Newsletter
Welcome to Issue 55 of Phaser World
There are some great games this week, which perhaps is just as well if you're still in a state of disbelief or denial following the election results. 2016 just doesn't know how to let go, does it?
So forget Trump, and instead pretend to be a viking! Viking: Way to Valhalla is fantastic. It took me a while to get 'in to', but once I did I was hooked, slaying wolves and bandits, collecting spears and fire power-ups. It's surprisingly deep. Equally entertaining is Dubiduh, such a great game idea, well implemented.
There's a Phaser Discord channel! You've been asking for this for a while, and I finally cracked and set it all up. It has to be said that the interface is lovely. As much as I'm really liking Discord, I will still be on Slack. Find me on either.
Until the next issue, keep on coding. Drop me a line if you've got any news you'd like featured (you can just reply to this email) or grab me on the Phaser Slack or Discord channels..
Games made with Phaser
Game of the Week
A highly addictive strategy matching game - as a viking defender can you save your village?
Staff Pick
A combo of Snakebird and The Witness. Get the heart to complete the levels in this fiendish puzzle game.
A match 3 game, where as a good doctor you must help to remove all viruses!
Another great one-button game. Flip gravity by pressing, and see how far you can run without hitting a wall.
Connect the same gems to earn points, and make it through 50 levels of this fun treasure grabbing game.
Advanced Phaser Course Offer
Get this great video course on advanced Phaser development for just $29 during November.
Phaser News & Tutorials
Join us on our new Phaser Discord channel.
Watch the Phaser 3 State Manager in action in this new video.
Understanding Phaser ArrayUtils
A new tutorial that goes through the Phaser Array Utils class in detail.
A lightweight Multiple Timers Manager library.
La Gran Guía de Phaser.js en Español.
Patreon Updates
Thank you so much to the following new Phaser Patreons who joined us this week: Ryan Masten, Tiago Rodrigues, goldbuick, Ryan Malm and Atrodilla. Also thank you to Christopher Keele for increasing his pledge.
Patreon is a way to donate money towards the Phaser project on a monthly basis (you can also make one-off donations). Donations start at $1 and receive discounts, forum badges, private technical support from me, and my eternal gratitude, in return :)
Development Progress
First up, something important: It's been a couple of months since I released Phaser 2.6.2. And although development on Phaser 3 is rocking along, I'm well aware that there are issues in GitHub that still need solving. Or perhaps even more frustratingly, I already did fix them in the dev branch, but they've since merged into the Phaser 3 work.
So I've put together a quick survey to find out if you think I should pause work on v3 briefly, and release Phaser 2.7, after which I can return to v3. Please take the survey, it's literally just 2 questions, and will be used to give me an idea where to focus my dev time over the next couple of weeks.
Phaser 3 State Manager Video
It's been quite an exciting week, from a development point of view at least. After some serious work on the new State Manager I created a video that demonstrated it in action. Turn the audio up to hear me waffle on about what's happening on-screen. I need to get a better microphone, but otherwise I'm quite happy with how the video turned out. Sadly, the software I use only captures at 30fps, even though it was all running at a smooth 60fps.
As I explain in the video, States can now run in parallel. You can think of them as being fully self-contained packages. They have their own Loaders, Physics systems, Tween Manager, etc. And most importantly display objects belong to just that State. Someone said on Slack "does this mean I can't make a Preload State any more?", which is a valid question. The answer is that although States themselves are entirely isolated, the resources they access are not. So they still pull textures from the global texture manager, and files loaded via a State loader, are still placed into the global cache. So an image loaded from one State is instantly available in any other State.
States also have their own main loop and internal frame rate. This is really important, as it allows you to configure a State that updates at whatever interval you require (once per second? no problem). There's no need to spend time processing a State if you don't have to. I'll show the variable frame rate and new interpolation system in a future video.
One other thing I did in the video, which I forgot to mention at the time, is used the new Transform system. All Game Objects in Phaser 3 use the new Transform class, and one feature it has is that you can parent the Transform of a Game Object to any other Transform - no matter where on the display list that is. I use this in the video to handle the window with the icons in. The icons are all part of a single Container. A Container is a non-visual way of grouping objects together, much like a Phaser.Group. However I add the Containers transform as a child of the window image itself, so as the window image is dragged around, its own transform, which has the container as a child, is updated, and that flows down to all children (the icons). It's quite hard to explain, although I guess the main take-away from it is that objects can now be grouped however you like, and that grouping no longer has to influence the way they are transformed in your game.
Onwards and Upwards
As well as the State Manager I also spent time re-working the Main Loop, Input Manager, and last night made a start putting Arcade Physics back in too. The pieces are slotting in to place. Depending on the survey results depends what I focus on next week, either way though, Phaser will be advanced a little bit more :)
Geeky Links
First up is this stunning YouTube VR Video: The Canyon. Pan around with the mouse and enjoy the great visuals and music.
Nintendo have released their NES Classic, which is a worthy Geek Link all on its own. But in a brilliant PR move they've also re-opened their tricks-and-tips hotline - so give them a call if you get utterly thrashed by Excitebike or Kid Icarus :)
And finally this week: Create a first-person engine in 265 lines of JavaScript. Doom, here we come!
Phaser Releases
The current version of Phaser is 2.6.2 released on August 26th 2016.
Phaser 3.0.0 is in development in the GitHub dev branch.
Please help support Phaser development
Have some news you'd like published? Email support@phaser.io or tweet us.
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