In a quest for something more substantial, I looked into the HTML5 game engine Phaser. It has a large audience and an impressive set of features. It was fun poking through some of the source to see how it does its magic, but I ultimately decided against making my own Phaser creation because it is at its core a bitmap-based system.

Bitmaps don't scale as nicely as vectors by their nature, and I place a great deal of importance on ability to scale well. In the modern HTML world, the customer might be running resolutions ranging anywhere from a 320 x 480 iPhone screen to a 3840 x 2160 4K desktop display.

The people behind Phaser isn't blind to this. Part of the core features includes a ScaleManager class to help the process. There are also ways to load lower- or higher-resolution assets in response to the screen resolution used by the particular user. But it is an imperfect solution, there are still bitmap scaling artifacts around that plainly wouldn't be an issue at all had the system been based on vector graphics.

Most of the Phaser titles don't bother with scaling at all, or only scale across a few fixed resolutions. I find myself quite annoyed when I load up a sample app, just to see it take up a tiny 320x480 (resolution of the original iPhone) section of my desktop browser.

sigh

I'll keep looking.