Phaser is a fast, free and fun open source HTML5 game framework. It uses [Pixi.js](https://github.com/GoodBoyDigital/pixi.js/) for WebGL and Canvas rendering across desktop and mobile web browsers. Games can be compiled to iOS and Android apps via 3rd party tools.
Along with the fantastic open source community Phaser is actively developed and maintained by [Photon Storm Limited](http://www.photonstorm.com). As a result of rapid support and a developer friendly API Phaser is currently one of the [most starred](https://github.com/showcases/javascript-game-engines) game frameworks on Github.
Thousands of developers worldwide use it. From indies and multi-national digital agencies to schools and Universities. Each creating their own incredible games. Grab the source and join in the fun!
The release of Phaser 2.4.4 continues our work with bug fixes, new features and optimizations. As with the previous version it's a point-release, making it a safe upgrade for anyone using an earlier 2.4 build.
Internally here at Phaser HQ we have been busy with several new projects.
First we released [Interphase](http://phaser.io/interphase/), a new 400-page publication for Phaser developers. Packed full of exclusive content including 8 complete games, tutorials and a deep dive into the Phaser State Manager. It's been a blast to write and we have been really encouraged by the response from readers. We're planning on releasing Interphase 2 before the end of the year.
We've also released [Particle Storm](http://phaser.io/shop/plugins/particlestorm). An advanced particle system allowing you to easily create stunning special effects in your games with just a few lines of code. Our primary design goal was to create a particle system that was extremely flexible. It was important that you should be able to easily integrate the effects into your games. Particles are constructed through easy-to-understand JavaScript objects with multiple properties and options to let you quickly put together complex visuals with minimum effort.
As we close in towards the end of 2015 there are still a couple of new releases on the horizon, as well as Phaser 2.4.5. We're also getting very close to a fully working build of Phaser 2 using our new renderer. As always, keep you eyes on the Phaser web site or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/photonstorm) for the latest news.
Finally we'd be extremely grateful if you could get involved with our [Phaser Patreon campaign](https://www.patreon.com/photonstorm). The uptake so far has been fantastic. Thank you to everyone who now supports Phaser development and shares our belief in the future of HTML5 gaming and Phasers role in that.
Please help support the future development of Phaser through our [Patreon campaign](https://www.patreon.com/photonstorm). We've some exciting plans and there's so much we'd like to do. Let's see if we can all work together to make this possible.
### Phaser Sponsors
Phaser is [sponsored](https://www.patreon.com/photonstorm) by the following great companies:
If you'd like to try coding in Phaser right now, with nothing more than your web browser then you can head over to the [Phaser Sandbox](http://phaser.io/sandbox). You'll find Quick Start templates and a user-friendly editor filled with handy code-completion features.
Want to try Phaser without downloading anything? The site [Koding](https://koding.com) offer a complete browser-based virtual machine to work in, allowing you to clone the Phaser repo and start work immediately.
We have a [Getting Started Guide](http://phaser.io/tutorials/getting-started) which covers all you need to begin developing games with Phaser. From setting up a web server, to picking an IDE and coding your first game.
Prefer **videos** to reading? Lynda.com have published a free course: [HTML5 Game Development with Phaser](http://www.lynda.com/Phaser-tutorials/HTML5-Game-Development-Phaser/163641-2.html)
The single biggest Phaser resource is the new [Phaser web site](http://phaser.io/news). It has hundreds of tutorials listed and fresh ones are added every week, so keep coming back to see what's new!
Using Phaser with **TypeScript**? Check out this great series of [Game From Scratch](http://www.gamefromscratch.com/page/Adventures-in-Phaser-with-TypeScript-tutorial-series.aspx) tutorials.
With 400 pages of content you'll find detailed articles, game development "Making Of" guides and tutorials. All were written using the latest version of Phaser, so you won't be learning any out-dated tricks here.
The [Game Mechanic Explorer](http://gamemechanicexplorer.com) is a great interactive way to learn how to develop specific game mechanics in Phaser. Well worth exploring once you've got your dev environment set-up.
### Mighty Editor - Visual Game Editor
[MightyEditor](http://mightyfingers.com/) is a browser-based visual Phaser game editor. Create your maps with ease, position objects and share them in seconds. It also exports to native Phaser code. Excellent for quickly setting-up levels and scenes.
Phaser is provided ready compiled in the `build` folder of the repository. There are both plain and minified versions. The plain version is for use during development and the minified version for production.
