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Developer Diary : Tutorial

Development Activity

As of Monday the 15th, we had an independent study week where we were given the chance to work on anything we had to catch up with during our spare time. For this week, I chose to start and finish my tutorial task.

For this task, we needed to make a Phaser Tutorial on anything of our choice. I decided to do a basic tutorial on Matter that many beginner level users would be able to learn how to set up their own scenes as well, it will cover most of how to set it up and how the user can create small simple contraptions using the engine.

Writing a coding tutorial can better help develop a basic understanding of your subject matter, it can help you to build something small and simple at a deeper understanding – this understanding can aid you in future projects.

“It requires that you understand what you’re doing/building enough to be able to explain it to somebody else”

ryanjyost, 2019

A great way to start your process on this would be to try and pick up a topic you want to learn and write about, which could just about be anything you’re not so experienced with.

I felt as if writing a tutorial on the basics of Matter from the ground up has helped to show me understand what the most simplest way to start on a foundation for a program using Phaser, as I’ve managed to explain in detail most of what goes into making the program work at a core level.

Figure 1

After having explained how to put some simple objects with attributes together, throughout the tutorial I’ve also provided links to the Phaser 3 documents that the reader can check to further entice them into starting to explore and experiment with what they can do in the program.

I’ve also provided some in-game screenshots of what I was able to achieve using this simple level of understanding, within the tutorial I managed to put together a small simple physics contraption that made use of constraints. (See Figure 2)

Figure 2

I think that I’ve managed to provide a decent tutorial for anyone without much prior knowledge to using Phaser on how to set up a simple scene, I’ve also left a lot of what you could possibly do in the guide as open-ended as possible to encourage experimentation by leaving many links to the Phaser documentation the user could use to expand upon.

Matter I feel is a good way to introduce beginner level programmers to using Phaser, it touches upon how these programs are usually set up which can help to further a beginner level user’s understanding of the basics, there’s also plenty of attributes you can assign to even basic objects that make it fun to experiment and learn with.

It’s also got many examples you can try on the Phaser website:

https://phaser.io/examples/v3/category/physics/matterjs

Although the coding in the tutorial is kept as brief and as simple as possible, I feel as if the next time I get the chance to write a tutorial I could do something slightly more complex to help further encourage myself to learn more new things about Phaser.

Bibliography

Ryanjyost.com. 2019. How to write a coding tutorial. [online] Available at: https://www.ryanjyost.com/how-to-write-a-coding-tutorial/ [Accessed 23 February 2021].

photonstorm.com, P., 2021. Phaser – Examples – physics – Matterjs. [online] Phaser.io. Available at: https://phaser.io/examples/v3/category/physics/matterjs [Accessed 23 February 2021].

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