Newsletter
Welcome to Issue 39 of Phaser World
I've always loved the game Breakout, and Shards is an absolutely fantastic version of it. It really shows-off the power of a skilled developer, Phaser and Box2D.
There's also a Photon Storm game this issue too! Frankfurter Fling was a game built for the NFL earlier this year, an update of one of their old Flash titles. Simple but strangely compelling.
You'll also find a large stack of tutorials, and some pretty exciting news in the Development Progress section.
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 channel.
News
A handy plugin that displays the whole Phaser Scene Graph in the browsers dev tools.
Games made with Phaser
Game of the Week
The classic brick breaker genre, given a beautiful modern twist.
Staff Pick
The great block filling puzzler is back, with new shapes and new boards!
Throw the hotdog as far as you can in the NFL stadium!
A blackjack game where you play on multiple columns at once.
A powerful binary calculator to help explore bit math.
Phaser Tutorials
In the next part of this Match 3 game tutorial series detecting combos is added.
The Drag and Match game engine is updated for Phaser 2.5.
Cordova and Android Studio Tutorial
Make your games run on Android devices with Cordova and Android Studio.
The 12th episode in the video series fixes up the game.
The 13th episode in the video series starts adding a Main Menu system.
The 14th episode in the video series covers Object Layers, how to create and use them.
The 15th episode in the video series covers level progression logarithms.
The 16th episode in the video series covers adding power-ups to your game.
Development Progress
Since the last issue we released Phaser 2.6.1. This was a tiny point release fixing an important bug. Beyond this though, we've not been idle - and the Phaser development train continues to plough on! Here is what's in production:
Multi-Texture Support
As you know, Phaser uses a custom build of Pixi v2. In Pixi 2 (and 3) it uses batched sprites in WebGL. This allows it to draw sprites that share the same texture in a single draw call. So if 2000 sprites are all using the same texture, or part of a texture (think texture atlas), then it happens in a single draw call on the GPU. This is important to keep performance up. Every time the texture has to change, the batch if flushed and starts over from scratch again. Do this too often and you can easily work your way into the situation of 1 draw call per Sprite, which is a terrible place to be from a performance point of view.
However, it doesn't have to be this way. And Felipe (@bitnenfer) has been busy implementing multi-texture batched drawing support, and updating the Phaser / Pixi 2 shaders to support it. This is something Mat wrote about on the Pixi blog, which explains it in more detail. We're using our own approach and code for Phaser, but the principal is the same.
You can track development in the public multi-texture branch on GitHub. Most of the hard work has been done, so expect to see this hit a Release Candidate within a week.
Path Manager Plugin
As promised a while ago, I said I wanted to release the Path Manager Plugin we had developed internally, for free, rather than charge for it. So work has begun on doing just this. You can find the source in the Phaser dev repo, in the plugins folder. It's not yet production ready as there are a couple of classes to tidy-up and examples to create. But keep your eye on it, because it's coming soon, and offers some really nice motion path support :)
Geeky Links
Nintendo are releasing the NES Mini later this year. Compact, built-in games and HDMI out.
Continuing the theme, they have now opened-up access to the Nintendo Developer Program to everyone living in an eligable country. Registration is virtually instant.
Procedural Content Generation in Games is a web site (and forthcoming book) covering some amazing topics: from dungeon generation, to fractals and noise.
Phaser Releases
The current version of Phaser is 2.6.1 released on July 11th 2016.
Phaser 2.6.2 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.
Missed an issue? Check out the Back Issues page.