Starting from Phaser 2.3.0 we now include a brand new build system which allows you to strip out lots of additional features you may not require, saving hundreds of KB in the process. Don't use any Sound in your game? Then you can now exclude the entire sound system. Don't need Keyboard support? That can be stripped out too.
See the [Creating a Custom Phaser Build](http://phaser.io/tutorials/creating-custom-phaser-builds) tutorial for details.
### Building from source
Should you wish to build Phaser from source you can take advantage of the provided [Grunt](http://gruntjs.com/) scripts. Ensure you have the required packages by running `npm install` first.
Run `grunt` to perform a default build to the `dist` folder.
Thousands of games have been made in Phaser. From game jam entries to titles by some of the largest entertainment brands in the world. Here is a tiny sample:
Phaser requires a web browser that supports the [canvas tag](http://caniuse.com/#feat=canvas). This includes Internet Explorer 9+, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera on desktop. iOS Safari, Android Browser and Chrome for Android are supported on mobile.
While Phaser does its best to ensure a consistent cross-platform experience always be aware of browser and device limitations. This is especially important with regard to memory and GPU limitations on mobile, and legacy browser HTML5 compatibility.
### IE9
If you need to support IE9 / Android 2.x **and** use P2 physics then you must use the polyfill in the `resources/IE9 Polyfill` folder. If you don't use P2 (or don't care about IE9!) you can skip this.
### JavaScript and TypeScript
Phaser is developed in JavaScript. We've made no assumptions about how you like to code and were careful not to impose a strict structure upon you. You won't find Phaser split into modules, requiring a build step, or making you use a class / inheritance OOP approach. That doesn't mean you can't do so, it just means we don't *force* you to. It's your choice.
If you code with [TypeScript](http://www.typescriptlang.org/) there are comprehensive definition files in the `typescript` folder. They are for TypeScript 1.4+.
The majority of Phaser development is now taking place on the Phaser 3 project. The Phaser 2 branch will still be supported and issues fixed, but roadmap features have been migrated over to Phaser 3.
We're now a good way in to development of Phaser 3. We've been working hard on creating a brand new and extremely powerful renderer. Progress reports are posted to the [web site](http://phaser.io/labs) and [Phaser 3 repo](https://github.com/photonstorm/phaser3).
There is still plenty of time to add your suggestions and feedback in [this forum thread](http://www.html5gamedevs.com/topic/7949-the-phaser-3-wishlist-thread/).
If you are an exceptional JavaScript developer and would like to join the Phaser 3 development team then let us know. We have a limited budget available to pay towards your time.
[Phaser Nano](https://github.com/photonstorm/phaser-nano) is a cut-down and optimized build of Phaser designed specifically for super low file-size environments such as banner ads and interstitials. It still uses the same friendly API as Phaser but in a much smaller footprint. The current release being just 8.3KB.
* Emitter.emitParticle now has 4 new optional arguments: `x`, `y`, `key` and `frame`. These allow you to override whatever the Emitter default values may be and emit the particle from the given coordinates and with a new texture.
* Group.resetChild is a new method that allows you to call both `child.reset` and/or `child.loadTexture` on the given child object. This is used internally by `getFirstDead` and similar, but is made public so you can use it as a group iteration callback. Note that the child must have public `reset` and `loadTexture` methods to be valid for the call.
* Group.getFirstDead, Group.getFirstAlive and Group.getFirstExists all have new optional arguments: `createIfNull`, `x`, `y`, `key` and `frame`. If the method you call cannot find a matching child (i.e. getFirstDead cannot find any dead children) then the optional `createIfNull` allows you to instantly create a new child in the group using the position and texture arguments to do so. This allows you to always get a child back from the Group and remove the need to do null checks and Group inserts from your game code. The same arguments can also be used in a different way: if `createIfNull` is false AND you provide the extra arguments AND a child is found then it will be passed to the new `Group.resetChild` method. This allows you to retrieve a child from the Group and have it reset and instantly ready for use in your game without any extra code.
* P2.Body.removeCollisionGroup allows you to remove the given CollisionGroup, or array of CollisionGroups, from the list of groups that a body will collide with and updates the collision masks (thanks @Garbanas#2047)
* Filter.addToWorld allows you to quickly create a Phaser.Image object at the given position and size, with the Filter ready applied to it. This can eliminate lots of duplicate code.
