phaser-capture

Why?

Although each OS has their own set of tools for screenshots and video capture, I wanted something platform agnostic that I could simply plug into whatever web-based game I was making. This also lets me collect captures on computers that I don't have software installation rights on.

I chose Phaser in particular only because it's what I'm already using most of the time, but I would like to eventually include a more minimal module that does the core screenshot/recording work without being coupled to Phaser.

Usage

The plugin is packaged via UMD, meaning it'll work happily used if included browser globally (via <script src="phaser-capture.js">) or if you prefer Node or Browserify.

Unfortunately Phaser plugins are not very well documented, and most rely on their own ad-hoc documentation to instruct their users. For now, phaser-capture is no different:

// var PhaserCapture = require('phaser-capture');  // For Node/Browserify users

var playState = {
  create: function() {
    game.capture = game.plugins.add(Phaser.Plugin.Capture);
    // game.capture = game.plugins.add(PhaserCapture);  // Node/Browserify

    // Take a screenshot every 5 seconds.
    setInterval(function() {
      game.capture.screenshot(function(dataUrl) {
        // Outputs a data-url of the image (default image/png).
        console.log(dataUrl);
      });
    }, 5000);
  },
};

game = new Phaser.Game(800, 600);
game.state.add('play', playState);
game.state.start('play');

API

The resultant plugin exposes only one method currently:

screenshot(callback, opts)

• callback is the function that will be called once the screenshot render is complete. It assumes its only argument will be a data-url.
• options is an object that may contain:
  • format, either image/png or image/jpeg

/THE FUTURE!/

• Downloading screenshots easily
• Uploading screenshots somewhere (Dropbox? Something more agnostic?)
• Video recording! (GIF, WebM)