Phaser

Phaser is a fast, free and fun open source HTML5 game framework. It uses 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. As a result of rapid support and a developer friendly API Phaser is currently one of the most starred 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!

• Visit: The Phaser website and follow on Twitter (#phaserjs)
• Learn: API Documentation, Support Forum and StackOverflow
• Code: 500+ Source Examples (also available in this git repo)
• Read: Subscribe to the Newsletter and grab our Phaser Books
• Chat: #phaserio IRC channel on freenode
• Extend: With Phaser Plugins
• Be awesome: Support the future of Phaser on Patreon or by buying our books and plugins

Index

• What's New?
• Support Phaser
• Download Phaser
• Getting Started
• Using Phaser
• Games made with Phaser
• Requirements
• Road Map
• Change Log
• Contributing

What's new in Phaser 2.4.3

29th July 2015

Phaser 2.4 is another huge update. We had to bump the version number from 2.3 directly to 2.4 because of some API adjustments, all of which are fully detailed in the Change Log. While it's true we could have released it over a few smaller point releases, that just isn't how the cookie crumbled this time. Be sure to pay attention to the previous deprecated API calls that have been removed in 2.4.

So although you had to wait for it a couple months more than usual, Phaser 2.4 is quite simply an epic release - there is no two ways about it! Brand new video component? Check. Support for fully boned Creature animations? Check. Brand new Cache and Loader updates? Check. Dynamic sprite and gradient generator? Check. Literally hundreds of updates, enhancements and fixes across the entire codebase? Yup, those too! The Change Log seems to scroll on forever, yet the overall package size continues to come down as we optimise and streamline our code too (this release actually builds smaller than 2.3 did, just 80KB min + gz)

Make sure you check out the Phaser web site. We are going to be adding in stacks of new examples and features in the coming weeks.

Also we'd be extremely grateful if you could get involved with our Patreon campaign. We've got some really ambitious plans for how we'd like to see Phaser evolve in the future. Hopefully together we can reach that goal faster.

But that's all for now. I hope you enjoy Phaser 2.4.

Happy coding everyone! See you on the forums.

Cheers,

Rich - @photonstorm

Support Phaser on Patreon

Please help support the future development of Phaser through our Patreon campaign. 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 by the following great companies:

QICI Engine: A powerful one-stop integrated Phaser game editor

Zenva Academy: Online courses on Phaser, HTML5 and native app development

Download Phaser

Phaser is hosted on Github. There are a number of ways to download it:

• Clone the git repository via https, ssh or with the Github Windows or Mac clients.
• Download as zip or tar.gz
• Download just the build files: phaser.js and phaser.min.js
• Checkout with svn

Bower / npm

Install via bower

bower install phaser

Install via npm

npm install phaser

CDN

jsDelivr is a "super-fast CDN for developers". Include the following in your html:

<script src="//cdn.jsdelivr.net/phaser/2.4.3/phaser.js"></script>

or the minified version:

<script src="//cdn.jsdelivr.net/phaser/2.4.3/phaser.min.js"></script>

cdnjs.com also offers a free CDN service. They have all versions of Phaser and even the custom builds:

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/phaser/2.4.3/phaser.js"></script>

Phaser Sandbox

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. You'll find Quick Start templates and a user-friendly editor filled with handy code-completion features.

Koding

Want to try Phaser without downloading anything? Clone Phaser in Koding and start working right away in their web based development system.

License

Phaser is released under the MIT License.

Getting Started

We have a Getting Started Guide 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

The single biggest Phaser resource is the new Phaser web site. 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 tutorials.

Source Code Examples

Ever since we started Phaser we've been growing and expanding our extensive set of source code examples. Currently there are over 500 of them!

Browse the Phaser Examples or clone the examples repo and eat your heart out!

Phaser Books

We've been busy writing books about Phaser. Available now:

• A Guide to the Phaser Tween Manager Book + Code Bundle
• A Guide to the Phaser Scale Manager

With more on the way. Vote on the next title to be written.

Game Mechanic Explorer

The Game Mechanic Explorer 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 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.

Using Phaser

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.

Custom Builds

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.

As a result of this work the minimum build size of Phaser is now just 80KB minified and gzipped.

See the Creating a Custom Phaser Build tutorial for details.

Building from source

Should you wish to build Phaser from source you can take advantage of the provided Grunt scripts. Ensure you have the required packages by running npm install first.

Run grunt to perform a default build to the dist folder.

Games made with Phaser

Thousands of games have been made in Phaser. From game jam entries to titles by some of the largest entertainment brands in the world. This is just a tiny sample:

Artwork copyright their respective owners.

We add new games to the Phaser site regularly, be sure to send us yours when it's finished!

Requirements

Phaser requires a web browser that supports the canvas tag. 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 there are comprehensive definition files in the typescript folder. They are for TypeScript 1.4+.

Road Map

All 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.

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 and Phaser 3 repo.

There is still plenty of time to add your suggestions and feedback in this forum 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.

