Welcome to Issue 38 of Phaser World
The main feature this week is the release of Phaser 2.6.0. I know it was less than a month since 2.5, but the jump in version numbers only seems dramatic because we're now adhering to semver properly :) Having said that, there are loads of new features too! Check out the Development Progress article this issue for examples.
There are a few 'core' things left on my task list for Phaser (like getting the WebGL Tilemap work merged), and then it's time to start looking at where the focus should be spent for the second half of the year.
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
The latest release is here - with Arcade Physics Circles support, and loads more!
The latest update includes a powerful scene editor, group support and automatic updates.
Games made with Phaser
Game of the Week
45 levels of beautifully presented puzzle block sliding mayhem.
Staff Pick
It's a Spanish bull running game - and you're the bull!
Rescue all the satellites, while protecting the cargo ship from the asteroids.
Take on the enemy bees in this multi-level scrolling shoot-em-up.
Avoid 8 different kinds of blades, each with their own special abilities.
Phaser Tutorials
Web Font preloading tutorial for games.
The seventh episode in the video series adds coins to pick-up.
The 8th episode in the video series adds draggable items.
The 9th episode in the video series adds enemies into the game.
The 10th episode in the video series tweaks the game enemies.
The 11th episode in the video series adds shooting into the game.
Development Progress
Phaser 2.6.0 is released. This is essentially the 2.5.1 version, but with some API changing features added, causing the bump to 2.6. It's a significant update yet again, as a quick scan of the Change Log will show. A few of my personal favourite new features are:
Arcade Physics support for Circle shaped bodies. This is something I started work on a while ago, then put on the shelf as I focused on other things. Along came VitaZheltyakov who finished it off - adding in the intersection calls needed. I took his work, modified it a bit and voila - we have circle to circle, and circle to rect collisions :) You can see how to use it in this example.
New Arcade Physics Signals. I hang out in the Phaser Slack channel every week day, and something that was discussed recently was a way to tell when a Body collides with the World bounds, not just another Body. I had a quick think, implemented it, wrote a test - and bosh! Another tiny little change, but a substantial feature. Here's an example showing it. As well as signals for world bounds, I also added 'onCollide' and 'onOverlap' signals too. These provide alternative means to the more usual collide callback that you'd traditionally use.
Again as a result of Slack, someone asked how to 'hide' a part of a Sprite. The answer of course is to use a mask, but they're not that well covered, so I knocked up these quick examples of masking a Sprite, and also of masking a whole Group.
Group Alignment. The spent a good while pimping out the 'bounds' related functions in the 2.5.0 release for Sprites. You can now easily align sprites within the world, each other, or any rectangle. This allows for what was previously quite complex layout code to be reduced to a few calls. In the 2.6.0 release I extended this support to Groups as well. So you can now easily align Groups, no matter how their children are positioned, using the new properties like 'left', 'centerX' and methods like 'alignIn' and 'alignTo'.
Pixi updates
You'll notice a huge load of changes to Pixi in this release. This is basically house-keeping work. I've been removing functions that are never used internally, and are just wasting space - or worse, causing bugs (like the TextureCache arrays not being properly cleared). This doesn't impact Phaser at all, but if you have any plugins that rely on certain Pixi features, then please check they still work with 2.6.0.
Geeky Links
Crunchyroll is now running the anime show New Game!, all about a game dev studio. It's wonderful :)
Shmuplations has a wonderful interview with Satoru Iwata, written in 1999 when he was a developer at HAL.
WallabyJS is a really nice looking test runner for JS scripts, and works from inside Atom or Visual Studio.
Phaser Releases
The current version of Phaser is 2.6.0 released on July 8th 2016.
Phaser 2.6.1 is in development in the GitHub dev branch.
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