Animations Editor

Sprite animations are the most frequent option to animate characters in Phaser games. The principle of this animation technique is the displaying of a sequence of images (frames), at a given “speed” or frame rate.

Animation:

Eagle animation.

Animation frames:

Eagle animation frames.

In Phaser v3, the animations are created as global objects, in the animations manager:

You can create a single animation:

this.anims.create({
    "key": "acorn",
    "frameRate": 12,
    "repeat": -1,
    "frames": [
        {
        "key": "atlas",
        "frame": "acorn-1"
        },
        {
        "key": "atlas",
        "frame": "acorn-2"
        },
        {
        "key": "atlas",
        "frame": "acorn-3"
        }
    ]
});

Or multiple animations:

this.anims.fromJSON(
    "anims": [
        {
            "key": "acorn",
            // ....
        },
        {
            "key": "player",
            // ....
        }
    ]
);

in the practice, you create all the animations once in the game, probably in the preloader scene. Then, you can play an animation on a sprite object passing the animation key to the play() method:

mySprite.play("acorn");

Other way to create the animations is packing them all in a single JSON file, and load the file using the this.load.animation(..) method:

this.load.animation("my-anims", "assets/animations.json");

Phaser Editor 2D provides the Animations Editor, to create the animations JSON file. So, the workflow is very simple:

  • Create the animations JSON file with the Animations Editor.

  • Import the animations JSON file into an Asset Pack file with the Asset Pack Editor.

  • Play the animations in your code, with the play() method.