Selecting a HTML5 Canvas library for a turn-based strategy game

In the past couple of days I had determined to select a HTML5 Canvas library to use for my next game project. Some of the features I require:

Scaling and rotating support with Tweening
Availability or ready-made resource (images, audio) loader or able to easily make your own
Ability to click on a random image or text element (sprite) and handle the event easily, like jQuery 'click' handler
Ability to easily make hover effect over images/text
Some other stuff like Flip is desired by not absolutely required

After investigating a lot of frameworks, I narrowed the list down to: Crafty, MelonJS, Quintus, LimeJS, CanvasEngine, Cocos2d-hmtl5, CreateJS/EaselJS. Crafty does not have rotating support, MelonJS and Cocos2d require that you manually, traverse all the child nodes, find which ones are visible and hittest the mouse coordinates to get the hover effect. I could not find this information of Lime.js, but inability to preload audio turned me off. Quintus apparently does not support hover at all. So, I was left with CanvasEngine and EaselJS. RPG.js is moving to CanvasEngine, so I thought there must be some reason for that and tried CE first. However, elements.events.mouseover is buggy - the event fires only when mouse stops moving. So, I was left with EaselJS, and managed to get it to work, even easier than I thought by using ButtonHelper class. More in my next post...

Tweet to @mbabuskov Milan Babuškov, 2013-05-08