So, my previously released game Nubbles was built using libGDX, written in Java. There were a lot of things I liked about using libGDX, and some things I didn’t. One of the things that always annoyed me was that I couldn’t use my Chromebook to work on games, I have other machines, but my Chromebook is the most portable. So I looked into HTML5 game engines, something I could write anywhere, deploy on mobile but test in a browser.

After playing with a few, I settled on Phaser. It has excellent documentation and examples, both of which were easily accessible offline (yes I know, Chromebook, offline, random). After working up a prototype for a new game idea (Square Next, more on that later) I decided I wasn’t keen on using plain JavaScript to develop, being used to Java I kind of missed some of the OO mechanics, and wasn’t keen on trying to implement or work around them in JavaScript. So I found TypeScript and thought I’d give that a go. Some seven months later and I’ve finished the project, written entirely in TypeScript, using Phaser to do all the heavy lifting.

Some things worked well, some things were a pain.

Being able to develop on pretty much anything with a web browser kind of went out the window, because I needed NodeJS to transpile the TypeScript back into JavaScript. This meant I could still use the Chromebook (Crouton is a marvellous thing), but couldn’t for example use an Android tablet (which tbh is probably not really an issue, I just like being able to develop on any device that I own for some reason).

I have to admit to liking TypeScript, it gives you the freedom of JavaScript, but adds in some of the safety of a strongly typed language like Java. Mind this seemed to lead to a hybrid style where I ended up with some typed and some non-typed variables, probably depending on my mood at the time.

Debugging wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be thanks to auto generated source maps and the Chrome debugger.

Using Grunt as a build tool meant I could just write code, save and then switch to a browser to see the results immediately.

The difficult part came when trying to get things working on Android…I started with CocoonJS, but having to upload a new file each time to be built in the cloud got annoying. I tried the command line version, but that just seemed to be using Cordova anyway. As I’m not really using any snazzy graphics I figured I may as well just use straight Cordova. Once I’d started down this route, things got easier, although I never did figure out a satisfactory way of integrating the Cordova parts into source control.

The final release of Square Next? used Cordova for iOS and Cocoon for Android.

Next time I’ll talk about moving away from Phaser….fickle, moi?

Many Thanks,

art