Welcome to Issue 35 of Phaser World
This is a pretty exciting issue for me :) Not only do we have the final release of Phaser 2.5.0, which represents weeks of hard work. But we've also got an exclusive first look at the Arcade Physics 2 API for Lazer, with demos, sample code and everything! Find out more in the Development Progress section.
Just be sure not to skip over some of the great games this issue too! Gemini was a forum favourite, although I struggled to get very far :) And Euro Football is the first of many polished footy games.
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
Phaser 2.5.0 is here! You can read more about it in the Development Progress section of this issue. There are loads of cool new features, stacks of bug fixes, all of the new Examples are online, and een a brand new GitHub page to boot!
Games made with Phaser
Game of the Week
The Potato Knight has spellbound everyone in Produceland! In this beautiful platform adventure.
Staff Pick
Shoot the ball past the goalkeeper, and try to score more points than your opponents.
Can you control both characters at the same time to get them to the end of the level?
Play a shopkeeper in an RPG world. Like "Papers, Please" meets "Lemonade Stand"
Race around the track, collecting speed boosts, and avoid the cows!
Phaser Tutorials
An interesting example of using Phaser to create Linux MDM Themes.
In this tutorial the developers share how they built a physics based racing game.
Easily chain your Phaser game code.
Part 3 of a tutorial series on re-creating the classic Dungeon Raid game.
Development Progress
What a week it's been! The headliner is that Phaser 2.5.0 is released. Wait, what happened to 2.4.9? The answer is that 2.4.9 was published with an issue in the TypeScript definitions, that would cause TS apps to fail to compile. Which was extremely frustrating, as I'd spent ages going through the defs with tslint and fixing all kinds of mistakes.
Rather than leave it broken, I wanted to release a version 2.4.9.1. Unsure if this was a valid numbering scheme I spent some time reading the Semver documentation, and realised that we've been doing it wrong for ages now. It appears we've been releasing MINOR level changes as just PATCH increments for a while now. With that in mind I figured it was time to start doing it properly. So 2.4.9 became 2.5.0, and we'll carry on from this point going forward.
Updated Docs, Examples and Sandbox
As well as releasing 2.5.0 I also spent some time fixing up the web site. All of the API Docs now include 2.5.0. And the Sandbox has also been updated, meaning you can code directly in 2.5.0 on there right away.
The Phaser Examples have been updated too. There are loads of new examples listed. Covering new features like Sprite alignment, the Weapons Plugin, and even Dolby Digital Audio. So have a dig around! The Examples site is of course running Phaser 2.5 as well. I even overhauled the Phaser GitHub page. It should be easier for beginners to navigate, and was given a new lick of paint too. Throw us a GitHub star if you like it please :)
Future Phaser Versions?
Phaser 2.5.1 is under development in the GitHub dev branch already. This is likely to be specifically a PATCH level release. The next MINOR version will be 2.6 and there are several features I'd like to add to it, including: Arcade Circles support, which can currently be found in its own branch). And also the new WebGL Tilemap Renderer.
Pete is very nearly finished on the new WebGL Tilemap Renderer, which is coming on so well! Finally we have super-smooth, hardware accelerated tilemaps :) Both of these features are targeted to drop in a Phaser 2.6 release.
Beyond that, as explained several issues ago, I'm going to take a look at using Pixi v4 inside Phaser. Pixi 4 was supposed to reach a final stable release this week, but that hasn't happened yet. As soon as it does I'll start testing, and make some decisions if we want to include it in Phaser v2 or not.
Arcade Physics 2 First Look
It's not just Phaser this week either! Felipe has been working like a trojan on the Arcade Physics 2 API, and has been making great progress.
We're now at the stage where we'd love it if you could pull down the Lazer and Lazer Examples repos, and start playing with the Arcade Physics 2 API.
It's all coded in ES6, and very different to how Phaser works internally. So he's written a detailed overview for you. This covers what's in the new API, how to get started with it, and where to find the examples and code.
Please give the Arcade Physics 2 First Look article and read, and let us know how you get on! You can open issues in the Lazer repo, post to the Lazer forum, or find us both on Slack (where he goes as @bitnenfer and I'm @rich)
Geeky Links
From the PS4 to 1.44MB Floppy: A fascinating video about porting Retro City Rampage to MS-DOS.
The whole of Star Wars A New Hope in one picture (403.5 ft of scrolling!)
Kicking it old school: How to make a C64 game in BASIC.
Phaser Releases
The current version of Phaser is 2.5.0 released on June 17th 2016.
Phaser 2.5.1 is now in development in the GitHub dev branch.
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