Welcome to Issue 64 of Phaser World
I'm pleased to say that Zenva have now released the videos for the RPG Game Dev course, and it's a cracker! They've got one final sale going on until this Sunday, after which they'll put the price back up, so if you're tempted then now's the time.
This week we've a bunch of new games as usual, but what is interesting is their variety. Zombie Days for example is a 3D zombie shooter (yes, 3D), but still handled within Phaser. Borborygmus is an interactive story book with some lovely animation, and Heroes of Java is a pinball game advertising Java job placements! I love seeing this kind of variety in your creations. Keep 'em coming :)
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.
Final Sale Week - Course is now live!
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
Can you escape from the zombies that are waiting to sink their teeth into you?
Staff Pick
The Rumble in your Tummy. A beautifully illustrated interactive children's story book.
Are you a Saw Loser? Dodge the blades for as long as you can!
Drop down the platforms carefully, avoiding the spikes and lasers in this addictive minimalist game.
A pinball game created to recruit developers - see if you can unlock the multiball.
Phaser News & Tutorials
Get the entire source code, fully commented, to the game Just Jump, ready packaged for app stores.
A new, free, and quick to set-up analytics service for your Phaser games.
Bayou Island on Steam Greenlight
Please help get this beautiful point and click adventure game on to Steam Greenlight.
IOGrid is an IO game engine / framework built using SocketCluster and Phaser.
A great look at how the interactive story book was created, and the challenges it posed.
A quick and easy way to create a web server for testing Phaser projects using golang.
Patreon Updates
Thank you so much to the following Phaser Patrons who joined us this week: Assaf Sahar, Mario Negrello, Marcel Schiering and Belén Albeza. Also thank you to Sergio Bonavida for the 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
A short update this week, even though lots of work has taken place. I'll explain why in the Phaser 3 section:
Phaser 3 Mailing List and Developers Guide
If you're interested in helping evolve the shape of Phaser 3, then please join the Phaser 3 Google Group. Discussions this week have included varying render loops. The group is for anyone who wishes to help shape what the Phaser 3 API and feature-set will contain.
The Phaser 3 Developers Guide is available. Essential reading for anyone who'd like to help build Phaser 3.
Phaser 3 Updates
Work this week has been split into two parts. We've been plugging away getting the new renderers slotted into the main v3 source (as opposed to sitting on their own, like last weeks test).
So far we've got the Blitter Batch and the Sprite Batch in place. The Blitter Batch is for rendering Blitter / Bob Game Objects. These are essentially just direct image frame transfers - no transform, no children - no effects, so they are insanely fast as a result.
The Sprite Batch is a general Sprite renderer. Even so, we've changed it significantly since the first iteration, and it will now calculate the transform matrix on the GPU, shifting a boatload of math away from the CPU. The Canvas renderer is now coming to life as well. I can't tell you how good it feels to finally have things rendering on-screen, and knowing it's doing so from the actual v3 source, and not a monkey-patched implementation we hung off the end for testing :)
What we're aiming for is to release a Beta 1 next week.
Let me be very clear here: This will be purely a test of the new renderers and State Manager. There will be lots missing. For example no mouse input, no scale manager, no physics, not even any tweens. So what's the point you ask? The reason is simple: It will be a 'minimum viable product' in the sense that you can still actually make games with it. It will include Keyboard input and all the rendering you need to actually make stuff move, and move fast. What we'll be looking at is getting it tested as widely as possible, so we can tweak and improve it (especially across mobile devices), before adding in more features.
Once we're happy we've got a rock solid sprite renderer and state system in place we'll drop a Beta 2 with another feature added (perhaps Bitmap Text, or Graphics) and continue the process. What I'd very much like to do is drop a new Beta once a week until all the key features are in, and we can head towards a Release Candidate. If that takes 20 beta versions, then so be it. Phaser 3 has taken long enough, I'm not going to rush to meet some arbitrary date.
So please keep reading, join the google group if you like, and look out because we're getting closer than ever before :)
Geek Links
Pixeljams Volume 2 is a 10-track album available on Bandcamp, that features some great music (the kind I really like to code to). The video for Doomed Vessel is great too.
Opera Neon - The future of web browsers? It certainly has a quite nice UI. You can download it and test it, or just watch the video to get an idea.
Oh this is wonderful :) ArnoldC is a programming language based on the one liners of Arnold Schwarzenegger! I wish I could end all my projects with "You have been terminated"!
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 support@phaser.io or tweet us.
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