love VS phaser

I've built a few games with my son over the years. The fun part for us was all about fast iteration, and then laughing at the bugs together.

There are some other recommendations here for how to approach 3d, and he is specifically asking for 3d -- but I want to put in one more pitch for 2d: the fun-to-tedium ratio can be much higher.

I wonder if you could spend some time prototyping some of his ideas in LÖVE https://love2d.org/ -- if you show him the smallest sketch of something working, he might have an idea about what to add next.

Many years ago, on a flight, we went from 0 to game before we landed (with no experience).

Probably the most important piece of software we'll be playing around with is a game engine called LÖVE. Lua is well known around developer circles as being a good scripting language when it comes to making games, and this engine is one of the more popular. I'll be going through installation at the end of this post.

I got it – these are the steps I took:

1. Download Love from https://love2d.org/

libGDX is great, but I can understand if it's not for some people. This also applies to love2d, raylib and Monogame

So I was stuck with my only other method: compiling from source, which I have absolutely no experience in. I'm told I have to install Git, put in "$ git clone https://github.com/love2d/love.git" into the terminal to, well, clone the repository, and that's where I hit a dead end.

You don't need to use git if you don't want to. Try downloading the 0.10.2 source directly here (the file you want is love-0.10.2-linux-src.tar.gz); I see you've tried this already but try again just to see what happens. Extract it to a directory (e.g. love-0.10.2-linux-src) and then run:

Love2d (MIT/C++/Lua) https://github.com/love2d/love

- Löve (doesn't have a separate page, but showcases a few games at the bottom of the page): https://love2d.org

The game, Wasp Escape, was built using the open-source Löve 2D game library for Lua.

love2d (lua) is a productive, fun, good docs, and most importantly proven / field-tested 2d game library, with easy to learn fast to compile and fast to run language - lua. while lua might not have a lot of features as python, the big bonus is that its much more focused language, which is important because otherwise you can get easily distracted on bells and whistles that other programming languages provide, i know that from experience

Gold : GitHub, Phaser Studio, Arcadia

Versatility: JavaScript is not limited to web browsers. It's used in a variety of environments, including mobile app development (using frameworks like React Native), game development (using libraries like Phaser), and even serverless computing (using platforms like AWS Lambda).

This reminds me of my first real dev job, 10y ago, making small facebook games with https://phaser.io it was actually kind of fun now that I think back.

Is it worth it? I think while attempting to create a game engine with the Canvas API and vanilla JavaScript. (I quickly ditched that idea and started using PhaserJS)

I didn't try to build anything with Phaser, but I evaluated it a bit when trying to pick a game engine for a 2D web game.

The tech didn't impress me that much, but it also seemed like the most mature 2D game engine available in JS.

Notably, Phaser 4 was announced ~four years ago and was an attempt to get the project written natively in TypeScript. It looks pretty dead in the water - https://github.com/phaserjs/phaser and having a "best effort" TypeScript experience layered onto Phaser 3 didn't excite me.

Additionally, with browsers gaining support for WebGPU, I expect any game engine worth their snuff to begin rapidly adopting support for WebGPU. As best I can tell, any hope of Phaser supporting WebGPU is lumped into Phaser 4, so... not much to say there.

Overall, it was a little tough for me to tell if I was being overly critical and viewing a mature product as a ghost town, but that's the impression I took away from it.

As far as I can tell, BabylonJS is king in town for a TypeScript game engine, but its focus is 3D experiences. I didn't find an especially compelling 2D game engine. I ended up making a prototype using React + PixiJS + React-Pixi, but that was hardly an engine and had significant performance issues.

Now I am building in Rust with Bevy. It's slow going, creating UI elements sucks right now, but the underlying tech is super solid and I feel good about what I write and what I learn even if I'm dismayed at the pace in which I am creating.