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 IRC
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
• Lazer
• Contributing

In Development

This is the development branch, where we are building Phaser 3.0.0

Check the Change Log to see what we've done so far. Or switch to the master branch for the current stable release.

As always, keep you eyes on the Phaser web site, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter. You can also follow me on Twitter or chat to me in the Phaser Slack channel.

There are also now more ways than before to help support the 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! See you on the forums.

Cheers,

Rich - @photonstorm

Developing Phaser takes a lot of time, effort, and money. There are monthly running costs; such as the forum and site, which we maintain 100% ad-free. As well as countless hours of development time, community support, and assistance resolving issues. We do this out of our love for Phaser of course, 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.

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 Friday 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.

Previous editions can found on our Back Issues page.

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

Using Browserify? Please read this.

CDN

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

<script src="//cdn.jsdelivr.net/phaser/3.0.0/phaser.js"></script>

or the minified version:

<script src="//cdn.jsdelivr.net/phaser/3.0.0/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/3.0.0/phaser.js"></script>

Phaser 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 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 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 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 being undertaken in Lazer, the next iteration of the Phaser framework.

Webpack

Starting from Phaser 2.4.5 we now include 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 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.

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+.

The majority of Phaser development is now taking place within the Lazer project. Lazer is the name for Phaser version 3. The Phaser 2 branch will still be supported, and issues fixed, but most roadmap features have been migrated over.

Lazer

Lazer is the next generation of the Phaser game framework, and was previously called Phaser 3. Using a completely ES6 base it is renderer agnostic, allowing for DOM, SVG, Canvas and WebGL rendering, across desktop and mobile web browsers.

Lazer is in active development, but is not yet ready for production use.

You can read all about the philosophy behind Lazer here or join the Google Group mailing list where progress reports are posted. You can also follow progress in the Phaser World newsletter.

Version 3.0.0 - "Shadow Coast" - In Development

New Features

• Multiple Batched Texture support is now available. This is a WebGL feature that can seriously decrease the volume of draw calls made in complex, or asset heavy, games. To enable it you can either use the new renderer type Phaser.WEBGL_MULTI, or you can pass the property multiTexture: true in a Phaser.Game configuration object. Once enabled, it cannot be disabled.
• game.renderer.setTexturePriority is the method that goes with the Multiple Texture support. It takes an array as its single argument. The array consists of Phaser.Cache image key strings. Phaser will then try to batch as many of the textures as it can, depending on the hardware limits. If for example the GPU can only batch 8 textures, and you provide an array of 16, then only the first 8 in the array will be batched.
• Phaser now supports Compressed Textures under WebGL. It will handle loading PVRTC, DDS, ETC1, KTX and PKM texture formats, and supports PVRTC, S3TC and ETC1 compression formats, with a TrueColor fallback for standard PNGs. Using compressed textures allows the GPU to decode, and access, the texture data much faster than traditional image compression schemes such as JPEG. iOS devices in particular benefit greatly from using PowerVR Texture Compression (PVRTC). The resulting textures take up less memory than their traditional counterparts, and when it comes to iOS, every bit of memory helps! Look at the new Loader.texture method for details on using this. You can also pass a file object to Loader.image, again, please see the docs for details.
• Support for Rotated Frames in Texture Atlases is now included for WebGL and Canvas. If you use software such as Texture Packer, you may now enable the 'Allow Rotation' checkbox, which can often help getting smaller, or more compact, atlases. As a result, the Texture.rotated and Frame.rotated properties are now in use.
• Frame.rotationDirection has been removed. It isn't needed, as modern texture packers only rotate 90 degrees clockwise anyway, and Phaser only supports this rotation direction.
• Weapon.multiFire is a new property that allows you to set a Weapon as being allowed to call fire as many times as you like, per game loop. This allows a single Weapon instance to fire multiple bullets.
• Weapon.fire has two new arguments: offsetX and offsetY. If the bullet is fired from a tracked Sprite or Pointer, or the from argument is set, this applies a horizontal and vertical offset from the launch position.
• Weapon.fireOffset attempts to fire a single Bullet from a tracked Sprite or Pointer, but applies an offset to the position first. This is a shorter form of calling Weapon.fire and passing in the offset arguments.
• Weapon.fireMany attempts to fire multiple bullets from the positions defined in the given array. If you provide a from argument, or if there is a tracked Sprite or Pointer, then the positions are treated as offsets from the given objects position. If from is undefined, and there is no tracked object, then the bullets are fired from the given positions, as they exist in the world.

Updates

• TypeScript definitions fixes and updates (thanks @chriteixeira @StealthC @Lopdo)
• Docs typo fixes (thanks @JTronLabs @samme)
• Phaser.Line.fromSprite now uses the Sprite.centerX and centerY properties if the useCenter argument is true. Before it required you to have overridden the Sprite and added the property yourself (thanks @samme #2729)
• Updated the pointer check code in the Device class, to get rid of the message Navigator.pointerEnabled is a non-standard API added for experiments only. It will be removed in near future. in Chrome.

Bug Fixes

• DisplayObjectContainer.removeChildren was incorrectly using the begin var, instead of beginIndex (thanks @alex-espinoza #2742 #2741)
• Camera.fx is tested to see if it exists, before resetting it (thanks @samme #2739 #2738)
• The Weapon Plugin will no longer crash if the Weapon's bullets have not yet been initialized before setting a new bullet class (thanks @JTronLabs #2731)

Pixi Updates

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.

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

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.

• 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 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 © 2016 Photon Storm Limited.

All rights reserved.

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