Welcome to Issue 62 of Phaser World
You're probably fed-up of people saying it, but ... Happy New Year! Yes, this is actually the first issue of 2017, as the previous one snuck in on the tailcoats of 2016. I trust you're all back and deep in some game dev project or other now :)
This issue we've some great games, a raft of new tutorials, a brand new RPG Game Dev Course from Zenva, and a whole stack of Phaser 3 updates, including a new devs guide I wrote.
Also many thanks to those who joined us on Patreon recently. We always take a hit in the New Year as people drop-off, or cards are declined, so it's great to see those numbers go upwards again!
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 or Discord channels.
Phaser in 2016 and beyond
A look back at the news and numbers of Phaser in 2016, and what the New Year holds.
Games made with Phaser
Game of the Week
A celebration of the 30 year old classic. Power-up your tractor beam, warm your trigger finger, and descend in to the planet cores.
Staff Pick
Connect the Power Gear with the Star Gear within 8 turns in this highly polished puzzle game.
Score 5 goals against your opponent in this multiplayer ball game.
Choose between snowboarding and skiing, and keep riding for as long as possible.
Can you collect and serve the ramen without getting caught?
Phaser News & Tutorials
Ever wanted to create games with vast worlds to explore and dungeons filled with monsters and treasure? Check out this new Zenva course.
Easily create a customizable health bar for your games.
The second part of the tutorial series adds in deadly obstacles.
The third part of the tutorial series adds particle explosions.
The fourth part of the tutorial series adds colors and backgrounds to the game.
Patreon Updates
Thank you so much to the following Phaser Patreons who joined us this week: Starfall Education Foundation, Oyed, ErrorNull, Paul Mason and Matt DeWolfe. Thank you to Mathew and Jesse Crockett for increasing their pledges, and those who sent donations but wished to remain anonymous.
Patreon is a way to donate money towards the Phaser project on a monthly basis. This money is used entirely to fund development costs. You can also make one-off donations via PayPal. Donations receive discounts, forum badges, private technical support, and the eternal gratitude of the Phaser team :)
Development Progress
Welcome back everyone! After a short, but needed, break, we're back at work and progressing Phaser 3 on its merry way.
I've split my time between working on the Geometry functions, adding in Hermite curve support, and new intersection capabilities, and also working on the Phaser 3 roadmap. I'm hoping to release it next week, but there's still more to finalise first.
Phaser 3 Developers Guide
This week I also wrote a comprehensive Phaser 3 Developers Guide.
This guide covers, in detail, how to set-up Phaser 3 locally so you can build it and test it. There's also a section in the guide on using the Phaser 3 Examples Runner, how to create your own examples, and an overview of the core game loop and internal flow of Phaser 3.
Please understand that this is meant for those who wish to contribute towards Phaser 3 development. It is not a guide on how to use Phaser 3 itself. Also it's a living, breathing document, which I fully intend to edit to over time (and which you're encouraged to edit as well!)
Phaser 3 Mailing List
Last year I created a Phaser 3 Google Group to discuss development. It has sad idle for many months, as development of Lazer was frozen, but I feel now is the time to make use of it once again.
If you'd like to join the group then please do so. This mailing list is for people who wish to help shape what the Phaser 3 API and feature-set will contain, and those who want to get involved in development of it (even if by just contributing ideas).
I will start using it a lot myself, as I find the immediate feedback it offers is much more useful, than remembering to check a forum, or wait a week to write the next newsletter. So if you'd like to get involved, please do!
Bitmap Fonts
Felipe has been working on adding a new Bitmap Font renderer into v3, here is what he has to say about it so far:
What’s good about bitmap fonts is that they are really easy to render and they are great if you want to have text with effects pre applied to them. Another nice benefit of it is that it’s easier to implement interesting effects to the text, for example adding color cycling or wiggle effects to words. That is the main idea behind the implementation for Phaser.
For now I’ve only worked on the “low level” implementation of the bitmap font rendering and so far we support the same features that Phaser’s BitmapText does. This features are multi-line support, text vertical and horizontal alignment, text color tinting, changing font size dynamically and be able to get the dimension of the rendered text.
So far the implementation looks very much like the Canvas API, with functions like drawText and getTextDimension. The idea is to build on top of that the features we want to add like word coloring and character effects, but leave the raw API commands there for you to build-upon too.
Geeky Links
The image above is from this beautiful ShaderToy experiment: Displacement with Dispertion.
Isaac Asimov: How to Never Run Out of Ideas Again - If there’s one word to describe Isaac Asimov, it’s “prolific”. To match the number of novels, letters, essays and other scribblings Asimov produced in his lifetime, you would have to write a full-length novel every two weeks for 25 years. This is how he never ran out of ideas.
Finally I bring you these lovely photos of Sigourney Weaver and the cat from Alien :)
Phaser Releases
The current version of Phaser CE is 2.7.2 released on December 6th 2016.
Phaser 3.0.0 is in active development in the GitHub v3 folder.
Please help support Phaser development
Have some news you'd like published? Email support@phaser.io or tweet us.
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