Welcome to Issue 51 of Phaser World
There's a nice mixture of content this week. We've the games of course, and some of them are so fun! (Jetpack Spikes had me literally swearing at my screen), but we've got a nice mix of tutorials too.
There's also a proper Phaser book published by CRC Press. I've not read it yet (I ordered a copy from Amazon today!) but it sounds good, and anything that helps promote learning Phaser is a good thing :)
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.
Games made with Phaser
Game of the Week
A massively multiplayer game of car wars! Steal coins, use shields and destroy the other players.
You are one day old. You have no memory of the past. You have no foresight of the future.
In this small but fiendishly addictive game you must simply avoid the spikes!
It's all about shooting bad guys! Pick a robot, and unleash destruction across 9 levels.
Take on the role of Lorenzo the bull in this great little pixel art game.
Phaser News & Tutorials
HTML5 Game Development with Phaser
Learn all about Phaser in this new 280 page book from CRC Press.
How to create a game like Pokemon Go.
In the second part of this series you create a Trainer and different species of Pokemon.
A tutorial on creating a SameGame Engine in Phaser.
Create a coin fountain effect with Arcade Physics.
Mobile Game Development Course
12 free sample videos from the Complete Mobile Game Development Course.
Patreon Updates
Thank you so much to the following new Phaser Patreons who joined us this week: Mike Arlington, Christopher Scott (Feudal Wars), Odysseus Chiu and eli penner. Also thank you to Daniel Egger for upgrading his pledge.
Patreon is a way to donate money towards the Phaser project on a monthly basis (you can also make one-off donations). Donations start at $1 and receive discounts, forum badges, private technical support from me, and my eternal gratitude, in return :)
Development Progress
It's been another insane week of Phaser 3 development. If you're subscribed to the GitHub watch list, then I apologise for the huge volume of commit emails you'll have been receiving lately :)
There is some confusion over what Phaser 3 is. I take the blame for that, because I confused matters by talking about Lazer so much, and saying it would be Phaser 3. So it's time to set the record straight:
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Phaser 3 is written in ES5, not ES6.
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It uses the same renderer as Phaser 2, but with huge improvements
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It removes the PIXI namespace
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There are brand new Game Objects and Components
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There is a new internal structure
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It deprecates a bunch of old Phaser 2 ways of doing things
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It is NOT API compatible with Phaser 2
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There will be a migration guide published on release
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It is in heavy active development right now, changing every day
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It will be maintained after release
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There is no ETA yet, but I'm confident it'll be this year
Fundamentally the way you do things in Phaser 3 is very similar to Phaser 2. In lots of cases it's identical, but you absolutely will not be able to just run your Phaser 2 code directly and expect it to work, because it's highly likely it won't. Migration will be needed. Lots of new Examples are being created to help ease the transition.
New Components
This week I added a bunch of new Components. The first was the Transform component. This manages all transform updates for a Game Object, such as changing position, scale or rotation. It also propagates those down to any children it may have. It uses aggressive caching and a Dirty state manager, meaning if nothing has changed in the display list, then no transform updates take place. If a leaf node in the display list is dirty, then only that node (and its direct children) are updated, the rest of the list is kept clean. This has reduced processing overhead on scenes tremendously. I'll share some stats and timeline charts with you soon to show this.
Transform properties, such as Scale, are no longer Point objects. This reduced the sheer number of objects being created for every Game Object, but more importantly we don't need to worry about Observable Points, and you can now do things like single tweens that adjust the position, scale and rotation of a Sprite all at once, in one single go. It's a lot cleaner, and I'm looking forward to sharing it with you.
Another feature of the new Transform class is that it's not tied to the Game Object hierarchy. Every Game Object has a Transform component, and a Game Object can also have a parent - but the two are not linked. This means you can group similar Game Objects together in a single Container or pool, but that when it comes to rendering them they can have their own entirely separate transform ancestry. While for most use-cases you will want them combined, they don't have to be, and that's the key difference.
Colors Ahoy
Another new Component is the Color component. This manages display related properties for a Game Object, such as the blend mode, alpha, tinting and a new feature: the ability to set a background color behind a Sprite. As with Transforms, Color updates are aggressively cached, and also use the Dirty state manager. You're now able to set a background color that renders behind the Sprite, and you can control each color channel directly - allowing you to easily tween the values.
Dirty Renderer
Because of the way that the Components work, it's possible to set the renderer into a new state whereby it only updates the scene if something on the display list is dirty. For example you could render 1000 sprites, but if none of them move for a while, then it doesn't need to re-render the scene. It can just skip the clear and draw phase entirely. It's not just motion either, even changing alpha is handled. So a Game Object that is fading in and out will still cause a render refresh, but a static scene won't.
In tests this has made a huge improvement. You tend to notice it most on mobile, where because it doesn't have to redraw the frame 60 times a second, then the CPU / GPU does a lot less work, and the devices don't get so hot! Obviously for some games this will be useless, but I feel there are many potential use-cases for it, especially in the casual space, and anything that saves battery life, and improves performance, has to be a win.
There's more I want to write about, but you'll have to come back next week for it :) Development is really exciting right now. I'm loving the shape this is all taking, and I thank you to everyone on Patreon who is making this possible by supporting Phaser.
Geeky Links
Polybius is a new PlayStation VR game coming soon from Llamasoft. And it looks utterly insane! I can't imagine what it's going to feel like playing this, but I can't wait to find out either :)
How to be a Compiler is a great article by Mariko Kosaka. It talks about how you (yes, you) can act like a compiler, in order to learn how they work. Then it shows you how to write one in JavaScript.
Finally this week is GitHub Audio. It's plays dynamically generated audio based on activities on GitHub. For example pull requests, or opening issues. Each has a different sound, and depending on the quantity it can create some soothing and interesting music!
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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