Welcome to Issue 31 of Phaser World
Zenva are one of Phasers awesome Patreon sponsors, and they've got this great new development course called "Advanced Game Development". If you're in the market for some advanced learning material then I'd definitely recommend taking a look. I believe there is a time-limited discount on the course too, which expires very soon, so click fast!
There are some nice new games this week, another healthy crop of tutorials and an extended Development Progress section. I hope you find these sections useful, or at least interesting to read! If you've got any feedback, or suggestions for future content, then please get in touch.
Until next issue, happy 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
The latest version of Phaser is now available, with updates, fixes and a handful of new features.
Become a Black Belt Phaser developer and create advanced games, including multiplayer.
Games made with Phaser
Game of the Week
4 snack themed arcade games given a stylish modern twist.
Staff Pick
Guide Surge through a rough adventure to rescue the captives from the Demon Realm.
A classic vertically scrolling shoot-em-up for Android.
Stop the evil penguin from building the Tower of Babel by crushing it with ice!
A little art game about the search for your true self.
Phaser Tutorials
Easily add Circle vs. Circle and Circle vs. Rect collisions to Arcade Physics.
A plugin for providing nice ads integration into your game.
An advanced TypeScript template to fast-start your Phaser games.
In part 3 of this series we add stars, and save progress to LocalStorage.
In part 4 of this series we add animations for locked levels.
Going Commando - A serverless multiplayer game.
Development Progress
Phaser 2.4.8
The latest version of Phaser was released on May 19th and included 7 bug fixes, 7 updates and 3 new features. The new features include the ability to draw RenderTextures to BitmapData objects, which is handy if you're passing in the results of Sprite.generateTexture. Most of the Arcade Physics methods, such as distanceBetween and angleToPointer, now have a new world argument, allowing you to perform the calculation using world coordinates instead of local coordinates. Finally there is a new worldBound property, allowing you to define the elasticity of an Arcade Physics body when it collides specifically with the world bounds. If you leave it set to 'null' it will use the Body.bounce property as before, but if you set it to a new Point object you can now control the world bounce and body bounce separately.
Arcade Physics 2
Work continues on Arcade Physics 2 for Lazer. The development is being undertaken by Felipe Alfonso - who goes by @bitnenfer on the Phaser Slack channel. So say hi if you see him! You can track all of his commits to the repo, but new features this week include a custom polygon ear cutting routine, polygon to point intersection tests and lots of new examples in the lazer-dev repo.
Phaser Next
Now that Phaser 2.4.8 is released I will start work on Phaser 2.5.0. The first task being to test Pixi v4 integration, to get an idea of what level of effort is involved making it all work. There's a fine line between expending effort on this vs. working on Lazer, but I feel I owe it to the Pixi team to at least give it a shot :)
As 2.5.0 is likely to be a quite dramatic change internally I am very likely to also create a 2.4.9 release as well. This way issues won't remain ignored for too long, should 2.5.0 take a while to create (which is likely).
The challenge of fixing long-term broken things
In Phaser 2.4.8 the way that Sprite anchors and Body offsets work is now different than it was before. It's actually now correct in its implementation. But it had been incorrect for so long, that the incorrect version became the 'standard', and the new fixed one itself appears to be broken. When I say 'broken' I mean that the end result isn't what is expected - the functions have always actually worked, it's just the outcome that differs.
This is an interesting paradox you encounter when maintaining such a diverse API like Phasers. Devs get used to the 'broken' implementation, and it becomes normal to them. Which begs the question: should it actually be 'fixed' or not? In some such cases I have definitely turned around and said "this is a legacy issue and will remain as one", but the Body offset one felt like more of a proper bug to me, so I fixed it. I guess the old saying of "you can't please everyone" applies here.
Geeky Links
Ancient Aliens is a Doom megawad that looks simply stunning! (yes, the original Doom, not the 2016 reboot).
Programming Fonts - A great interview preview that compares all kinds of different fonts that are good for coding.
A Japanese gaming documentary from the 90s, including a great section showing the tools and methods Hudson Soft used when creating Super Bomberman 3 for the SNES (hopefully will be translated soon)
Free fully animated character sprite sheets from GameFromScratch.
Phaser Releases
The current version of Phaser is 2.4.8 released on May 19th 2016.
Phaser 2.5.0 is now in development. Follow progress on the GitHub dev branch.
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