My Take on Phaser after 30 Days

February 7th, 2021

Hello everyone, today I'll quickly summarize my take on Phaser after around 30 days of training. I already published my reasons for picking Phaser on the first place earlier today I'll share what I think after 1st month.

What is Phaser?

Phaser is a open source HTML5 game framework that allows you to create WebGL or canvas based games. Basically you can make mobile or browser based games with Phaser. It's been developed by one person and widely supported by the community. Phaser is the most popular framework compare to other frameworks that does the same job with it.

Developer Experience

I'm using VS Code to develop stuff with Phaser and my developer experience was quite alright so far. I can summarize that result under several reasons that I find the most important.

• I'm using JavaScript for all my personal projects and I tend to use it for professional work also. For me developer ecosystem that Phaser provides can be unmatched. Phaser's documentation is one of the best documentations I've ever seen and I've never experienced any problems while I'm trying to look for an answer about the Phaser API or anything that are related to Phaser.

• Easy debugging. I'm currently learning the framework and maybe it's too early to talk about debugging but I wasn't expecting anything from the Phaser on the debugging side to be honest, I mean don't get me wrong from my understanding it's nowhere near to a modern game engine but it's quite alright for such a framework.

• Community. Again, even though the community isn't as big as the main stream game engine's communities, I can describe Phaser community as a one passionate community that can help with lots of things quicker than I expected.

Limits of the Framework

I'll keep that part super short. From my experience I've never witnessed any limitations against the work I try to do, yet of course my experience is quite limited and means nothing under the "limits of a framework" topic. Yet as far as I think since my expectations from Phaser often limited with the use of its Arcade Physics for a 2d platformer game I won't be experiencing huge problems in general.

But of course the framework already comes with some limitations by supporting only a group of possible games options against the engines that can support all genres that are possible.

Knowledge Transfer

I think Phaser is a great teacher for the fundamentals of the game dev, I'm not a game developer and maybe I shouldn't be the one who is saying that but recently I'm sparing lots of free time on researching about best practices in game dev world from gamers psychology to camera movement or from rewarding to lighting and so on and so forth.

Since when you work with Phaser all you do is basically writing code over and over again without nearly 0 helper tools you easily absorb those fundamentals whenever you try to work with any of them at any extend. I think the abstracted nature of modern game engines can cause a side effect to new learners at this point.

BTW, don't get me wrong I still think it's makes sense to use or learn Phaser if and only if you want to use JS so bad and you only want to make web based games, for aaaalllll other scenarios any mainstream game engine would beat Phaser with a large margin. Unity, Unreal, Godot... You name it. All the things I mentioned above are only valid for my situation from my point of view.

Alright everyone, that was it for today. I planned to write that post at the very first day that I started to work on Phaser and I can monthly update that part if I feel like to.

I hope to see you in the next one, until then take care :)