Some guy is using this framework to make a game a week. His third game is particularly addictive, yet very simple. Check them out: http://www.lessmilk.com/
No problem! Thanks for investing time into the project -- I'm sure it's a lot of work, and I'm sure the community really appreciates it. I enjoyed your tutorial and look forward to a few more :P
We did a mini multiplayer platformer in this over a weekend. It was pretty simple to setup but if you aren't familiar with properly setting up JS applications you're going to hit a wall eventually with your code (luckily we had someone incredibly smart to help us).
The idea of cross platform and in the browser is nice, but if I had to do it again I'd probably go for something desktop or app focused.
So as an experienced developer with no game dev experience, is something like Phaser (or other frameworks, like Corona) a good place to start, or should I start with something more minimal? I really want to pick up 2d gaming so that I can develop a few fun games for my kids (and teach them in the process), but am unsure if I should start with a very minimalistic, low level set of libraries or a full stack... Any advice is very welcome. Oh, and it'd be great if I could do all of this from Linux. That's one of the big drawbacks of things like Corona, which require either Mac OS or Windows.
Yup, it's pretty much a perfect place to start. Browsers are ubiquitous, 2d gaming is pretty easy to understand and get started with, and the results can be surprisingly addictive despite their simplicity: http://www.lessmilk.com
Developing your own game engine that suits your needs in JS would be pretty instructive as well. There are a metric ton of JS game engines out there, many of them open source, so you can see what tradeoffs they made with respect to performance, quality, etc, while developing your own. It's really not hard to get stuff drawing on the screen with JS and canvas.
I could imagine writing a game with your kids that uses Phaser to get them started, then figuring out something Phaser can't do (or doesn't do well) and showing them how to open the code, read it, grok it, change it, etc. Very cool.
We've been using Phaser to migrate a bunch of education games from Flixel/Flash to HTML5. Absolutely recommended.
The latest version (1.2) is currently in testing and has now integrated Pixi.js 1.5.
I'm looking for something that I can use to rebuild a bunch of Java applets, but I need good audio support, and good cross-browser support as well.
Their mobile focus would be a nice bonus, but I'm not sure I can use it if they don't support even modern IE, for example... a lot of people use IE (unfortunately IE8/9 are still quite common as well, though I might be able to get away with lacking support for those), and won't install a new browser just for my site.
> Games created with Phaser require a modern web browser that supports the canvas tag. This includes Internet Explorer 9+, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. It also works on mobile web browsers including stock Android 2.x browser and above and iOS5 Mobile Safari and above.
