Switching to Godot - Why I'm quitting PhaserJS

hey YouTube what's up welcome back to another video it's been a minute uh since I've posted a YouTube video probably about six weeks here and this video is sort of an update on the videos I'm posting to this channel um the last video that I posted a couple weeks ago was hopefully the part one of a two-part Series where I Implement a dialog box in my phaser 2D RPG and this video will also be about that phaser 2D RPG I've said in previous videos that I'm working on a productivity app that's also a game and I was using phaser to support that game the problem was it just wasn't very good and it took a lot of work to get just a little bit of progress and I follow several creators on YouTube who do developer logs of developer Vlogs of their progress as they're making games and many of them are using the Godot engine or Unity to build their games and I've been tempted by video so many times I thought that maybe I would make faster progress if I switched but I kept just focusing on the RPG that I was making in phaser and thought that the idea of switching to another game engine was sort of shiny object syndrome and I just needed to get to an MVP with my current Tech stack and then I could reassess but I've been developing this project now for about a year and the progress is just nowhere close to what I had hoped for and when I have when I look back and and look at that I have to accept that working in phaser is making me go considerably slower and I don't think that's entirely phaser's fault I think a little bit of it is in something like Godot and maybe I'll post another video that's a much better comparison between these two engines now that I have a good deal of experience in both spoiler but phaser just the tooling just isn't there to be able to iterate fast enough and to be able to have a quick feedback loop for what it is that I'm building and there is so much more information out there on good go if there are if you're looking for a tutorial on how to do something there's a million godotorials tutorials excuse me on YouTube and there are not that many phaser tutorials so you can definitely build a game in phaser but I think that as you scale if you want to make a bigger game or a more complex game it just becomes a lot harder so I've been doing a lot of research over the past couple weeks over choosing something like Godot and whether or not it could support my needs for the game that I'm building because I have very specific needs because like I said I'm building a productivity app that's also a game I need the game to be able to interface with the react.js application and be able to receive data from that application and be able to communicate back up the tree so to speak to that react app and that was something I knew I could do in phaser and that's why I just picked phaser and moved forward because it was all JavaScript that I knew how to figure that stuff out over the past couple weeks I've been doing a tutorials this year tutorial series excuse me I'm going to leave this in I'm going to try to do this as one shot video hopefully this comes across as clear if not sorry we'll approve in the next video um I've been doing a tutorial series by heartbeast which is his RPG Series in Godot and it's incredible so now that I've finished that series I need to Pivot and start looking at how do I communicate between my react application and Godot and that's going to be the topic of my work moving forward but at the moment I just wanted to give anyone following this channel an update on what I've been working on Sorry my phone's going off this is an actual rare one take for me so here's the progress so far on that Godot RPG uh you can see this is Godot and again maybe I'll make another video if people are interested in a comparison between my workflow in phaser and my workflow in Godot I'll go ahead and hit play here if you've seen the heartbeast Series this will look very familiar but basically this is a RPG 2D RP action RPG template sort of tutorial series that he goes over his character has oops let me click on it his character should have let's call it omnidirectional movement anyway it's all Vector based and physics based instead of grid based okay see this bat has locked onto me I need to to run away so I have the ability to roll here by pressing my X key and I can slash these bushes by pressing my Z key the bats will detect me when I'm in a Zone and come after me and I can attack them and they play a little animation when they die and they'll chase after me let's go ahead and kill this one we'll ignore that one and we'll just leave that there okay so um that's a preview of what I've been working on recently I find that this product that I was just showing you is a far better game than what I've been building and by having a grid system I think the old game that I was building felt very much like Zelda for the SNES like a very uh you know four directions up down left right you can only attack in One Direction and that was my vision for the original version of the game that I'm building it's a Zelda it's very similar to Zelda um but as I was playing it as I was developing it I just started to get burnt out on the project because it felt so it felt like so much work in order to be to get just a little bit of progress and the game that I was building wasn't the game that I wanted to play it was like a shitty version of the game that I wanted to play because that's all that I thought that I could build and in phaser that's really all I could build with this skill set that I had and that skill set has leveled up uh tremendously over the past year in phaser and that experience gave me a great foundational understanding for game programming which is a little bit it's very different than web programming especially in react and that has helped me go a lot faster when following this tutorial series it's making things click a lot better and as I'm exploring Godot things just make so much more sense now that I've been doing it the hard way in phaser um having an organized editor that's that's powerful and um just compartmentalized in a way that makes sense builds a much clearer mental model of how the game exists how it gets built where code is located Etc so um hopefully that explains everything um as far as the timeline like after the last video I put a lot of effort in I took maybe like a week or two break because I just felt burnt out by the project and then that week or two break turned into a four week break because I just didn't want to get started again on the project and that's when I knew that I needed to try something different so then over the past two weeks I've been exploring Godot and I think that I'm gonna make the switch into using Godot as a way to build my project going forward but there's still some boxes that it has to check I haven't figured out how to get it to communicate with Super Bass yet and that's the database that I'm using for both my game and the productivity app that I'm building and I haven't figured out how to get it hosted in my next JS app so the next couple videos I'm gonna make are gonna be about figuring that out they might be more One-Shot uh videos like this so if you're looking for phaser RPG tutorials they may not be coming anytime soon but let me know in the comments down below what you think about transitioning to the Godot engine if you used Godot if you're making games on your own let me know how it's going anyway thanks for watching this video I appreciate your attention and thanks for following me on this journey I'll catch you in the next one hopefully it's uh less of a break between those all right have a good [Music]

Channel: Yugen

Views: 4,515

Keywords: devlog, devvlog, founder, game dev, game development, how to, javascript, saas, startup, supabase, tutorial, typescript, vlog, level design, game, indie dev, indie, indy dev, video game dev, web dev, indiehacker, indie hacker, godot

Id: VOvm2gpncLI

Length: 8min 33sec (513 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 25 2023