Welcome to Issue 63 of Phaser World
While the gaming world goes into overdrive about the Nintendo Switch (and yes, it does look sweet!) we've got games about jelly, plugins to help make your text float, a brand new release of Phaser CE, the world's largest arcade cabinet, and hundreds of thousands of sprites zipping around the screen. Yup, it's another action packed newsletter :)
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.
Ever wanted to create games with vast worlds to explore and dungeons filled with monsters and treasure? Check out this new Zenva course.
Games made with Phaser
Game of the Week
A super-cute match 3 game. Pop the jellies, across many challenging levels, with lovely graphics and power-ups galore.
Staff Pick
Click on flags to initiate attack, answer trivia questions and beat your opponents.
A massively multiplayer version of the classic mine sweeping game.
An exciting action-packed RPG. Pick a character and blast your way through the randomly generated dungeons.
Another great 'one button' game - tap to change the direction of the plane, and collect the money - if you can.
Phaser News & Tutorials
Phaser powers the Doritos Mix Arcade, projected on a 45-foot LED screen, part of the world's largest arcade cabinet.
A new floating text effect UI component with lots of configuration options.
Filmed at JS Kongress last November, Martin Splitt walks you through building a game with Phaser.
Part 1 of a new tutorial series on making an RPG Game.
TileSprite Optimization Tutorial
Emanuele shares his performance results from changing the use of TileSprites in his game.
Patreon Updates
Thank you so much to the following Phaser Patron who joined us this week: Marshall Smith and also to Leonardo Silveira for his donation.
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
Hey everyone! Another busy week. The Phaser repo zoomed past 14,000 GitHub stars. Very cool :) And there have been lots of updates, so let's get on with it.
Phaser CE 2.7.3 + Updates
I published the 2.7.3 release of Phaser CE this week, is available on npm. Phaser CE has also moved to its own GitHub repository: https://github.com/photonstorm/phaser-ce
I've updated all of the links from the main Phaser repo, and tagged the 2.7.3 release, so you can now get it from the 'releases' page as well as npm. I've also submitted Phaser CE to the jsDelivr CDN and CDNJS. I'm happy to say that jsDelivr has merged it already, so it's now available on there, but it's still pending on CDNJS.
I also merged in some new Pull Requests, and started adding CE to the main Phaser web site. This will help continue to drive adoption of it.
Phaser 3 Mailing List and Developers Guide
A re-cap from last week, but there is a new Phaser 3 Developers Guide available. This is for anyone who'd like to help build Phaser 3.
There is also a Phaser 3 Google Group which I've been making good use of. Discussions this week have included how to handle 2D layering and new modern TypeScript defs. If you'd like to join the group then please do so. It is for anyone who wishes to help shape what the Phaser 3 API and feature-set will contain.
Phaser 3 Updates
This week I have added in a new Dynamic Sound FX generator to Phaser 3. If you've heard of sfxr before, then you'll be familiar with how it works. You pick an oscillator type, such as sine or sawtooth, set some parameters for it to work from, including echo, reverb and dissonance, give it some durations, and voila: instant 8-bit style sound FX, generated on the fly! It's a Web Audio only feature of course, but it's still nice to have in there, and is pretty compact too.
I also made a start on the Canvas Renderer, and will hopefully finish off implementation of that next week. Alongside this, Felipe has been working on the WebGL Renderer:
WebGL 2D Rendering
One of the ideas of this new renderer is avoiding unnecessary layers of abstraction. If we could only have a single layer between the user and WebGL API it’d be the best for us and developers. This also took me to think what are the most atomic features we should have on a renderer for a 2D engine like Phaser.
The most basic features are simply draw an image at (X, Y). With that you cover a great percentage of most Phaser games out there. I took on to make the most efficient “draw image” I could make with just pure WebGL, no abstractions or layers of any kind.
I was able to create this little demo that could render between 150k and 220k sprites at 60 FPS (tested across a few different machines). For me that was a great building bed for more features.
The idea now is to build on top of the most basic features, this way we know that in the core what we do will always run great. We can also build custom solutions for most common cases. For example developers generally mix primitive graphics with sprites, we could build a tailored made solution for that and make it as efficient as we can.
Go ahead and try the demo and see how it performs for you (note: demo is locked to 200k sprites). Next week we'll be merging this into the Phaser 3 code base, so we can get some real tests going with sprites and atlas frames.
Geek Links
Vintage Game Shop is a game about using your knowledge of retro and classic video games to make a profit! Everyday, people will come to your shop to sell you vintage games, consoles and memorabilia. Your goal is to buy them as cheaply as possible, so you can earn some money when you resell them to another client. As you earn more money, you will be able to buy more rare and expensive items until you can complete your collection!
8-bit Music Theory is a great set of videos that takes a classic game, then breaks down the music within it. Games covered so far include Earthbound's Snowman theme, and of course Zelda's Overworld piece.
GDR is a truly epic list of Game Development Resources. Spritesheet Tools, Icons, text generators, and on, and on, and on!
Phaser Releases
The current version of Phaser CE is 2.7.3 released on January 9th 2017.
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 [email protected] or tweet us.
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