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Phaser - HTML5 Game Framework
Phaser is a fast, free, and fun open source HTML5 game framework. It uses a custom build of Pixi.js for WebGL and Canvas rendering, and supports desktop and mobile web browsers. Games can be compiled to iOS, Android and native desktop apps via 3rd party tools. You can use JavaScript or TypeScript for development.
Along with the fantastic open source community, Phaser is actively developed and maintained by Photon Storm. 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 Phaser. From indies and multi-national digital agencies, to schools and Universities. Each creating their own incredible games.
Visit: The Phaser website and follow on Twitter (#phaserjs)
Learn: API Docs, Support Forum and StackOverflow
Code: 700+ Examples (source available in this repo)
Read: Weekly Phaser World Newsletter
Chat: Slack and Discord
Extend: With Phaser Plugins
Be awesome: Support the future of Phaser
Grab the source and join in the fun!
Contents
- What's New?
- Support Phaser
- Phaser World Newsletter
- Download Phaser
- Getting Started
- Building Phaser
- Games made with Phaser
- Requirements
- Road Map
- Change Log
- Contributing
9th January 2018
Please excuse us as we put the final touches to the release of Phaser 3. We had to restructure our repository to make the transition easier, which means if you're looking to download Phaser to build a game with then you'll find it in the Phaser CE (Community Edition) repo. If you're looking for the last official version of Phaser 2 then that's 2.6.2
Phaser 3 is the next generation of the Phaser game framework. We have been working hard on it for over a year and are very close to release. Visit the site to see the roadmap, labs and weekly Dev Logs. If you've time to help us test that would be appreciated! It is not yet production ready, but gets closer with every build.
For the latest information visit the Phaser web site, where we cover all three versions. Subscribe to Phaser World, our weekly newsletter, for the latest news, tutorials and development updates on both Phaser 3 and Phaser CE.
Want something more social? Then you can follow us on Twitter and chat with fellow Phaser developers in our Slack and Discord channels.
There are now more ways than ever to help support development of Phaser. The uptake so far has been fantastic, but this is an on-going mission. Thank you to everyone who supports our development, who shares our belief in the future of HTML5 gaming, and Phasers role in that.
Happy coding everyone!
Cheers,
Rich - @photonstorm
Developing Phaser takes a lot of time, effort and money. There are monthly running costs; such as hosting and services. As well as countless hours of development time, community support, and assistance resolving issues. We do this out of our love for Phaser, but at the end of the day there are real tangible costs involved.
If you have found Phaser useful in your development life. Or have made income as a result of using it, and are in a position to support us financially, without causing any detriment to yourself, then please do. There are a number of ways:
- A monthly contribution via Patreon.
- A one-off donation via PayPal.
- Purchase any of our plugins or books.
- Companies can sponsor a release of Phaser, or an issue of our newsletter.
It all helps cover our running costs, and genuinely contributes towards future development.
Extra special thanks to our top-tier sponsors: Orange Games, Zenva Academy and CrossInstall.
If you would like to sponsor Phaser then please get in touch. We have sponsorship options available on our GitHub repo, web site, and newsletter. All of which receive tens of thousands of eyeballs per day.
Every Monday we publish the Phaser World newsletter. It's packed full of the latest Phaser games, tutorials, videos, meet-ups, talks, and more. It also contains our weekly Development Progress updates, where you can read about what new features we've been working on.
Previous editions can found on our Back Issues page.
All Phaser 2 versions are hosted on Github. You can:
- 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
You can also get Phaser 2 via Bower, npm and CDN
Phaser 2 Sandbox
If you'd like to try coding in Phaser right now, with nothing more than your web browser, then head over to the Phaser Sandbox. You'll find Quick Start templates, and a user-friendly editor filled with handy code-completion features.
License
Phaser is released under the MIT License.
Our Getting Started Guide will get you up to speed quickly. From setting up a web server, to picking an IDE. After which read our Making your first Game tutorial. Please work through this, no matter what your development experience, to learn how Phaser approaches things.
