Choosing a Language

I started playing with PhaserJS several years ago. It seemed a simple engine for making small simple games that could work in a multiplatform context. While exploring various options for creating this game, I set about working with some basic prototypes to determine the language and context that might best fit it. I spent not a little bit of time tooling around Phaser, hoping the version 4 update Richard Davey currently has in development might allow me to reduce the engine to the smallest size possible without having to make something custom to support things that feel a bit boilerplate in game dev.

JavaScript comes with a number of limitations, chief among them portability to other hardware. Electron allows JavaScript to be executed in almost any desktop environment with ease, but extending a game beyond the desktop without making it a Browser game is not always an easy task. Capacitor from Ionic may make porting some JavaScript to more native mobile apps a bit more modern, but it's still based on the old Cordova/PhoneGap code which can severely limit performance. Apple's support for graphics options seems to be continually diminishing, especially after replacement of OpenGL with metal, and WebGPU support has only recently entered "trial" status in Google Chrome.

Since my day job involves building applications with JavaScript/TypeScript I thought JavaScript might be an option. While prototyping I found some things prohibitive with Phaser, and at least for this project have elected not to use it.

Along the way, however, I've created some tooling and integrations that some might find useful, and I'll post those as updates in the future. Among those is an Electron/TypeScript/Phaser boilerplate. The screenshot attached is from an early prototype using some graphics assets from opengameart.org.