Change Log

Version 2.4.3 - "Coramen" - in development

New Features

• Loader.images is a new method that allows you to pass an array of image keys, and optionally the urls, to the Loader and have them all added to the load queue in one go.
• Tween.frameBased allows you to control if a Tween updates based on the physics step (i.e. frame based) or the system clock (time based). A frame based tween will use the physics elapsed timer when updating. This means it will retain the same consistent frame rate, regardless of the speed of the device. The duration value given should be given in frames. If the Tween uses a time based update (which is the default) then the duration is given in milliseconds. In this situation a 2000ms tween will last exactly 2 seconds, regardless of the device and how many visual updates the tween has actually been through.
• BitmapText.smoothed is a new boolean property that allows you to set texture smoothing on a bitmap font or not. By default smoothing is always on, but you can turn it off which helps for bitmap fonts created from pixel art style character sets.
• Text.addFontStyle and Text.addFontWeight allow you to apply font weights and styles to specific characters in a Text object. For example you can now include bold or italics within single Text objects (thanks @jdnichollsc #1950)
• PIXI.CanvasPool is a new static global created to deal with the issue of resource leaks and continuous DOM node build-up when creating lots of Text or BitmapData objects, or when calling generateTexture on any display object. The CanvasPool will do its best to re-use out dated canvas elements rather than filling up the DOM with new ones.
• Sprite.setTexture has a new destroyBase parameter - set this to true if you know the base used a generated texture that isn't being used by any other sprites. This will free-up the canvas for further re-use by other calls to generateTexture or Text objects.
• Line.midPoint will return a Point object where the x and y values correspond to the center (or midpoint) of the Line segment.
• Line.rotateAround allows you to rotate a Line around the given coordinates (in world space)
• Line.centerOn will position the Line so that its midpoint lays on the coordinates given.
• BitmapData.line draws a line to the BitmapData in the color and thickness specified.
• BitmapData.op is a handy short-code to get and set the canvas global composite operator.
• BitmapData.drawFull draws the given Game Object or Group to a BitmapData and then recursively iterates through all of its children, including children of Game Objects and Groups. It can draw Text, BitmapText, Sprites, Images, Emitters and Graphics objects. It's perfectly valid to pass in game.world as the parent object, and it will iterate through the entire display list.

Updates

• TypeScript definitions fixes and updates (thanks @clark-stevenson @vrecluse @yahiko00 @cloakedninjas @qdrj)
• JSDoc typo fixes (thanks @Cowa @yahiko00 @qdrj @STuFF)
• VideoStream.active = false is used if the browser supports it, otherwise it falls back to VideoStream.stop.
• Text can now accept undefined or null as the text argument in the constructor and will cast it as an empty string.
• Point.rotate uses a faster and simpler rotation function when no distance argument is specified.

Bug Fixes

• Pointer.isDown was reset before the Input.onUp event, meaning you couldn't get the Pointer.duration from within the event.
• Pointer.isDown was reset before the Input tap calculations, meaning onTap wouldn't dispatch (thanks @stovenator #1953)
• InputHandler.pointerOver would get stuck in an 'isOver' state if the Sprite changed its visibility during an onUp callback (thanks @Cristy94 #1955)
• If you override the P2 mpx functions, to define your own px to meters values, the P2 Debug Bodies would ignore it (thanks @vrecluse #1957)
• ArrayUtils.numberArrayStep would return an empty array if a single parameter was given, instead of a single step array (thanks @pooya72 #1958)
• Text with tints applied wouldn't update properly in Canvas mode.
• Removed use of the deprecated enterFullScreen and leaveFullScreen signals from the Scale Manager (thanks @mmanlod #1972)
• BitmapText with tints applied wouldn't update properly in Canvas mode (thanks @Pajamaman #1969)
• Group.cacheAsBitmap would be incorrectly offset in Canvas mode (thanks @mkristo #1925)
• Text.setTextBounds didn't add the x and y values to the width and height offsets.
• Line.rotate used a calculation method which resulted in the line growing (or shrinking) in length over time, the more it was rotated. The new method never changes the lines length.
• BitmapText.font failed to pull the new font from the Phaser Cache, stopping it from updating properly (thanks @AbrahamAlcaina #2001)
• Video.stop now removes the 'playing' event listener, which stop Videos set to loop from throwing errors after being destroyed.

For changes in previous releases please see the extensive Version History.

Contributing

Please read the Contributors Guide for full details on helping with Phaser, but the main points are:

• Found a bug? Report it on GitHub Issues and include a code sample.

• Pull Requests should only be made against the dev branch. Never against master.

• Before submitting a Pull Request run your code through JSHint using our config.

• Before contributing please read the code of conduct.

Written something cool that shows Phaser in use? Please tell us about it in our forum or email: support@phaser.io

Phaser is a Photon Storm production.

Created by Richard Davey. Powered by coffee, anime, pixels and love.

The Phaser logo and characters are © 2015 Photon Storm Limited.

All rights reserved.

"Above all, video games are meant to be just one thing: fun. Fun for everyone." - Satoru Iwata