The single biggest Phaser resource is the Phaser web site. You'll find hundreds of tutorials, with new ones added every week. Subscribe to the Phaser World newsletter for a weekly links round-up.
Using TypeScript? Game From Scratch has a great series of tutorials covering that.
Prefer videos? Zenva have an excellent Phaser video course, with hours of great material.
Source Code Examples
Ever since we started Phaser we've been growing and expanding our extensive set of examples. Currently there are over 700 of them, with the full source code and assets available.
Browse the Phaser Examples, or clone the examples repo, and eat your heart out!
Interphase
Interphase is a programming book for Phaser developers of all skill levels.
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.
As well as the book you get all the source code, graphics and assets to go with it, and lots of extras too.
Phaser Editor - A complete Phaser Editor
Phaser Editor is a brand new Eclipse based editor that offers lots of built-in tools specifically for Phaser developers. Handy features include Smart code auto-completion, built-in web server, documentation search, asset management, texture atlas creator, audio sprite creator, asset previews and lots more.
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.
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. You can also create your own builds.
Custom Builds
Phaser 2 includes a grunt based build system, which allows you to strip out features you may not require, saving hundreds of KB in the process. Don't use any Sound in your game? Then exclude the entire sound system. Don't need Keyboard support? That can be excluded 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.
Browserify / CJS
Phaser 2 was never written to be modular. Everything exists under one single global namespace, and you cannot require selected parts of it into your builds. It expects 3 global vars to exist in order to work properly: Phaser, PIXI and p2. The following is one way of doing this:
window.PIXI = require('phaser/build/custom/pixi')
window.p2 = require('phaser/build/custom/p2')
window.Phaser = require('phaser/build/custom/phaser-split')
If you build a custom version of Phaser 1 it will split the 3 core libs out into their own files, allowing you to require them as above.
We appreciate this is just a band-aid, and not a proper use of modules, but please understand it was never built to be used this way. You're trying to fit a square peg in a round browserify-shaped hole, so compromises have to be made. Please don't open GitHub issues about it as we've no intention of changing Phaser at this stage of its life. Full module based development is supported in Phaser 3.
Webpack
Starting from Phaser 2.4.5 we included a custom build for Webpack.
You need to add p2 as a dependency.
Webpack Config
var path = require('path');
var webpack = require('webpack');
var phaserModule = path.join(__dirname, '/node_modules/phaser/');
var phaser = path.join(phaserModule, 'build/custom/phaser-split.js'),
pixi = path.join(phaserModule, 'build/custom/pixi.js'),
p2 = path.join(phaserModule, 'build/custom/p2.js');
module.exports = {
...
module: {
loaders: [
{ test: /pixi.js/, loader: "script" },
]
},
resolve: {
alias: {
'phaser': phaser,
'pixi.js': pixi,
'p2': p2,
}
}
...
}
Main js file
require('pixi.js');
require('p2');
require('phaser');
Building from source
Should you wish to build Phaser 2 from source you can take advantage of the provided Grunt scripts. Ensure you have the required packages by changing to the v2 or v2-community folder, and 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. You can find hundreds more on our web site.
Artwork copyright their respective owners.
We add new games to the Phaser site weekly, so be sure to send us yours when it's finished!
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 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 ES5 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+.
We have always been meticulous in recording changes to the Phaser code base, and where relevant, giving attribution to those in the community who helped with the change. You can find comprehensive Change Logs for all versions:
The Contributors Guide contains full details on how to help with Phaser development. The main points are:
-
Found a bug? Report it on GitHub Issues and include a code sample. Please state which version of Phaser you are using! This is vitally important.
-
Pull Requests can now be made against the
masterbranch (for years we only accepted PRs against thedevbranch, but with the release of Phaser CE we've relaxed this policy) -
Before submitting a Pull Request run your code through JSHint using our config.
-
Before contributing read the code of conduct.
Written something cool in Phaser? Please tell us about it in the 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 © 2018 Photon Storm Limited.
All rights reserved.
"Above all, video games are meant to be just one thing: fun. Fun for everyone." - Satoru Iwata