elwis Posted September 7, 2014 Share Posted September 7, 2014 Hi all,I've read and walked through a couple of the Phaser tutorials and it's a very nice framework for sure. However, I was thinking about making some old classic boardgames in html/mobile versions just for fun and I'm not sure how well suited Phaser is to handle stuff like that. (drawing maps of risk, monopoly, small world style etc) and then just sit back and wait for events.(i did that many years ago in Java/Swing but hey, it's 2014 now..)I'm sure it will work, but I haven't found any nice tutorials or examples so i was thinking that it might be better to build it from scratch. Any thoughts? Regards eguneys 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eguneys Posted September 7, 2014 Share Posted September 7, 2014 I am interested in this as well, I am thinking of building a game of poker, or chess. It seems to me Phaser is not the best fit, what could be alternatives, and what does Phaser offer to me in this area. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elwis Posted September 7, 2014 Author Share Posted September 7, 2014 True, I've googled and read about a lot of different gameengines (tried a lot of them also) but they all seem to be well suited for platformers and actiongames. I'm not sure if it would give me any benefit at all, maybe better to use meteor or something and build it myself. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eguneys Posted September 7, 2014 Share Posted September 7, 2014 Yes pure dom is an option, but you need some structure as well, Phaser will give you states and animation. That's one plus, Also I like playing on top of canvas, that gives more flash like behaviour, It's a little ugly when you have mouse cursor on dom elements and you can actually select them. But Phaser lacks on user interface part. So that can be done with dom. I think hybrid approach is best. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spencerTL Posted September 7, 2014 Share Posted September 7, 2014 Not directly related to board games but a bit similar, I've made quite a few simple puzzles, rearrange the counter types, for use by teachers in maths lessons etc. I've made these in the past with no framework and I've made them with Phaser and Phaser reduced the dev time by loads and made the final result slicker. So while many of the features might seem to be suited to arcade style games they can be easily repurposed. Lately I'm also finding that the A* plug in makes finding routes on a grid board dead easy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elwis Posted September 8, 2014 Author Share Posted September 8, 2014 Yes, I bet phaser reduce a lot of boilerplate code at least. I'll just start out with Phaser and then see where it will ends, thanks for input. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nepoxx Posted September 8, 2014 Share Posted September 8, 2014 Phaser is perfectly suited to make a board game / card game. However, if you are not looking for animations or anything fancy, it might be overkill, because you will be rendering your board game at 60 fps even if nothing is happening. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elwis Posted September 8, 2014 Author Share Posted September 8, 2014 Well, animations could always be fancy, but I haven't managed to find any examples for any of the javascript gameengines. Perhaps board/card games are considered very boring Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
totor Posted September 8, 2014 Share Posted September 8, 2014 boardgamers usually use vassal engine, it's java though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elwis Posted September 8, 2014 Author Share Posted September 8, 2014 I've read about VASSAL, but I thought it was a tool for playing boardgames over the web, not a framework for developing your own games? Maybe I was wrong then? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
totor Posted September 8, 2014 Share Posted September 8, 2014 i'm not sure what you are looking for? someone has to build the module of the game with vassal if you want to play it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elwis Posted September 9, 2014 Author Share Posted September 9, 2014 Sorry, I think you are right and I was wrong. I thought Vassal was just a tool for playing physical boardgames over the web with friends. Now when I look closer it actually seem to be a framework where I can develop my own boardgames as modules. I will take another look at that later, thank you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bluedot Posted September 9, 2014 Share Posted September 9, 2014 We're doing a bunch of re-imaging of simple board games for the Chromecast device using Phaser. It's going well so far, I'll post on here when they're done and I can talk more about them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hexer Posted September 16, 2014 Share Posted September 16, 2014 Vassal is not great if you want to do AI. It does have great abstractions in its API for hex or square grids, moving pieces around, and online (synchronized) play. It would be good to know if Phaser has support for those abstractions. If not, you'll have to do it yourself, which defeats the purpose of using an engine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bmceldowney Posted September 16, 2014 Share Posted September 16, 2014 You could use Phaser in conjunction with a library like ROT.js for grid abstractions. It can even calculate FOV, lighting and do pathfinding if those are going to be important to the game. It does draw directly to the canvas so I'm not sure if it would butt heads with Phaser but you could probably figure out a way to delegate all the drawing to Phaser and just use ROT.js for the calculations. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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