* Tiled 0.13.0 added support for layer data compression when exporting as JSON. This means that any .tmx stored using base64 encoding will start exporting layer data as a base64 encoded string rather than a native array. This update adds in automatic support for this as long as the data isn't compressed. For IE9 support you'll need to use the new polyfill found in the resources folder (thanks @noidexe#2084)
* The Random Number Generator can now get and set its state via rnd.state. This allows you to do things like saving the state of the generator to a string that can be part of a save-game file and load it back in again (thanks @luckylooke#2056#1900)
* The new `PointerMode` enumeration value has been added for better simple input discrimination in the future, between active pointers such as touch screens and passive pointers, such as mouse cursors (thanks @pnstickne#2062)
* Button.justReleasedPreventsOver controls if a just-release event
on a pointer prevents it from being able to trigger an over event.
* Button.forceOut expanded to accept a PointerMode value such that it
* Phaser.KeyCode is a new pseudo-type used by the Keyboard class (and your code) to allow for separation of all the Keyboard constants to their own file. This stops the JSDocs from becoming 'polluted' and allows for easier future expansion (thanks @pnstickne#2118#2031)
* When calling GameObject.revive the `heal` method is called to apply the health value, allowing it to take into consideration a `maxHealth` value if set (thanks @bsparks#2027)
* Change splice.call(arguments, ..) to use slice instead (thanks @pnstickne#2034#2032)
* BitmapData.move, moveH and moveV have a new optional `wrap` argument allowing you to control if the contents of the BitmapData are wrapped around the edges (true) or simply scrolled off (false).
* The Physics Editor Exporter (found in the resources folder of the repo) has had an option to prefix shape names and optimize JSON output added to it (thanks @Garbanas#2093)
* Touch.addTouchLockCallback has a new argument `onEnd` which allows the callback to fire either on a touchstart or a touchend event.
* The SoundManager now detects if the browser is running under iOS9 and uses a touchend callback to unlock the audio subsystem. Previous versions of iOS (and Android) still use touchstart. This fixes Apple's screw-up with regard to changing the way Web Audio should be triggered in Mobile Safari. Thanks Apple (thanks @MyCatCarlos for the heads-up #2095)
* The default Button.onOverMouseOnly value has changed from `false` to `true`. If you used this in your touch enabled games then please be aware of this change (#2083)
* New Color stub added for the custom build process. Contains just the bare minimum of functions that Phaser needs to work. Cuts file size from 48.7KB to 7.4KB. Note: Do not stub this out if using BitmapData objects.
* New DOM stub added for the custom build process. Contains just the bare minimum of functions that Phaser needs to work. Cuts file size from 14.8KB to 2.4KB. Note: Do not stub this out if using the full Scale Manager.
* New Scale Manager stub added. Removes all Scale Manager handling from Phaser! But saves 75KB in the process. If you know you don't need to scale the Phaser canvas, or are handling that externally, then you can safely stub it out in a custom build.
* Added the PIXI.PolyK, PIXI.WebGLGraphics and PIXI.CanvasGraphics files to the Graphics custom build option. They weren't used anyway and this removes an extra 40.2KB from the build size.
* Time.suggestedFps is now defaulted to `Time.desiredFps` for the first few frames until things have settled down (previously it was `null`) (thanks @noidexe#2130)
* Game.update could call `updateLogic` multiple times in a single frame when catching up with slow device frame rates. This would cause Tweens to advance at twice the speed they should have done (thanks @mkristo)
* Under setTimeOut (or when `forceSetTimeOut` was true) the Time was incorrectly setting `Time.timeExpected` causing game updates to lag (thanks @satan6#2087)
* Removed use of the `tilePosition` property in the Phaser.Rope class as it isn't implemented and caused calls to `Rope.reset` to crash (thanks @spayton#2135)
Please note that Phaser uses a custom build of Pixi and always has done. The following changes have been made to our custom build, not to Pixi in general.
* PIXI.WebGLRenderer.updateTexture now returns a boolean depending on if the texture was successfully bound to the gl context or not.
* PIXI.WebGLSpriteBatch.renderBatch would still try and render a texture even if `updateTexture` failed to bind it. It now checks the return value from `updateTexture` and ignores failed binds.
* Sprite.getBounds would report an inaccurate value if the sprite was negatively scaled (causing things like generateTexture to be cut off) (thanks @DavidAPC#2108)
* BaseTexture.skipRender is a new boolean that can be set to skip the rendering phase in the WebGL Sprite Batch. You may want to do this if you have a parent Sprite with no visible texture (i.e. uses the internal `__default` texture) that has children that you do want to render, without causing a batch flush in the process.
- Before submitting a Pull Request run your code through [JSHint](http://www.jshint.com/) using our [config](https://github.com/photonstorm/phaser/blob/master/.jshintrc).
