I have been dabbling in Javascript every once in a while over the last few years, but I just never got myself to like the language and the ecosystem a lot. While I understood that Javascript and the npm ecosystem had a lot to offer, I just did not know where to get started, because it felt like everytime I sat down to start learning again, the entire ecosystem had already moved on. Also Javascript just seemed to me like a language that was bolted together vs. carefully engineered.

However, deno came around and I do have to say I was/am very intrigued. Deno offered a batteries included approach, a secure-by-default runtime, Typescript by default and super easy deployment. I played around with Deno’s webframe work Fresh and I have to say, I really like it! While deno is steadily improving Node.js interoperability it is sadly not there yet and a lot of libraries that I would need for deno to be useful in my day job don’t exist yet (e.g. oracle-drivers: oracle is still alive and kicking in the large enterprise database world …).

Nevertheless, I see a lot of potential for deno and that made me try Javascript again. This time I decided to start with something less busineesy and more fun and I decided to learn Javascript by programming web games in phaser3. At first I also took a brief look at Unity, mainly because of C# vs. Javascript and at playcanvas another Javascript game engine that has an excellent editor for 3d games. I decided to stick with phaser mainly, because I grew up with a Gameboy and I love casual 2d games, which is what phaser excells at.

Getting started with phaser is also very easy, you can gradually easy into setting up the complete Javascript development stack. If you are interested, checkout the great tutorial on the official website. At the moment I am migrating my phaser projects to vite, because it comes with a lot of nice features that make development more pleasant. I will write more about my migration in another post (which will hopefully not sit on the shelf for ages like my still only partially finished raytracing blog, where I need to generate nice visuals. Maybe if I wait a bit longer, Midjourney can also do mathematical charts ^_^).

After dabbling a bit with different phaser tutorials I bought the book ‘Make 2d Games in Javascript with Phaser’ by Thomas Palef to learn how to create games in a more professional manner. Thomas’ book is really amazing, he takes you all the way from the very basics to a fully functional game that also works on mobile. He also includes additional game templates that you can easily customize. Worth every cent in my mind, really a very good resource. I have no affiliation whatsoever, just a very happy customer. You can buy his book here

Below you can find a slightly modded match-3 game using Thomas’ template code. I plan to extend it in the future and include additional mechanics, but I think it is very fun already in this simple version.

Get at least 3 hearts of the same color next to each other. You have 10 moves in total to get as many points as possible :)