Welcome to Issue 70 of Phaser World
It's quite something to think we're at issue 70 already! It really doesn't feel like very long ago that I started doing this newsletter, and wow have things changed since then. We're closing in on 7500 subscribers too, which is awesome. So if this is your first issue, or your 70th, welcome and I hope you enjoy the contents!
This week there are some deadly addictive games. A lovely remake of Zuma, a fixed grid version of Pipe Mania and a wonderful educational maze game too. There are plenty of new tutorials and plugins, not to mention Phaser 3 dev news.
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.
Games made with Phaser
Game of the Week
Fire the spheres to keep the chain as short as possible, in this beautiful and polished action puzzle game.
Staff Pick
A world of pipes, and you need to make sure those pipes are rotated the correct way.
A great educational game in which you must control Red Riding Hood, avoid the wolves and solve the mazes.
Help the spacewrecked astronaut survive by propelling them into the oxygen bubbles.
A top-down 2D racing game. Win races to earn money to upgrade your car.
Phaser News & Tutorials
A plugin to visually inspect and modify common game settings in real time.
A great little Sprite rotation control for easily rotating Sprites by dragging.
A simple tutorial on how to fade an object between two colors.
A plugin that allows you to have seamless translations in your game.
A tutorial on tweeting with Twitter within your Phaser games.
Patreon Updates
Thank you and welcome to the following awesome people who joined the Phaser Patron this week: Joel Dies and Michael Smietana.
It's worth mentioning that Patreon backers are entitled for free support time from me via Slack or Skype. Lots of developers have taken advantage of this since I started it. So if you're a patron (or have donated via PayPal) and you'd like to pick my brains about a Phaser specific issue, or get some help, then please do use your support time! Just email me or get me on Slack to arrange it.
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
At the start of this week I spent some time finally putting Phaser CE on to the main Phaser web site. For too long it had been absent from the downloads section, but I fixed all that, and now CE releases are as prominently featured as v2 ones were. I've also merged all the latest CE pull requests in, and will prepare a 2.7.4 release early next week. I meant to do it this week, but ran out of time, so if you've got anything you'd like included, get your PRs in!
Phaser 3 BitmapText
It may feel a bit strange to harp on about something as 'basic' as Bitmap Text, after all I've talked about it before, and you're probably wondering why on earth it's worth mentioning again. I think the reason is because it's a great example of how v2 has transitioned to v3, and it has also consumed a lot of my time this week too :)
For a while now I've wanted you to be able to create more interesting text effects easily. In v2 each character of a Bitmap Text is actually its own Sprite object, which introduces a massive amount of un-necessary overhead. In v3 we use a brand new rendering system that avoids this, but more importantly it allows us to offer you more flexibility. For example there is a new method called 'setDisplayCallback'. It lets you define a callback that is invoked when every character in the Bitmap Text is rendered. The callback is an object containing details of the character, such as the index and charCode, and position, rotation and scale values. You can modify the object in your callback and then return it. So if you adjust the x/y coordinates for example, it'll render that character at the new position.
This opens up a whole raft of new possibilities. For example take a look at this Wibble Text Labs Example. Pretty neat huh? and extremely simple to do. You can also do things selectively based on the text index, so if you take the previous wibble effect, but only run it on a few characters, you get this Selective Wibble Effect instead,
Smaller is better
The v3 API surface is significantly smaller than v2. We've got rid of a lot of cruft, moved loads of old methods into helper utility functions, rather than hanging them off the Game Object, and we've been carefully evaluating what should be kept.
To me the changes to Bitmap Text are a perfect example of how you can now do an awful lot more, but with a lot less code (both internally in Phaser, and in your code too). The aim is to make sure that the features we include and expose are game related. I.e. they'll help you make better games.
Graphics Ahoy!
The (badly looped) animated gif above is a demonstration of the new Graphics renderer that Felipe has been busy integrating into v3 this week. He had done a lot of work on it previously, but this week was all about getting that code into v3 for real. It has been a challenge, but he's made massive progress and the results speak for themselves.
The example shown above can be found here. That's a lot more Graphics shapes than Phaser 2 is capable of, believe me!
He also created this Graphics stress test, so if you fancy seeing how it runs click the following image:
Now I appreciate you're not likely to ever need that many Graphics stars in a single game scene. Yet that isn't the point of this test - the point was to push the new Graphics rendering as hard as we could, to ensure that it won't become a major bottleneck in your games. I'm honestly fed-up of telling people they should really avoid using Graphics in Phaser 2 because it hammers performance, our new system at least ensures that isn't the case. Use them, and use them as much as you like!
Felipe has some more work to finish off ensuring the Graphics renderer works with the new Camera system, but everything you can see so far is all available in the current build in our repo. All of the examples are in the Phaser 3 Examples repo, and all the source in the main Phaser repo. We are building all of this live, public, and in the open.
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.
Geek Links
Terminals are sexy is a curated list of sexy Terminal frameworks, extensions and resources for CLI lovers.
The Voxel Art Store has these fantastic 16×16 Dungeon Crawl Assets: " a collection of trichromatic tiles, objects and monsters, all 16×16 pixels in size. The theme and the orthogonal perspective are inspired by the Zelda underground dungeons, but meant to be used for turn-based roguelikes and dungeon crawlers, but with some additional effects and animations, it could be also used for games with an active movement."
Finally some music I love coding to: Infected Mushroom: Return to the Sauce - the full album is on YouTube, but you can also grab it from iTunes, etc.
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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