Welcome to Issue 48 of Phaser World
Where has the summer gone?! It's quite frightening to think how close we are to October already, and strangely enough the client requests for Christmas themed games are starting to arrive thick and fast.
Felipe and I have been working really hard on Phaser 3 as well, and all of that work has been poured into the Beta 1 which you can read about this issue. There are some awesome features, and it's quite exciting to see how it's evolved the past few months.
You lot have been busy too! Video based tutorials, incredible point-and-click adventure games, and even a brand new book. It's another good week, even if it was an especially hectic one :)
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.
New Phaser Book
Create a Procedural Endless Runner Book
This brand new 177 page book covers build a flexible procedural runner game, with full source code.
Patreon Updates
Thank you so much to the following new Phaser Patreons who joined us this week: Christopher Keele and Zac Higgins.
Patreon is a way for you to donate money towards the Phaser project, on a monthly basis, starting from just $1, and receive discounts, forum badges, private technical support from me, and my eternal gratitude, in return :)
Games made with Phaser
Game of the Week
A thrilling old-school style point and click adventure game, set on the mysterious Bayou Island.
Staff Pick
Discover new landmarks and funky facts, as you run, jump, roll and fly your way around the world!
Staff Pick
Chain the letters together, to form words and clear blocks, in this engaging casual puzzle game.
A fast paced match-3 game, focusing on pure matching fun.
You are the chosen one to save the village, and restore the energy shield before time runs out.
Phaser News & Tutorials
Phaser Game Design Part 4
Phaser Game Design Part 5
Phaser Game Design Part 6
Phaser Game Design Part 7
Phaser Game Design Part 8
Development Progress
Phaser 3 Beta 1 is now available for download
You can find it in the GitHub Dev Branch. There is a pre-built file in the build folder, or you can pull the whole source and build it yourself as needed.
If you take a quick look at the Change Log you'll see what's new, but it's pretty fundamental stuff.
The headliner has to be multi-texture batch support. We introduced this into an earlier beta of Phaser, where loads of you tested it and gave your feedback. This found some nice bugs, and helped us refine how it works, and Phaser 3 will be the first release with it fully enabled.
I've prepared a gist for you here, which shows how to use it. You'll see it's a 2 part set-up now. You can use the new Render Type 'Phaser.WEBGL_MULTI' in the constructor, or you can use the property 'multiTexture: true' in a Game Configuration Object. Doing either of these will swap out the old shaders for the new ones we wrote, allowing the 'setTexturePriority' call to work.
We also opened up the property 'BaseTexture.textureIndex', which allows you to have really fine-grained control over what is batched, and when.
Compressed Textures
In Phaser 3 you'll also find complete support for compressed texture formats. I discussed the benefits of these in Issue 41 of the newsletter, so please read that issue to refresh yourself.
Supported texture compression formats are: PVRTC, S3TC and ETC1.
Supported file formats are: PVR, DDS, KTX and PKM.
The formats that support all 3 compression algorithms are PVR and KTX.
PKM only supports ETC1, and DDS only supports S3TC.
Compressed textures are supported automatically by our updated WebGL renderer. All you have to do is tweak your preload code a bit. Here is a gist showing how to do it.
Rotated Atlas Frame Support
Also new in Phaser 3 is supported for rotated texture atlas frames. Atlas packers such as Texture Packer support the option to rotate the frames, to achieve better packing results. Phaser will now automatically parse this information when the atlas is loaded, and apply it during the rendering stages for both Canvas and WebGL. It's great to finally have this one in here :)
There will be an official release candidate of Phaser 3 early next week, and the final version by the end of September. Rather than go 'all out', we made the important changes that we needed to, and will build on those incrementally over the coming months.
Geeky Links
If it's bright and colourful and makes you want to grin, chances are Jimp is behind it. Armor Games talk to the talented artist about his work and the future.
It's not often I feature other games here, but Horizon Chase is just a thing of beauty! An old-school feeling racer, with purely modern graphics.
Our final link this week is How to Delay your Indie Game. A brutally honest and fascinating insight in to what can happen when building a game.
Phaser Releases
The current version of Phaser is 2.6.2 released on August 26th 2016.
Phaser 3.0.0 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.
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