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: 400+ 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 our work via Gratipay

Index

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

What's new in 2.2.2?

Happy New Year! Welcome to the first release of Phaser in 2015.

We're kicking off the year with the 2.2.2 release. This is mostly a maintenance release and fixes a few crucial issues such as tilemap rendering in Safari and physics performance. But a few small yet super-useful features sneaked in too, my favourite being that the Loader now supports BLOB urls for audio files.

We're hard at work on Phaser 3. Development on the brand new renderer began in earnest last year and we're already seeing exceptional results from it. You can follow our development in the forum and public repo. Even though we're working on taking Phaser 3 into ES6 and the next generation of web browsers, we haven't stopped with the 2.x branch.

If you take a peek at the 2.3 milestones you'll see we've got some great features in build. Included is a refactoring of all the Game Object classes, a new parallel asset loader and more consistent Text style handling.

After the runaway success Phaser enjoyed in 2014 we're really excited to see what this year will bring, and hope you'll join us for the ride.

Happy coding everyone! See you on the forums.

Change Log

Version 2.3.0 - "Tarabon" - in dev

New Features

• Physics.Arcade.isPaused allows you to toggle Arcade Physics processing on and off. If true the Body.preUpdate method will be skipped, halting all motion for all bodies. Note that other methods such as collide will still work, so be careful not to call them on paused bodies.
• Arcade.Body.friction allows you to have more fine-grained control over the amount of velocity passed between bodies on collision.
• BitmapData.text will render the given string to the BitmapData, with optional font, color and shadow settings.

Updates

• TypeScript definitions fixes and updates (thanks @clark-stevenson @TimvdEijnden @belohlavek @ivw)

Bug Fixes

• SoundManager.unlock checks for audio start support and falls back to noteOn if not found.
• Sprite.frame and AnimationManager.frame wouldn't return the correct index if a sprite sheet was being used unless it had first been set via the setter.
• Error in diffX and diffY calculation in Tilemap.paste (thanks @amelia410 #1446)

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

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/2.3.0/phaser.js"></script>

or the minified version:

<script src="//cdn.jsdelivr.net/phaser/2.3.0/phaser.min.js"></script>

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

Use the How to Learn Phaser guide we wrote for GameDevTuts. It covers finding tutorials, examples and getting support.

Although currently a bit of a "wall of text" we urge you to keep an eye on the News section of the Phaser web site. We post fresh links there daily.

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 400 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.

This current release of Phaser is 153 KB gzipped and minified with both Arcade Physics and P2 Physics included. We also provide smaller custom builds.

Custom Builds

The custom builds of Phaser are in the build\custom folder.

Phaser comes with two physics systems: Arcade Physics and P2.js. Arcade Physics is perfect for arcade style games and provides an AABB (bounding box) based collision system. P2 is a full body physics system, complete with springs, materials, constraints and lots more.

If you don't require P2 then use the custom build: phaser-arcade-physics.js. This will save nearly 200 KB from the minified file size.

If you don't need physics at all, or are implementing your own, there is an even smaller build: phaser-no-physics.js. This doesn't include Tilemaps or Particle Emitter support either, as both rely on Arcade Physics, but is even smaller as a result.

Finally there is phaser-no-libs.js which is Phaser without any physics support or Pixi.js. Phaser requires Pixi.js to work, but this build allows you to use your own version of Pixi instead of the one Phaser provides.

Want to create your own custom builds? Take a look at the manifests files in the tasks folder.

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.

If you change either Pixi.js or P2 then use the Grunt tasks replace:pixi and replace:p2 respectively. These tasks patch their UMD strings so they work properly with Phaser under requireJS.

Games made with Phaser

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

Artwork copyright their respective owners.

Find lots more on the HTML5 Game Devs Forum.

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 1.0+. If using an earlier version of TypeScript (i.e. 0.9.5) you will need to include WebGL definitions into your project first.

Road Map

Here are some of the features planned for future releases. Not all are promised to be delivered and no timescale is given. But they serve as a good indication of the direction Phaser is heading in.

Version 2.3 ("Tarabon")

• New parallel asset loader (already started in dev branch)
• Enhance the State Management, so you can perform non-destructive State swaps and persistence.
• Updated Text handling
• Look carefully at the internal structure of Phaser to avoid method repetition (such as Sprite.crop and Image.crop), investigate using mixins to help reduce overall codebase size.
• Restore Math.interpolateAngles and Math.nearestAngleBetween
• Scene Manager - json scene parser.
• Touch Gestures.
• Adjust how Pointers and Interactive Objects work. Allow an IO to be flagged as "on click only", so it doesn't ever get processed during normal Pointer move events (unless being dragged)
• Allow multiple drag items - no longer bind just 1 to a Pointer
• Allow Groups to have Priority IDs too and input disable entire Groups and all children (let it flow down the chain)
• Allow Groups to be InputEnabled? Dragging a Group would be really useful.
• Cache to localStorage using If-Modified-Since. See github request
• Allow for complex assets like Bitmap Fonts to be stored within a texture atlas.

Version 2.4

• Ability to control DOM elements from the core game and layer them into the game.
• Game parameters stored in Google Docs.
• Optimised global Animation manager to cut down on object creation.
• Flash CC HTML5 export integration.
• Massively enhance the audio side of Phaser. Take more advantage of Web Audio: echo effects, positional sound, etc.
• DragonBones support.

Phaser 3

Development has begun on Phaser 3. At the moment it's still in the very early stages. We are asking for suggestions and feedback in this forum thread so be sure to add your voice.

We are currently experimenting with an ES6 based module system and we're keen for Phaser 3 to use as many native ES6 features as possible. It will be a significant refactoring of the code base, but never at the expense of features or ease-of-use.

We don't anticipate a release until Summer 2015 and will support Phaser 2 fully in the meantime.

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.

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: rich@photonstorm.com

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.