Welcome to Issue 72 of Phaser World
And we're back with a brand new issue of Phaser World. Fancy driving down some zombies? Undead Drive provides exactly that, and it's superb fun! There are also some neat puzzle games and some brilliant tutorials and plugins this issue, as well as some exciting Phaser 3 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.
Advanced Phaser Course Updated
This great video course on advanced Phaser development has been updated with a new multiplayer lecture.
Games made with Phaser
Game of the Week
It's zombie killing time in this awesome and relentless drive 'em up!
Staff Pick
Drag, drop, flip and rotate the pieces so that they fill the grid in this charming puzzle game.
Avoid the angry YouTubers in this fun one-button mini game for the Gamee platform.
Fling the creature into the bucket to fill it with paint, but don't miss, and avoid the spikes too!
Control a submarine lost in a deep-sea maze, using just the sonar to see what's around.
Phaser News & Tutorials
Easily add sloped tile support to your games with the updated version of this essential plugin.
Socket.io Multiplayer Tutorial
How to make a multiplayer online game with Phaser, Socket.io and Node.js.
A plugin that easily allows you to out the contents of the Phaser Cache to the browser console.
The Drag and Match engine continues to be updated, this time with tweens smoothing things out.
Visually display details about any object in your game, with multiple display configuration options.
Patreon Updates
Thank you and welcome to the following awesome people who joined the Phaser Patron this week: Casey, microcipcip and Anton Zakitny and thank you to Odysseus Chiu for increasing their pledge.
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
Last week I mentioned that we were going to work on some games this week, to see what gaps in the current API it would highlight. As it turned out, it highlighted so many that neither of us finished a game at all, which is both frustrating and extremely useful in equal measure.
Felipe was trying to get a 'trail effect' coming out the back of an asteroids style space ship. It was using the triangle feature of the Graphics class. Under this use it flagged up a bug whereby the end points of the triangles would incorrectly join to the first due to an error in the line width handling, causing an interesting graphical mess on-screen. So time was spent fixing this. He then wanted to add in the ability for trail colors, which also took time, along with other small fixes as the week progressed. So, no game, but a pretty sweet fruit ninja style slashing effect at least:
On my side I started on a little game, wanted to add some text to it, but we only had BitmapText finished and I wanted to use Text instead. So I spent time converting the Text game object over and getting it rendering. But of course it's not quite as simple as just copying code over. And I ended up spending a good amount of time planning out how the new Text Game Objects would work. Splitting off the style related functions (like setting up a shadow, or changing the line alignment) into their own new TextStyle class, and optimising the canvas text measuring routines.
I'm very pleased with the end result. It's fast, flexible and so much more cleaner than in v2. Yet the time it took meant I ran out of time to make my game as well. We do however now have a powerful static Text class and I created a number of examples to go with it too. Definitely more useful, but a little deflating.
Crunch Time
I'm very pleased to say that this week I completed the last of my client projects for the year, and I've now booked in Phaser 3 development to be my sole focus for the next 3 months. While Felipe has always been dedicated to v3 work (the money from our awesome patrons covering that), I had to maintain contract work as well, often focusing on project work during the day, and cramming in as much Phaser as I could manage in the evenings, and while waiting for feedback and QA reports.
I know this isn't an unusual situation, it's something a lot of you with your own open source projects have to do too. But now is the time to buckle down and dedicate myself 100% to it. I've saved enough income to ensure I can manage this without worrying, and honestly I'm really excited to get started :)
I'm aware that the word 'crunch' has a lot of negative connotations in the dev world, but let's be clear here: it doesn't mean doing a death march, or running myself into the ground. It just means being absolutely dedicated to getting v3 released, and not having to swap back to other projects as we go.
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
Everything is a remarkable looking 'game', and I use the term loosely, because even Sony describe it as an interactive experience. Even so, regardless how you play, or experience it, I simply cannot wait. It looks brilliant, and the video captivated me from start to finish.
The Retro Gaming Times is an English language magazine for retro fans, and this issue contains some neat articles including a great C64 round-up.
Finally this week, Google have gone and created a brand new JPEG encoder that promises 35% more compression, while still using the same decoding functions built into all common browsers already. Pretty smart stuff!
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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