In this post I’m going to talk bit about how and why I chose my programming language, IDE, and framework.
JavaScript
When I started this project, I was familiar with a number of languages including Java, C++, and PHP, but I had recently spent a lot of time using JavaScript for some web stuff, so I was kind of in the JavaScript zone. In addition, I really liked the idea that I could just upload the game to my website and let people play it in a browser, regardless of platform. I also love the fact that rebuilding my project means saving a text file and refreshing the browser. The console is also pretty awesome for debugging.
For these reasons I chose to use JavaScript as my programming language.
Sublime Text
I’m going to say something controversial right now. I use Windows. I’m sorry, and I regret it every time I talk to other programmers. I know I should have a MacBook Pro and be using the Linux terminal for everything, but I’ve always owned a PC with Windows, and I never used the Linux terminal until university.
Anyway, I had used Nodepad++ and other text editors in the past, but a friend had recently told me to check out Sublime Text, so I did, and I liked it. Sublime Text lets you open multiple files at once, save projects, search and replace in multiple files, customize colors and highlighting, and much much more!
Phaser
As I mentioned in the previous post, I had never used a game engine before, so I really had no idea what I was looking for. I basically Googled “JavaScript game engines” and quickly chose one that had good examples and documentation.
Having only used Phaser, I can’t really speak about its strengths or weaknesses. However, it seems easy to use, especially for 2D sprite-based games like Zyrian. I’ll talk more about Phaser in future posts, including examples and everything.