Is Phaser worth learning?

[FlatAssembler]

So, for those of you who don't know, Phaser is a HTML5 (mostly JavaScript) framework for advanced Internet graphics. It's mostly intended to be used for web-games, and comes with a bunch of features you'd probably never use on actual web-pages. The biggest downside I perceive to learning it is that I know quite a lot of SVG and CSS, and I think I wouldn't be able to apply my knowledge when using Phaser. And it practically forces you to use OOP in Javascript, and I am not a great fan of OOP either. Anyway, what do you guys think?

[bennyboy]

It seems like a pretty decent substitute for what Flash used to be.

If you are just learning game making for a hobby, then it seems to me there are more fun and powerful tools out there that will get you to production faster-- Unity, for example. If you've played around with a few demos of Phaser, and you can really envision how you'd use it in your own site for fun and profit-- it looks robust enough that you could probably do that.

[FlatAssembler]

What was Flash, actually? I've always thought it was something like SVG, just with a different syntax (that was difficult to combine with HTML, and that's the main reason it got deprecated). Was it actually more powerful than SVG?

[bennyboy]

What was Flash, actually? I've always thought it was something like SVG, just with a different syntax (that was difficult to combine with HTML, and that's the main reason it got deprecated). Was it actually more powerful than SVG?

I'm not so familiar with SVG except that it's a format for vector graphics.  When I google it, I see it does a lot of the things Flash used to do.  Flash allowed you to have a virtual workspace, move objects around them, have them interact with clicks, etc.  If you have a browser that even allows the Flash plugin, you can probably find some flash games online.  You'll not that they're kind of similar: mostly 2D sprite graphics, pretty simple designs, etc.

Flash is definitely dead.  I don't remember the exact reasons, but I think they were kind of standards wars where companies refuse to support each others' products.

For the most part, I wouldn't really worry which platform you go with.  If you have a serious project in mind, you mainly want to feel sure that the platform will survive long enough for you to finish your project and get it out there to be enjoyed by other people.

BTW, here's a little Windows minigame I made for a coding class in which I very clumsily try to explain why OOP is good for game making.

[KevinM1]

Flash was... well, it was a mess. It was proprietary technology from Adobe that required a browser plugin to work. It had its own IDE and secondary scripting language called ActionScript which looked a lot like JavaScript,but wasn't JavaScript. AFAIK, Flash couldn't actually interact with the HTML it was embedded in.

Flash died for a few reasons:

It was woefully insecure. Adobe is shit when it comes to actually securing their platforms.
It was resource intensive. As much as front end developers bitch about npm bloat, Flash was proportionally worse in its era.
It was buggy. Sometimes the Flash Player - the browser plugin - would simply stop working. Other times it would soft lock. Other times, it would crash the browser.
It was proprietary. As a developer, you were relying on your audience to install a buggy, insecure plugin for your stuff to work. You also needed to use their IDE to even develop in the first place.

Ultimately, in the era of open web standards (and, I mean fucking Microsoft has open sourced most of .NET and I believe all of C#), Flash was a lumbering dinosaur.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Phaser is definitely worth learning if you plan to shoot Klingons.


Boru

[Aoi Magi]

Phaser is just a framework, svg is a graphics format, Flash was primarily a scriptable animation engine, comparing these is like comparing ebay and walmart, In my experience, choose a framework after you've decided what you want to do and not the other way around,, if you want to get into web based hml5 game development, phaser is a good choice, but you really should focus on the core Javascript first so the you can adapt to any framework when the need arises. Also, just out of curiosity, what exactly do you not like about OOP?

[bennyboy]

Also, just out of curiosity, what exactly do you not like about OOP?

Atheists like spaghetti, maybe?

[FlatAssembler]

Well, there is a lot of pseudoscience in informatics associated with it. Loud claims about it increasing the productivity empirical studies repeatedly fail to confirm.

[Aoi Magi]

Well, there is a lot of pseudoscience in informatics associated with it. Loud claims about it increasing the productivity empirical studies repeatedly fail to confirm.

hmm, well I really don't know of any such claims or studies, and I also don't know about your coding experience with OOP, but from my personal experience, working with procedural code written by someone else is often a nightmare, and even coming back to your own code and trying to debug it after say a year is a real pain, especially if you do a lot of coding. Proper OOP code is much easier to work with and extend and thus at least in my experience, it does boost productivity. Also when working on games, it's much easier for me to think in terms of objects than functions, like enemyA can walk, and enemyB can walk and jump, so enemyB can just extend enemyA and add the jumping code, with procedural you'd end up doing pretty much the same thing though in a bit less organized manner.