solution for interactive development on the web, I'd encourage them to find those frameworks and libraries with a quick Google search. Squid is a personal project of mine that I share openly for anyone interested. It's very simple, lightweight, and provides only basic functionality in an attempt to minimize imposing limits on how it's used.

1. Enable rapid development of interactive web content by providing a basic framework for an update and render cycle, resource management, input detection, and entity system.
2. Minimize time spent on bootstrapping with simple constructor functions and a lightweight, single-file include.
3. Allow freedom in architecture design by sticking with traditional JavaScript prototypes.

• All of the library's functions and classes are namespaced under SQUID to prevent naming collisions in large projects.
• SQUID itself contains a variety of helper functions and constants that I've found myself including in various projects.

• Main container class for the update and render cycle, entity manager, initialization, and start/pause functions. All Squid projects start with creating an instance of Squid: var sqd = new SQUID.Squid();

• The constructor can optionally be passed a canvas object, width, and height. If no canvas is assigned by initialization time, a new canvas object will be created and appended to the document body.

• Basic entity class. All Squid entities must have a position (entity.x entity.y), size (entity.w entity.h), and update and render functions. Using the Entity constructor is not mandated as long as custom entities have these four basic properties.

• Entity objects created with SQUID.Entity have a default render function that renders a provided image or sprite according to the object's position and size values. The default update function is empty.

• Animation class integrated with Entity class. Declare animations with the resource URL, starting frame coordinate, frame size, and number of frames. Declare Entity.animation = yourAnim and Entity will render the animation by default if no explicit render function is declared for the entity.

• Layers are a container class used for managing entities. The main Squid object contains an array of layers (Squid.layers) that are updated and rendered in order. At Squid construction, a base layer is created for convenience. Adding entities directly to a Squid object adds them to the base layer.

• Resource manager for dynamic loading of image resources.