It's another week, so surely there must be a new Phaser CE release? Yup! Here it is: Phaser CE v2.8.0. It's a great update with fixes for Arcade Physics Circular bodies, particle emitter updates and all kinds of other nice things. More details in the README as always.

Phaser 3 Updates

This week I didn't code a single line of Phaser 3. Not the best way to start a Phaser 3 Update I expect you're thinking? The reason is that I spent the week and several sleepless nights putting together the Phaser 3 Labs site. I definitely pushed myself too hard (which alas almost certainly contributed towards me being ill on Friday) but I was determined to get it all finished and uploaded.

If you support Phaser on Patreon you'll already have received an email about this, but the Phaser 3 Labs is a new section of the Phaser website. I've been working on the content for a while now and it finally all came together. Here is what you'll find there:

Phaser 3 Dev Logs

The Dev Logs are the weekly reports we publish in this newsletter. For a long time now I've wanted to archive it on the website, worried that there is a stack of useful information and history buried away in our back issues and available nowhere else. Getting this content out of the newsletter and onto the website was harder work than you'd think.

In the end, I coded a script that took the horrendous HTML that email newsletters are known for and parsed it into a DOMDocument and then extracted the parts out of it that I needed into MarkDown. It took a while to perfect but I'm happy with the results and it means you can now easily go back through the past 9 months worth of contents.

As a happy side-effect, I also overhauled the Newsletter Back Issues pages, which now show a screen shot, a contents list and option to download the PDF too.

Phaser 3 API Overview

I've been chipping away at this for a while and finally pulled it all together. It's basically a complete overview of all Phaser 3 systems and components, broken down by section. You can see the namespace in which it sits, a progress chart, a link to the source on GitHub and read about the functions it does (or will) contain and even see example source code.

Every section so far is covered and this part of the site will continue to grow and change as the week's progress. You should be able to get a solid understanding of how the API is structured and match up headings in our schedule with the API contents to see what it is we're working on.

Technical Schedule

This took a lot of late nights, planning and discussion to produce. It's our technical schedule for the next 6 months, including beta, alpha and release candidate points and beyond, right up to Phaser 3.1. Naturally, it will evolve over time - hopefully, we can claw back time in some areas, and we may loose it in others, but I feel that based on the past 6 months it's an accurate reflection of what's coming and when.

FAQ, History, Contributors Guide

There's more content to be found too. After getting asked the same thing over and over we collected the most common questions together in an FAQ.

I took the History of Phaser 3 article I wrote, updated it and corrected some parts and added that. There is also an upgraded Contributors Guide if you want to get started building Phaser 3 today. There's a lot to be found on the site and a lot more to come too.

I'm looking forward to getting back into actual Phaser code again but you can't ignore the fact that the website and newsletter are an important part of Phaser too - and it doesn't write itself! It takes me at least 1 full day a week to collect together the news articles, write them, take screenshots, post them, create the newsletter and publish everything. Every single week. This is important work to do because Phaser is more than just me or the source code, it's also about the community - what you ladies and gents are all doing is just as important as what we're doing here. And to be honest it's what keeps me going a lot of the time.

Phaser 3 Mailing List and Developers Guide

If you're interested in helping evolve the shape of Phaser 3, then please join the Phaser 3 Google Group. The group is for anyone who wishes to discuss what the Phaser 3 API will contain.

The Phaser 3 Developers Guide is available. Essential reading for anyone who'd like to help build Phaser 3.