My nephew and I are meeting once a week to make video games. We are using Phaser (and Javascript) as our game engine and Glitch as our coding IDE.

Here’s one of our game: Invaders. Since it’s on Glitch, you can see all of the code and “remix” it into another game. In the constructor of the Invaders class there are a lot of member variables that you can can to tweak the game to your taste.

I’m sharing this because I think that to learn programming, you should Start with a Working System, not use tutorials. This is more like what real programming jobs are anyway. Once you are comfortable with what the code does, then build a new game from scratch by copying over pieces a little at a time as you need them. That’s what I did to learn Phaser. The game I used is out of date, but I’ll share my fork and update soon.

In this game, we use

• Sprites
• Animations
• Sounds
• Keyboard controls
• Collision detection
• The physics engine: so that we can use velocity instead of updating the positions manually

You can make a lot of games with just those basic tools.