Talking about HTML5, Javascript and Phaser.
When you have to add input texts or GUI elements in your HTML5 game, you probably miss the simple, clean and flat elegance of most modern hybrid app frameworks like Bootstrap.
Bootstrap is the world’s most popular front-end open source toolkit, featuring a lot of prebuilt components like alerts, cards, dropdowns and so on.
So the main question is: why should you build your components with Phaser when you already have plenty of them?
We only have to find a way to include Bootstrap component in Phaser games, and this is possible thanks to Phaser DOM support.
From Wikipedia: The Document Object Model (DOM) is a cross-platform and language-independent interface that treats an XML or HTML document as a tree structure wherein each node is an object representing a part of the document.
Long story short, we can import HTML elements and handle them like Phaser game objects. Does it sound interesting? Yes, because it is.
Look at the example:
Try to interact with it. The red dropdown is a Bootstrap component, whose input is managed by a Phaser event listener and whose movement is managed by a Phaser tween.
How is it possible? First, we have to import in our index page Bootstrap and jQuery libraries as if the page were just another page powered by Bootsrap.
Obviously, we also import Phaser.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<style type = "text/css">
body{
background: #000000;
padding: 0px;
margin: 0px;
}
</style>
<script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.5.1.slim.min.js" integrity="sha256-4+XzXVhsDmqanXGHaHvgh1gMQKX40OUvDEBTu8JcmNs=" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.0.0-beta1/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" integrity="sha384-giJF6kkoqNQ00vy+HMDP7azOuL0xtbfIcaT9wjKHr8RbDVddVHyTfAAsrekwKmP1" crossorigin="anonymous">
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.0.0-beta1/dist/js/bootstrap.bundle.min.js" integrity="sha384-ygbV9kiqUc6oa4msXn9868pTtWMgiQaeYH7/t7LECLbyPA2x65Kgf80OJFdroafW" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<script src = "phaser.min.js"></script>
<script src = "game.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<div id = "thegame"></div>
</body>
</html>
In a separate file, which I called bootstrap.html, we add the code to generate the dropdown, just following Bootstrap docs.
<div class="btn-group">
<button type="button" class="btn btn-danger dropdown-toggle" data-bs-toggle="dropdown" aria-expanded="false">
I am a Bootstrap Dropdown
</button>
<ul class="dropdown-menu">
<li>
<a class="dropdown-item" href="#" id = "up">Move up</a>
</li>
<li>
<a class="dropdown-item" href="#" id = "right">Move right</a>
</li>
<li>
<a class="dropdown-item" href="#" id = "down">Move down</a>
</li>
<li>
<a class="dropdown-item" href="#" id = "left">Move left</a>
</li>
<li>
<hr class="dropdown-divider">
</li>
<li>
<a class="dropdown-item" href="#" id = "center">Move to center</a>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
Now, the magic: Phaser support to DOM elements, explained in the commented source code:
let game;
window.onload = function() {
let gameConfig = {
type: Phaser.AUTO,
backgroundColor: 0xe5e5e5,
scale: {
mode: Phaser.Scale.FIT,
autoCenter: Phaser.Scale.CENTER_BOTH,
parent: "thegame",
width: 500,
height: 500
},
// this is needed to work with DOM elements
dom: {
createContainer: true
},
scene: playGame
}
game = new Phaser.Game(gameConfig);
window.focus();
}
class playGame extends Phaser.Scene {
constructor() {
super("PlayGame");
}
preload() {
// this is how we load HTML content
this.load.html("dropdown", "bootstrap.html");
}
create() {
// a DOM elements is added pretty much like a sprite
let dropdown = this.add.dom(game.config.width / 2, game.config.height / 2).createFromCache("dropdown");
// click listener
dropdown.addListener("click");
// on click callback function
dropdown.on("click", function(e) {
// different actions to do according to element "id" property
switch(e.target.id) {
case "up":
this.tweens.add({
targets: dropdown,
x: game.config.width / 2,
y: 50,
duration: 200
});
break;
case "right":
this.tweens.add({
targets: dropdown,
x: game.config.width - 150,
y: game.config.height / 2,
duration: 200
});
break;
case "down":
this.tweens.add({
targets: dropdown,
x: game.config.width / 2,
y: game.config.height - 50,
duration: 200
});
break;
case "left":
this.tweens.add({
targets: dropdown,
x: 150,
y: game.config.height / 2,
duration: 200
});
break;
case "center":
this.tweens.add({
targets: dropdown,
x: game.config.width / 2,
y: game.config.height / 2,
duration: 200
});
break;
}
}, this);
}
}
And that’s it, so simple and effective. This allows us to give players a HTML5 game with modern UI. Download the source code of the entire project.
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