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phaserjs
phaser
JavaScript2013–2026
phaserjs / phaser

phaser

Phaser is a fun, free and fast 2D game framework for making HTML5 games for desktop and mobile web browsers, supporting Canvas and WebGL rendering.

Web DevelopmentCreative & MediaGames & EmulationMobile & DesktopCommunication & Social
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15Distinct people
16Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
40.7KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Phaser is a fun, free and fast 2D game framework for making HTML5 games for desktop and mobile web browsers, supporting Canvas and WebGL rendering.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year16 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-08-12 06:52:11 UTC to 2026-03-03 06:45:55 UTC.

01232013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

16 sources
Flux159·Jan 31, 2025
This is super cool & I'm impressed that it's working with WebGL. From reading the code & seeing the examples in the sandbox, it looks like the sprite layer is defined one time (initialization) with specific sprite & animation properties that are exposed to JS via the SpriteGPULayer config https://github.com/phaserjs/phaser/blob/v4.0.0-beta.5/src/ga... , then that class passes the info over to the vertex shader which has ifdefs to determine which animation, other features are enabled for a given SpriteGPULayer - https://github.com/phaserjs/phaser/blob/v4.0.0-beta.5/src/re... This way you don't end up having to do any updates per frame on the CPU and it remains one draw call for the entire layer right? Are there other use cases besides from large scale sprite/animated backgrounds that you've thought of?
In Show HN: 1M+ animated GPU sprites in JavaScript
SeanAnderson·Sep 13, 2023
I didn't try to build anything with Phaser, but I evaluated it a bit when trying to pick a game engine for a 2D web game. The tech didn't impress me that much, but it also seemed like the most mature 2D game engine available in JS. Notably, Phaser 4 was announced ~four years ago and was an attempt to get the project written natively in TypeScript. It looks pretty dead in the water - https://github.com/phaserjs/phaser and having a "best effort" TypeScript experience layered onto Phaser 3 via DefinitelyTyped didn't excite me. Additionally, with browsers gaining support for WebGPU, I expect any game engine worth their snuff to begin rapidly adopting support for WebGPU. As best I can tell, any hope of Phaser supporting WebGPU is lumped into Phaser 4, so... not much to say there. Overall, it was a little tough for me to tell if I was being ove
Read the rest
rly critical and viewing a mature product as a ghost town, but that's the impression I took away from it. As far as I can tell, BabylonJS is king in town for a TypeScript game engine, but its focus is 3D experiences. I didn't find an especially compelling 2D game engine. I ended up making a prototype using React + PixiJS + React-Pixi, but that was hardly an engine and had significant performance issues due to React's reconciler and GC. Now I am building in Rust -> WASM with Bevy (https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants). It's slow going, creating UI elements sucks right now, but the underlying tech is super solid and I feel good about what I write and what I learn even if I'm dismayed at the pace in which I am creating. Realistically, if I started over, I would likely take my prototype as far as I could with PixiJS or Phaser. I'd write non-idiomatic TypeScript to appease GC and would avoid asking too much of React when working with <canvas />. Once I had a functioning game I'd consider rewriting it in a more performant language. It's been challenging to be 100% supportive of writing in Rust due to how much slower iterations are compared to JS/TS.
In Phaser: A fast, fun and free open source HTML5 game framework
leeoniya·Mar 13, 2020Submission

Show HN: uPlot.js v1.0 – A fast, small chart for time series, OHLC and bars

Hello again! 5 months and ~400 commits since the initial prototype: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21207132 v1.0 has shipped! - https://github.com/leeoniya/uPlot A non-exaustive list of features/concerns that have been addressed since v0.1.0: - A terse, consistent API, (w/ plugins & hooks) - Timezone & DST handling - Point rendering - Bi-directional zooming - Dynamic data updates (streaming) - Numeric x scales (non-temporal) - Area fills & high/low bands - Dependent scales (°C -> °F) - Cursor sync across charts - Highlight closest series - Axis labeling & positioning - Bars & OHLC (via tiny plugins) - Feature gates for even smaller custom builds A bunch of demos: https://leeoniya.github.io/uPlot/demos/index.html About a dozen brave early adopters helped me weed out bugs, add features, refine the API and co
Read the rest
ntributed demo code. Without them there'd be no v1.0, so thank you. So far there are some cool use-cases. One user renders several hundred hundred-point charts per page - something that's impossible with WebGL or heavier charting libs. There's been a prototype for Grafana panel integration. The author of Phaser [1] is currently taking uPlot for a perf-monitoring test drive while working on the new engine: https://github.com/phaserjs/phaser4-dev :D Also, a shout out to the Chart.js guys, who recently tagged v3.0-alpha which performs 3x better than v2 on uPlot's benchmark, and is the only lib to have made any noticeable headway, let alone multiple factor! cheers! [1] https://github.com/photonstorm/phaser
5 points · Open discussion
Jare·Apr 5, 2017
I haven't looked in detail for this example, but IIRC Phaser always supported multiple updates per tick by default, see https://github.com/photonstorm/phaser/blob/9579263333d799bf7... edit: guess I spoke too quickly, that was v3. In v2 the game loop in Phaser is more aggressive detecting "spiral of death" scenarios. Still, the idea is that if your CPU just can't deal with the given number of updates per second even when skipping renders and other "optional" stuff, then there is just no way to avoid a bad experience, either very low framerate or slow motion. Variable framerate simulations can be quite dangerous and unstable, and the example doesn't even try.
In HTML5 Games Workshop: Make a Platformer Game with JavaScript

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