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Comment by CryoLogic | Hacker News Reader

For anyone looking to build a game but not yet settled on an engine I highly suggest giving Phaser a shot. I spent a few hours with the latest version and was pleasantly surprised how far it has come.

Most importantly the documentation and example code are now so robust that most common game components like 2d physics, collision, projectiles, multiplayer can be found here: https://www.phaser.io/examples

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I went from knowing nothing about Phaser to a working game in about two weeks for a game jam earlier this year. Really enjoyed working with it.

http://www.lmnopc.com/air-sea-golf/

The jam was "genre shift", where participants were supposed to take an existing game and shift it to another genre. I chose the Atari 2600 classic Air Sea Battle and turned it into a simple golfing game.

I liked the idea of using the 2600 as a starting point so I could worry less about the graphics and more about the physics and gameplay.

It's simple but it works. It's almost much more fun on a phone - the touch screen is more fun than a mouse for this one. :)

It seems like it's just limited on desktop? After dragging a certain amount on a desktop, I can't pull the swing back any further.

You have to start dragging the mouse from higher up the window as far as I can tell.

Watch the demo at the beginning of the game — you don’t want to click on the ball as your pivot point for the swing — use the upper right part of the window. That’s part of the reason I made the demo — to show the best place to start your swings. :)

That is really fun! It plays very smoothly on my iPhone.

Glad you dig it! :)

For Lua, I recommend Love2D. Never enjoyed coding a game so much than in this little bundle of joy. It made my programming better in other languages. (Phaser is great).

Note! The examples link is for Phaser 2. Phaser 2 has good documentation but development stopped about two years ago. Phaser CE (community edition) picked up where Phaser 2 left off and went from 2.6 to 2.11, cleaning things up a bit and adding support for stuff like new event APIs. Meanwhile, the original Phaser developer released Phaser 3 and many revisions (up to 3.14 now), but the documentation isn't organized as well as the Phaser 2 docs yet.

Anyway, it's a good framework but you have to pick a version and there isn't an obvious answer.

Yep the docs for Phaser 3 are super patchy and can be quite frustrating, often you'll find things that look as though they should work but are for v2 and no longer exist. There's a lot of great support in the discord server though

Thanks for that note about the Discord server. I'd run into the same problem with the v3 documentation while participating in a few weekend game jams earlier this year. My decision was that I would simply use Phaser v2 if I were to try another game jam. I'll definitely be considering Phaser 3 again pending a quick look at the Discord server.

I remember the author, Richard Davey, was super helpful on the flixel forums back in the day (the AS3/flash game engine), so I have no doubt that Phaser must be a high quality project!

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