Comment by ploggingdev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ploggingdev | Hacker News Reader

Perfect timing. I just started reading up about phaser since I was looking into building a html/js powered browser based gaming site, something like miniclip.com.

I am a complete beginner and I want to build a simple game to simulate trading bitcoin. Let's call the main character Wojak (since it's the most popular meme for bitcoin trading related discussions). Here's the idea : Wojak got into Bitcoin early and made a nice little fortune and now stays at home trading bitcoin on exchanges. I want the setting to be a house with furniture, a door, a window and a computer. Maybe something slightly better than this : http://img.phone.baidu.com/public/uploads/store_4/d/7/6/d769...

I will be using historical bitcoin price data to simulate a very simple exchange the user can trade against. Here are my questions for anyone who has built a game using phaser :

* Is phaser suitable for what I plan to build?

* can you give me an overview of what sort of time and effort building a game like this will involve?

* How do I generate the assets, models of the furniture? What tools are commonly used?

* How do I get audio for the background music and some simple effects for the scenes? Any good resources for this? Maybe there are apps that can help with this?

* Any good tutorials to get me up to scratch in understanding how browser based games work from a developers point of view?

* Any good resources and communities that might be helpful for what I have in mind?

I started looking into phaser and building browser based games a couple of hours ago, so apologies if the questions and my thinking are all over the place.

Phaser is perfectly fine for that. Since you are building a game about some sort of economy that evolves, you are likely to need some graphs in your UI, I doubt Phaser has components strictly for that but it's likely that someone has done some libraries, or you can roll something simple with the 2D primitives that Phaser does support.

However, it sounds like your game is going to be more based on UI interactions (buttons, etc) than in "realtime" action, which Phaser is very strong at. If you are already comfortable with straight HTML and CSS then you might be better off building the game as a Web App, and use lots of great libraries in that realm.

Until you have the foundations of your game, I advise you to not worry about graphics and audio. There are resources like https://opengameart.org/ where you can get some material to work with so it's not just a plain and ugly looking thing. Once you prove that the game has legs (and you as its developer have legs too) then you can start looking into creating or comissioning assets.

if you're just starting game dev, then pick an established game engine, like Cocos2d-x or Unity. Both can produce web builds.

I think it's fair to say that Phaser is pretty established. If you're just targeting the Web+2D, you can get a smaller output too, rather than, say, bundling Unity into your game.

Not a knock against those two, they're both quite good. Phaser is definitely a reasonable option, though.

If you're an absolute beginner, go with a modern engine like unity, game maker, cocos, ... If you're an average dev and knows js, phaser is very nice. (But do you only want to target browsers?)

>> modern engine like ...game maker...

No, no, no. I started on Game Maker about 12 years ago. It taught me a lot of crummy programming practices, and often took care of too many of the underlying aspects, to a point where I was often doing things without any understanding of how they worked.

Unity is free, and offers something much closer to a proper IDE. It's usage of C# also encourages newer developers to learn the fundaments a language they can very much apply elsewhere if and when they need.

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