Questions about mobile games with PixiJS

[gobit]

Hi guys,

After skimming through the forum, I really couldn't find any sound information about the mobile game development with PixiJS. I used Starling before and had success with it. I don't want to use Unity for my next game as it feels somewhat overkill for a word game I'm going to create and coding the game with TypeScript / JavaScript sounds really nice. 

Some questions come to my mind are:

1. What are you guys use to publish your WebGL games to Google Play Store / AppStore?

2. How's the performance of the games, are you happy with it? Are you able to provide near native feel to your players?

3. I see that CocoonJS was a popular option to publish the games to devices but as it's gone and no more an option, how do you create native apps, Cordova?

4. Do you have any experience with In App Purchases with Cordova? Is it a seamless work or did you have headaches trying to implement iap?

Thanks for the help

[bigtimebuddy]

1. It's pretty common to use Apache Cordova (https://cordova.apache.org/) to bundle JavaScript into an app-like experience. There are some quirks with supporting old version of Android, but otherwise, there are lots of plugins available for interacting with native APIs (accelerometer, haptics, etc).

2. PixiJS uses WebGL which is very fast, especially on mobile devices. There are some performance tips on the GitHub wiki and I'm sure lots of advice here. You will probably be able to achieve 30+fps, if not higher, on mobile. Although, it's also easy to abuse performance, so make sure you understand issues of limited RAM and slower CPU, which are big limiting factors on mobile.

3. Yes for Cordova. In PixiJS v5, we have dropped support for CocoonJS.

4. A 2 second search revealed a bunch of Cordova plugins: "cordova in-app purchases", looks like there are a few options that would be worth testing.

Good luck!

[Exca]

There's also plenty solutions that build on top of cordova and make the build pipeline easier / enable use of native ui components / add more features.

For example phonegap: https://phonegap.com/

Ionic: https://ionicframework.com/

Appgyver steroids: https://www.appgyver.io/steroids

Framework7 https://framework7.io/

Then there's also more native solutions like react-native, flutter and nativescript. With these though using pixi is much harder as they run as native apps.

You could also use a pwa builder https://github.com/pwa-builder/PWABuilder-CLI  to package existing web app into a PWA (progressive web app), though with that accessing any native components is much harder.

I have done one project with pure canvas 2d 4 years ago with appgyver steroids (decided to go with that mainly because it had a build pipeline) and in app purchases were pretty easy to do. I'd assume same from all cordova based stuff.