I went from knowing nothing about Phaser to a working game in about two weeks for a game jam earlier this year. Really enjoyed working with it.

http://www.lmnopc.com/air-sea-golf/

The jam was "genre shift", where participants were supposed to take an existing game and shift it to another genre. I chose the Atari 2600 classic Air Sea Battle and turned it into a simple golfing game.

I liked the idea of using the 2600 as a starting point so I could worry less about the graphics and more about the physics and gameplay.

It's simple but it works. It's almost much more fun on a phone - the touch screen is more fun than a mouse for this one. :)

That is really fun! It plays very smoothly on my iPhone.

Glad you dig it! :)

It seems like it's just limited on desktop? After dragging a certain amount on a desktop, I can't pull the swing back any further.

Watch the demo at the beginning of the game — you don’t want to click on the ball as your pivot point for the swing — use the upper right part of the window. That’s part of the reason I made the demo — to show the best place to start your swings. :)

You have to start dragging the mouse from higher up the window as far as I can tell.

For Lua, I recommend Love2D. Never enjoyed coding a game so much than in this little bundle of joy. It made my programming better in other languages. (Phaser is great).

Note! The examples link is for Phaser 2. Phaser 2 has good documentation but development stopped about two years ago. Phaser CE (community edition) picked up where Phaser 2 left off and went from 2.6 to 2.11, cleaning things up a bit and adding support for stuff like new event APIs. Meanwhile, the original Phaser developer released Phaser 3 and many revisions (up to 3.14 now), but the documentation isn't organized as well as the Phaser 2 docs yet.

Anyway, it's a good framework but you have to pick a version and there isn't an obvious answer.

Yep the docs for Phaser 3 are super patchy and can be quite frustrating, often you'll find things that look as though they should work but are for v2 and no longer exist. There's a lot of great support in the discord server though

Thanks for that note about the Discord server. I'd run into the same problem with the v3 documentation while participating in a few weekend game jams earlier this year. My decision was that I would simply use Phaser v2 if I were to try another game jam. I'll definitely be considering Phaser 3 again pending a quick look at the Discord server.

I remember the author, Richard Davey, was super helpful on the flixel forums back in the day (the AS3/flash game engine), so I have no doubt that Phaser must be a high quality project!