Hi everyone - it's been a chaotic few months since the last update, and a lot has been happening which I really hope I can share with everyone soon. Until then, please find the latest updates from the Phaser world, including 3.60 Beta 8, lots of cool Phaser Job offerings, new games, and more.

Phaser 3.60 Beta 8 Release

We've been quietly but solidly working away on Phaser 3.60 for months now and are very close to release. Today I'm happy to say that 3.60 Beta 8 has been published, and I would urge you to test it if you can do so. It should be a safe drop-in replacement for Phaser 3.55, with very little need for changes to your code. However, it does bring a lot of new features and fixes to the table. Some of the new features include:

Sprite FX - The ability to create and use SpriteFX Pipelines directly on Sprite Game Objects. These allow a straightforward way to define per-Sprite shaders, including extra padding space, perfect for effects such as blur, distort, glow, outline, shadow, and more.

Compressed Texture Support - Phaser 3.60 contains support for Compressed Textures. It can parse both KTX and PVR containers and within those has support for the following formats: ETC, ETC1, ATC, ASTC, BPTC, RGTC, PVRTC, S3TC, and S3TCSRB. Compressed Textures differ from normal textures in that their structure is optimized for fast GPU data reads and lower memory consumption. Popular tools that can create compressed textures include PVRTexTool, ASTC Encoder, and Texture Packer.

Matter Physics v0.18 - We have updated the version of Matter Physics to the latest v0.18 release. This is a big jump and brings with it quite a few internal changes to Matter and a \~40% performance improvement.

There are also hundreds of updates and bug fixes across the entire codebase.

As always, I have been careful to record all of these in their own Change Log. So it's easier for you to identify which change happened in the 3.60 version specifically.

Beta 8 is available now from the Releases page. You can also download it from npm:

npm i phaser@3.60.0-beta.8

I have published new TypeScript defs files that align with this version. You can find them in the types folder of this repository.

If you find any problems with this release, I urge you to please report them in GitHub issues.

As usual, I'd like to thank the Phaser community for their help in both reporting issues and submitting pull requests to fix them. So, please do spend some time digging through the Change Log. I assure you, it's worthwhile :)

Phaser Real Time Multiplayer Tutorials

The team over at Colyseus has been hard at work creating a series of tutorials that cover real-time multiplayer game development with Phaser. The tutorials are split into 4 parts currently, including:

Basic Player Movement
Linear Interpolation
Client Predicted Input
Fixed Tickrate

The full source code is also available on their GitHub.

If you've ever wondered about how to get started with a Phaser multiplayer game, this is a perfect place to start.

Phaser Editor 2D v3.33.1 released

The latest version of Phaser Editor 2D is now available. This includes various bug fixes and feature updates, such as new project templates, object constructors and more.

You can find out all the details on the Phaser Editor site.

Marbles Garden

This is a simply beautiful casual game, very similar to the classic game Zuma. Marbles Garden is a match-3 marble shooter puzzle. Your goal is to protect your beautiful garden against evil golems. Special projectiles and other bonuses, which you can upgrade during the game for collected stars, will also help you with that.

Features 60 beautiful levels, 14 upgradable powerups, a live environment, and epic music

Your goal is to prevent golems from pushing balls into the hole at the end of the path. Shoot balls to match at least three of the same color to eliminate. You will receive a star for each completed level. For stars, you can activate and upgrade powerups that will help you destroy more balls.

Play Marbles Garden on Game Distribution.

Almost Pong

Lessmilk, who is the author of the Make 2D Games in Phaser book, has published this great little game which is a nice blend of Flappy Bird and Pong. See how long you can last in Almost Pong.

Phaser Jobs

Right now is a pretty great time to be a Phaser developer! Many companies and projects are looking for talented devs on both a full-time and freelance / contract basis. Here are a few new job listings worth your consideration. If you contact any of them, please mention you saw their job listed on the Phaser Patreon.

Phaser Web3 Developer for Game7

Game7 is looking for a Phaser developer with experience in designing 2D idle-type games (no web3 experience required). Most of the technical development is complete. This includes smart contracts, graphQL endpoints, and code to interact with the smart contracts. The goal is to abstract out the technical web3 tech and make it a simple voting game. Voters are rewarded with tokens.

Experience

- Focus on UI/UX to make the game intuitive
- Creating 2D animation/sprites (no designs yet)
- GraphQL (queries and endpoints already provided)
- Building modals/components (scripts already provided)

Resources: https://docs.0sum.io/fish-dao

Email Ronen Kirsh - r@game7.io

Elsewhere - TypeScript / Phaser Game Engineer

San Francisco / Remote. Part-time or Full-time.

As a specialist game engineer at Elsewhere, you'll work on the very core of our product: a vibrant, interactive 2D virtual world built in the web browser.

Accordingly, success in this role will require strong technical chops. Our product needs to be performant, load quickly, run on a variety of devices, and deliver a world-class user experience. You should be excited about doing things previously thought impossible in the web browser. :)

Click here for details

Melon Cube Studios

Melon Cube Studios is looking for a top-notch game programmer to join our rapidly expanding team in creating a pixel RPG browser-based game. Experience and understanding of RPG games are highly desired in this role.

As a game programmer, you'll be joining a team of developers, creatives, and game strategists who are passionate about pushing the boundaries in Decentralised Finance and blockchain to develop a one-of-a-kind game. You'll be involved in all aspects of development for a game that is on the edge of current protocols and frameworks and will gain valuable experience in all aspects of the newly emerging GameFi industry.

The salary for this position is between $55,000 to $85,000 a year, depending on experience and this position is a completely remote job.

Email harry@meloncubestudios.com

Pixel Pat

From TechSpot: "Intel has marked the first anniversary of its CEO Pat Gelsinger being at the helm by releasing an 8-bit-style browser game featuring its boss. Not only will it bring mild amusement for about thirty seconds, but you can also learn some interesting facts about Gelsinger and his history.

The aptly named Pixel Pat, which you can try here, is a free, endless runner put together by Intel. This writer assumed it was an April Fools' Day joke that the company may have posted a day early, and in a way, maybe it is, but you can still play the retro-esque game."

Needless to say, I'm only including this game here because it's made in Phaser :)

Energy Island Corp

SpirkopGames have released this Phaser-made title onto Steam:

"Build and manage an electric grid! At the start of the day, build new infrastructure and plan your day. Once ready, start the day then watch electricity production / consumption in real-time to adjust your building's settings. The growth of the islands depends on you!"

Grab Energy Island Corp from Steam

Geek Links

And to end this post, here are a few superbly geeky things worth looking at:

• An article about porting there C++ Zelda codebase to Web Assembly
• 4 integers are enough for a complete Snake game!
• A stunning re-creation of Toyoma, Japan’s Etchū-Daimon train station in Unreal Engine 5