Welcome back everyone! After a short, but needed, break, we're back at work and progressing Phaser 3 on its merry way.

I've split my time between working on the Geometry functions, adding in Hermite curve support, and new intersection capabilities, and also working on the Phaser 3 roadmap. I'm hoping to release it next week, but there's still more to finalise first.

Phaser 3 Developers Guide

This week I also wrote a comprehensive Phaser 3 Developers Guide.

This guide covers, in detail, how to set-up Phaser 3 locally so you can build it and test it. There's also a section in the guide on using the Phaser 3 Examples Runner, how to create your own examples, and an overview of the core game loop and internal flow of Phaser 3.

Please understand that this is meant for those who wish to contribute towards Phaser 3 development. It is not a guide on how to use Phaser 3 itself. Also it's a living, breathing document, which I fully intend to edit to over time (and which you're encouraged to edit as well!)

Phaser 3 Mailing List

Last year I created a Phaser 3 Google Group to discuss development. It has sad idle for many months, as development of Lazer was frozen, but I feel now is the time to make use of it once again.

If you'd like to join the group then please do so. This mailing list is for people who wish to help shape what the Phaser 3 API and feature-set will contain, and those who want to get involved in development of it (even if by just contributing ideas).

I will start using it a lot myself, as I find the immediate feedback it offers is much more useful, than remembering to check a forum, or wait a week to write the next newsletter. So if you'd like to get involved, please do!

Bitmap Fonts

Felipe has been working on adding a new Bitmap Font renderer into v3, here is what he has to say about it so far:

What’s good about bitmap fonts is that they are really easy to render and they are great if you want to have text with effects pre applied to them. Another nice benefit of it is that it’s easier to implement interesting effects to the text, for example adding color cycling or wiggle effects to words. That is the main idea behind the implementation for Phaser.

For now I’ve only worked on the “low level” implementation of the bitmap font rendering and so far we support the same features that Phaser’s BitmapText does. This features are multi-line support, text vertical and horizontal alignment, text color tinting, changing font size dynamically and be able to get the dimension of the rendered text.

So far the implementation looks very much like the Canvas API, with functions like drawText and getTextDimension. The idea is to build on top of that the features we want to add like word coloring and character effects, but leave the raw API commands there for you to build-upon too.