Build a Game in Vuejs with Phaser

Nowadays you can create almost everything with JavaScript, also games 🎮!!! The cool thing about this is that you don’t need to be an expert making games to start, and there are a lot of tools, for example Phaser.

Phaser let you create games with only JavaScript, I find this exciting and is the reason why I’m playing with it in some of my Twitch sessions.

One of the weaknesses that you can find in this kind of libraries is that are not in the same level of evolution than others like Vue and React (if we talk about UI elements). To create a button in Phaser is more complex than in Vue.

This is why some developers started to use React and Vue in combination with Phaser, in this tip you will learn how to integrate Phaser and Vue.

First create a new project with the CLI:

vue create game

Navigate to the project and install phaser and ion-phaser

npm install --save phaser @ion-phaser/core

This package will help ups to easily integrate Phaser with libraries and frameworks like Angular, React or Vue, you will find more information in their website.

The next step is to add ion-phaser to our main.js file:

import { defineCustomElements as defineIonPhaser } from '@ion-phaser/core/loader';
import Vue from 'vue';
import App from './App.vue';
 
Vue.config.productionTip = false;
Vue.config.ignoredElements = [/ion-\w*/];
 
defineIonPhaser(window);
 
new Vue({
  render: (h) => h(App),
}).$mount('#app');

Ok, now its time to open our example component, ‘HelloWorld.vue’ and add the ion-phaser component.

The layout will look like:

<template>
  <div class='hello'>
    <div  @click="initializeGame"  class="flex" >
      <a  href="#1"  class="btn">Initialize</a>
    </div>
    <ion-phaser
      v-bind:game.prop='game'
      v-bind:initialize.prop='initialize'
    />
  </div>
</template>

And in the code we simply add the game object, for this example a really simple game object:

import Phaser from "phaser";
 
export default {
  data() {
    return {
      initialize: false,
      game: {
        width: "100%",
        height: "100%",
        type: Phaser.AUTO,
        scene: {
          init() {
            this.cameras.main.setBackgroundColor("#24252A");
          },
          create() {
            this.helloWorld = this.add.text(
              this.cameras.main.centerX,
              this.cameras.main.centerY,
              "Hello World",
              { font: "40px Arial",  fill: "#ffffff" }
            );
            this.helloWorld.setOrigin(0.5);
          },
          update() {
            this.helloWorld.angle += 1;
          }
        }
      }
    };
  },
  methods: {
    initializeGame() {
      this.initialize = true;
    }
  }
}; 

And yeah! both are integrated!

In a real world example what I recommend to you is to have a separated file game.js to have the game configuration and split the login in different scenes.

I also like to have a Vue component called ‘’ where I show the data about my character.

I’m working in a game using this kind of technologies, just to train myself and improve my coding skills.

Do you want to start to practice too? C’mon lets play and make games 🤗🤩

(Image of my game :D)