Kiwi.js vs Phaser

[plicatibu]

It seems a naive question but is kiwi.js an ancestor of Phaser, is it a borther of Phaser or what?

 

I came across this post and this other one and I didn't get it.

 

Also here you see in kiwi.js the statement Phaser.js (Kiwi Lite).

 

Isn't Phaser suitable for mobile devices too? Why 2 projects?

 

Thanks.

[rich]

The important thing to look at with those posts is the date on them, to appreciate what happened and when. But this is a perfectly fair question, so here goes a little history lesson

 

When I left my previous company and started Photon Storm full time, my first project was to help build Kiwi.js for a company in New Zealand called Instinct Entertainment. It was just myself and one other part-time developer (the massively talented Ross Kettle). We had nothing to work from, no template as such, so we were literally creating it on the fly - and what's more, the html5 landscape was constantly shifting beneath us as well (back then even iOS hadn't accelerated canvas fully yet).

 

After a few months we made the jump from plain JavaScript to TypeScript. This actually helped the project significantly at the time, as we had structure and clarity that was a bit lacking before. But I also needed to start doing client games as well (to pay the bills basically, as fun as frameworks are, they don't make you much money ) so my time was now split between Kiwi and client games. And I used Kiwi for most of those early games, which helped it grow and develop. But still I was essentially coding on my own most the time, and after a while that gets really tiring. Ross was doing loads as well, but like me he had his own projects too, so we'd get strange boughts of him not being able to do anything for a few weeks, and then doing loads, and the same from my end, and it all kind of gets mixed and muddled up (it's not a great way to run a project in hindsight). Even so I coded for months: days, nights, nights into mornings, literally thousands of lines of code.

 

Kiwi was still closed-source at this point and was a quite monstrously sized project. Too much so really. At the time I really wanted it to support DOM as well as Canvas, and spent a good while refactoring to support this. In hindsight it probably didn't need it, but back then DOM was still significantly faster than Canvas in most browsers (you could argue, for certain games, it still is) but of course adding this dependency didn't help with the scale of the project. So I'm literally burning the candle at both ends, trying to manage a hugely growing small business and trying to keep Kiwi moving forwards with effectively zero project management.

 

Remember no-one else was allowed to see what we were doing, we couldn't release it onto github (due to funding applications going on at the time) and it was all just getting too much. There weren't enough hours in the day to manage it all and I basically burnt out.

 

To try and rekindle my love for it I literally spent a weekend while the family was away hacking together a crude conversion of Flixel. I literally copied it wholesale, having to rebuild classes that existed in AS3 and porting the others. A couple of days later I was done - it was small, clean and just worked, because it only tried to do a few things so it did them pretty well. It was called Kiwi Lite (a name that I feel is a strong indication of my mindset at the time) and I wanted to release it on github. I was told I couldn't use the name as Kiwi had to remain closed at that time. So I asked Adam (creator of flixel) if I could call it Flixel5, but he said he'd rather I didn't as it would confuse things with the Flash build. So I spent an hour brainstorming some names with my good friend Ilija and we settled on Phaser. He drew a cool little space dude sprite and logo and the first build was pushed to github on April 12th 2013.

 

I had always intended it to be a 'younger brother' to the much more sophisticated and feature-complete Kiwi.js, and for a good while that is how it remained. But an interesting thing happened: other people started using it. It started to take on a life of its own, and a small but constant trickle of devs started submitting pull requests and bug fixes. And then people actually started making games with it. And this does a curious thing when you've been working effectively in isolation for so long: it motivates you, like nothing else possibly can.

 

And although I carried on working on both for a while, I slowly drifted away to Phaser because I was getting real tangible feedback and support, and it was infectious. The team at Instinct hired other devs to work on Kiwi and they've done an excellent job of cleaning it up, adding in WebGL support and making it a really attractive framework, and they released the first beta late last year (and didn't even tell me ). It's still TypeScript to the core, something I moved away from with Phaser - a move that's well documented on the forum if you want to read about my troubles with it!, but it's well worth looking at and using, especially if you like TypeScript or come from AS3.

 

And while they were finishing Kiwi, Phaser evolved. When I swapped to plain JavaScript that was the same time I swapped to using Pixi.js under the hood, mostly because Mat is such a great guy but also because it was tiny and clean and it made sense to me. Version 1.0 was released just under six months ago, and for some reason it's hit a real chord with developers.

 

Just so we're clear there is (or was) no 'breach of contract' here. There was a simple agreement in place, and I literally poured my heart and soul in Kiwi development for months, way more time than agreed (or ever invoiced for!) because I believed in what I was building. I'm not involved in development of it any more though, because it's no longer my "baby". A lot of work has been done on it, lots of internals changed (for the better) and the new devs own it now. It's their creation and they don't need me sticking my oar in.

 

I've really held back from promoting Phaser, I think in part because I felt guilty and somewhat humbled that people even liked it and used it! And I wanted to give Kiwi time to release and establish itself. You can count the number of posts about it on my blog on one hand for example, and even though it has been ready for months the web site is still just a single pager. But that didn't stop it growing in popularity. I'm genuinely amazed at how well it's going. I'm not really doing anything other than trying to constantly improve it and help people use it, but I guess those are 2 quite fundamental things

 

Phaser 2.0 is finally the version I'm truly, genuinely 100% happy with. I've spent weeks fixing bugs, making it simpler under the hood, using Pixi.js more intelligently and improving it as much as I can. It's taken a long time and a lot of work to get to this point and as corny as it sounds, absolutely none of this would have  happened if it hadn't been for the community around it. The more people that use it, the more I want to make it better. And for those that submit pull requests and help fix bugs, you're the best  When 2.0 ships in March I'm no longer going to hold back from promoting it, so you'll see it appearing in a lot more places and things will step-up a gear around the site and tutorials.

 

tl:dr - I spent a long time working on Kiwi, but am no longer part of that team. It's a great framework and well worth using. Phaser was a weekend creation born from a pit of frustration/depression that went mental and grew into what you see today, utterly unplanned, but utterly wonderful because of it.

[plicatibu]

Thank you for telling us about the hole history.

 

I'm glad to see how successful Phaser is. It's really an amazing framework.

[Mike]

It's a great story and I'm very happy of witnessing the whole process since February last year.

 

Personally the only thing I miss at the moment is enough free time to spent of html5 game dev... but at least I keep everything under close look and check the constant progress.

 

p.s.

Just for clarity I don't have any busyness connection with both phaser or kiwi I'm just a developer which found Phaser as perfect solution to my needs and programming level. and I really love html5.

[clark]

I second that. It is great to see a story behind this. 

I find it amazing you are managing to keep these different technologies integrated into a single well structured framework.

The downside is that it reminds how much I suck!

[feiss]

hey, thanks for the time writing the whole story. I knew the beginning and the end of it, but not the adventure in the middle. Everything makes sense, and I'm very glad it turned out like it is now. Kiwi growing healthy on one side, Phaser rocking the hell out of us. Congrats!

[Nambiar]

Ok. Just came across this post. Thought I'd put this here...

 

 

Taken from the "History of Things" post from my site - http://gamedolph.in/a-history-of-things/

 

<3 Phaser.