Welcome to Issue 80 of Phaser World
Here we are, our second issue this week! Issue 79 was published on Monday, but Friday is our usual day, so you get yet another stonking issue just so we can get back on track. There are some fun little games and tutorials, and even two releases of Phaser CE sneaked out between issue 79 and this one! Oh and check out the trippy Phaser 3 examples I had fun making, in the Dev Progress section.
Today is also my son's birthday. He's 11, which is a really weird sensation because I can remember when I was 11 quite clearly! and much like him, games were all I really cared about. Admittedly I didn't get a game quite as stunning as Zelda: Breath of the Wild for my 11th (I got this sigh), but I appreciated it just as much. It's amazing seeing the next generation fascinated in gaming and creating things. Happy Birthday, Tommy, it's a privilege to be your Father.
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
Can you protect your city from the Dark Army as your band of champions go up against their finest enemies?
Staff Pick
Pick your hockey team and win the championship!
Survive and build your base, defending it from rivals. Fight for glory!
Try removing adjacent sets of numbers in this mathematical puzzle game, but you can only do so if they total 15.
An experiment in crowd design, where players, devs and artists collectively design a multiplayer game.
Phaser News & Tutorials
The latest version of Phaser CE is released. Including lots of new features, updates and fixes.
Creating Isometric Worlds Tutorial
Part 1 of a new TutsPlus series on creating isometric game worlds in Phaser.
Creating Isometric Worlds Tutorial
In Part 2 of the series you learn how to add pickups, triggers and path finding.
Creating Games with Phaser Part 2
In Part 2 of this new video based tutorial course it looks at interacting with your game.
从零到一：用Phaser.js写意地开发小游戏（Chapter 1 - 认识Phaser.js）
Patreon Updates
Thank you and welcome to the following awesome people who joined the Phaser Patreon this week: James Simpson.
Patreon is a way to contribute towards the Phaser project on a monthly basis. This money is used entirely to fund development costs and is the only reason we're able to invest so much time into our work. You can also donate via PayPal.
Backers get forum badges, discounts on plugins and books, and are entitled to free monthly coding support via Slack or Skype.
Development Progress
First things first, Phaser CE 2.4.8 was released this week And then quickly followed by a 2.4.9 hotfix :) (hey, I've been there, I've done it myself!) 2.7.8 includes a bunch of new features covering Groups, the Scale Manager, the Loader, and lots of work with the Creature animation runtimes. Also a stack of bug fixes. It's great to see CE grow and mature like this. Long may it continue :)
Phaser 3 Updates
Lots of people have been asking me recently "When will Phase 3 be released?". It's a good question. I actually have a quite detailed plan now, breaking down our work over the coming months, and what is required to get us to Beta, Alpha, Release Candidate and Final. However, I don't want to share it just yet. The reason is that it's based on the assumption that we are successful with our application for funding through the Mozilla Open Source scheme (MOSS).
Of course, there are many great OSS projects out there worthy of funding, and I know the competition will be tough for what is a finite amount of money. But I had to plan our schedule thinking positively. I have no idea if Phaser has been accepted into MOSS or not. I kid you not when I say it's making me quite anxious waiting to find out. What is worse, I don't even know when they are going to decide. So right now it's a case of a small moment of panic each time a new email arrives. The reality is that if we succeed, then I can share our schedule (and I'll be over the moon!). And if we don't I'll need to start looking for more contract work against to sustain development and adjust the dates accordingly. Either way, I should be able to share it soon.
Graphics-ho!
One of our Trello cards was to investigate if it would be possible to allow devs to inject transform operations into the command stack of a Graphics object. If you've had a look at previous Graphics examples you'll know they're built-up in much the same was as Canvas operations are. You can set a lineStyle, and use functions like moveTo, lineTo, drawRectangle, and so on. Internally these are added to a command queue, cached and then rendered.
The idea was to see if Graphics could also support functions like translate, scale and rotate, added into the command list. And lo and behold, Felipe took the challenge, vanished into the ether for a couple of days, and popped out the other end with a monster commit that did exactly that.
Sweetness and lightning, it makes such a difference as to what's possible. Here's an example (as usual, click the screen shot to run it in browser - desktop WebGL required for this one)
The Phaser text is created by nothing more than moveTo and lineTo commands. The new transform operations allow us to scale and rotate it. And the extra bells and whistles that build-up over the 60 seconds the demo runs for are all just variations of Graphics features, like line thickness, or stroke colors.
The background stars and Pacman ghosts effect is a combination of an EffectLayer using a hue shifting shader and some sprites with a little math. Nothing more complex than that.
As always you can play with the online code editor for this example and tweak it to your heart's content.
Render to Texture
Another new feature this week is the ability to render a Graphics object to a Texture. You can draw whatever you require to the Graphics, then turn it into a Texture suitable for any other texture based game object, such as the images in this demo:
Now, this is handy of course, as it means you can generate game assets at run-time. However, it also allows you to go one step further, by feeding the texture it creates into a Render Pass. Remember, a Render Pass is a way to inject a shader into the display list. Here is a Graphics object (our jaunty little star shape again) being fed into an illumination shader:
Sweet, right?! These two features alone open up a whole world of possibilities now, and I'm really excited to see them land in Phaser 3.
That's it for this issue, a bit shorter than usual, but remember you did get two issues this week! Lots of other work was completed. For example, I built the new Visibility Manager and hooked it into the Timestep and Game Loop. But you sadly can't extract much eye candy from a window focus event. Feel free to check the commit log for the gory details though.
Next time I'll explore the powerful new Tween Manager, and show you how to make the most of it. And hey, if Mozilla has responded by then, I'll either be unbearably ecstatic or weeping gently into my keyboard. Time will tell.
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. The group is for anyone who wishes to discuss what the Phaser 3 API will contain.
The Phaser 3 Developers Guide is available. Essential reading for anyone who'd like to help build Phaser 3.
Geek Links
All 3 Geek Links this week are to do with the same dev team: Butterscotch Shenanigans. I recently came across them for the first time via their Coffee with Butterscotch podcast, which quite frankly is excellent listening. I'm 6 episodes in now and loving their mixture of enthusiasm, humor, and knowledge.
The podcast took me to their website, where I found some fantastic games including Crashlands, a story-driven action RPG. And in turn that lead me to Amazon Prime where you can watch a 6-part documentary called Dev Diary, which follows the process of making Crashlands, and all the things that go on personally. Fascinating viewing.
Phaser Releases
The current version of Phaser CE is 2.7.9 released on May 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.
Missed an issue? Check out the Back Issues page.