What web technologies to use for multiplayer bullet-hell game?

[Theorems]

Hi,

I am looking to eventually make a multiplayer online game similar to Realm of the Mad God. I am good with javascript but have not yet learned any game engines or libraries and have just used the canvas. What should I learn to make a game like rotmg? Looking at phaser I have a feeling it would be better to make my own game engine for canvas in the long run to have it fully customizable and multilplayer but I don't have experience with any engines so I dont know. Any advice is appreciated, thanks.

[mattstyles]

Phaser handles stuff like rendering, audio, user input and a host of other helper stuff that saves you time coding, it does not specifically handle multi-player but its usually not too tricky to add it on i.e. you have a scene graph of sprites which Phaser knows how to render, now listen for network events and move the sprites based on those events, Phaser will go right ahead and deal with the rendering layer for you (of course you'll have to deal with stuff like client-side predication and latency yourself).

RotMG is fairly simple on the client (ignoring the fact its action packed and fast so you'll need it performant) and Phaser should be just about perfect for handling the client stuff. You should be able to get something up and running fairly quickly and then spend your time on the multi-player stuff.

Writing your own engine and stuff can be fun, but, I think for a game like this you'd end up with something pretty similar to Phaser anyway.

[Theorems]

Thanks for the answer! ill try making a few simple phaser games to test it out.