Jorge Palacios - Developing an HTML5 Brick-Breaker Game with Phaser

Creating a Brick-breaker Game With Phaser is the result of teaching HTML5 game development by example at a local institute, focused on web technologies with a philosophy of teaching concepts, methodologies and standards in practical way.

This book is intended to be a hands-on introduction to HTML5 game development using the Phaser framework by developing a complete game with well-known mechanics. It is bundled with all the necessary assets, so we can focus on the code and not finding extra resources or developing programmer artwork.

By the end of the book, youll have learned to:

• Set up an organized file structure for developing games for the web
• Create a blank game and test everything runs OK
• Import images and sounds
• Show and move sprites on the screen
• Manage a group of sprites
• Play sound effects and background music
• Show text on the screen with custom web fonts
• Handle touch and keyboard input
• Detect collisions and use the Arcade physics system
• How to start using the particle system
• Manage game states
• Create a loading screen
• Optimize the game for mobile devices

You can play a version of this game on , or running the

It is aimed to programmers with some experience with JavaScript and want to learn by doing (and finishing). It is not a guide to JavaScript, but each step is explained and the source code is well-commented so you can get it right away and keep focusing on the big picture.

The Phaser web site has a well-documented section on how to get started. However, I invite you to test and develop the code from this book using the Brackets editor. The code was developed and tested on it, and works well on Windows, Linux and Mac. Besides, testing the examples is far too easy:

1. Install Brackets
2. Make sure you have Chrome / Chromium browser installed
3. In the menu bar, go to File -> Open Folder
4. Locate a directory with an index.html file. For example: brick-breaker-phaser/01core_mechanics/01paddle/
5. Select it
6. In the menu bar, go to File -> Live Preview

There are other editors and tools, but the coding-testing pipeline on Brackets is very straightforward if youre new into web development.

The following people helped in the development of this book or the game associated with it:

• Richard Davey - creator of Phaser
• Christian Chomiak - edition and title page
• Kenney - artwork and some sound effects
• Joe Powell, courtesy of Freesound - background music (Electric Air)
• Sergio Marin, and the whole team at Escuela Web, for giving me a place to unite two of my passions; game development and teaching

This chapter is focused on organizing our project to keep a tidy file structure. It will allow us to start good, and test the installation of Phaser. It is worth mentioning that well be using Phaser v2.3, available here for download.

1. Create the following file structure: an empty index.html file and four additional directories; css, img, js, and snd, respectively. As we can see, its a standard file structure for web development. As games grow, teams tend to specialize the file structure but right now its not our case:
   1game2|index.html3+---css4+---img5+---js6\---snd
2. Add the phaser .js file in the js/ directory. Here we will store all of our scripting files:
   1+---js2|phaser.min.js
3. Modify the index.html with the following code. This declares the type of document, its character encoding, includes the phaser in the html and creates a place for the game to be rendered:
   12lang="en">34charset="UTF-8">5 html5 Breaker game 6type="text/javascript" src="js/phaser.min.js">789

   id="phaser_game">

   1011

   • Create a file named main.js in the corresponding directory. This file will store the initialization code of our game:
     1// game's global variable2vargame;3// after everything is loaded, then4window.onload=function(){5// initialize the game object6game=newPhaser.Game(640,400,Phaser.AUTO,'phaser_game');7};
   • Now include the previous file into the html file with the proper tag. It must be included below the phaser include:
     1type="text/javascript" src="js/phaser.min.js">2type="text/javascript" src="js/main.js">
   • Finally, test the game by running it on the browser. If we open the browsers JavaScript console, we can read a message from the Phaser API stating that it is initialized and everything runs smoothly.
     

     Phaser output message

   0.2 Empty game

   Now that we know how to set up an empty Phaser project, I can tell you that inside the downloadable content there is a directory called 00empty_game with the previous code, plus all the images and sounds that we will use to properly build our game.