Is Brackets good, or is using the other methods better?

[Froton X]

I use Brackets, and sometimes, I can't figure out if it's because of Brackets that something I put is going wonky, or because of my own amateur skills? Always so discouraging when something doesn't go the way I tried to get it to go. Makes me wonder if I'm more like a guy drawing stick figures and thinking he's a museum level artist in terms of programming. I'm an artist so sometimes I wonder if trying to learn phaser would actually be far too time consuming compared to somebody who is a programmer?

[lewster32]

I can't think of a situation where a text editor would hinder you, but there are many IDEs that can help, such as Visual Studio and others that provide code completion (very handy).

 

As for being an artist moving to programming, that's exactly what I did and I'm glad I did. It's one thing to be able to design, but to be able to make those designs come to life is a whole other level, and so worth the effort!

[Froton X]

Ah, Brackets has this feature of previewing what you wrote down without the need to do the setups listed in the begginers guide in order to preview a game. I'm wondering if the catch is that it wouldn't be previewing as accurately.

 

Really? That is quite encouraging to hear.

[lewster32]

If you can get a simple web server set up (there are many ways to do this now, and each guide will likely have a different method of doing this) then all you have to do is open the browser, point it to your game and then when you make a change, just refresh it. I've not used Brackets (or Adobe Edge Code which is mostly the same thing) with Phaser so I can't comment on how well it handles things like asset loading (which is where I figure it may get a bit stuck) but otherwise it should work fine and be pretty much 100% accurate.

[Froton X]

I see, I should give that a try then, I tried setting up an internal server but ran into some problems.

 

I know there's other, probably easier to use engines, like construct 2 and so on, but I got this feeling that despite the higher learning curve, I keep thinking "Phaser is the future", when it comes to html5 games.

 

Which is why I want to learn it. I guess I am frustrated because I wish I just had to learn 1 game engine, but I'm also trying to learn Unity at the same time as Phaser. I managed to learn Game Salad after a good two months of studying it practically everyday. I went from seeing alien technology in front of me, to being able to utilize it to do what I wanted. Too bad I didn't check how it handled html5 beforehand, but it's still a good engine none the less.

 

Learning hurts a lot, lol. Very painful and time consuming process for me, but once you learn it, it's like you always knew it. I haven't really tried to learn Phaser on a daily basis like I did for GameSalad back in Jan/Feb. I kept getting discouraged by trying to do stuff for hours, and having no progress at all, but its probably the text editor's preview thing going wonky was what I was thinking. As you mentioned, it was probably not handling the asset loading properly and got stuck. Guess I'll try another method tomorrow after work.

[lewster32]

I too have used Unity and I really enjoy it - I also prefer to use C# within Unity which means I get to keep my language skills varied.

 

Don't overstretch yourself, think small and try to approach problems that won't stretch you too far. It's common to start with a huge wonderful and ambitious idea and quickly lose the pace and the will as you get stuck over and over with problems that seem totally out of your reach. The way I gained experience in programming was to make lots and lots of small, fast to complete demos and interactive toys. Each one only took 4-6 hours, looked great and didn't stretch my abilities too much, but cumulatively I learned a lot from doing them.