Welcome to Issue 83 of Phaser World
Apologies for this issue being a couple of days late. I was feeling terrible at the end of last week and had to take Friday (newsletter day) off to recover.
On the plus side, we've some great games, a stonking new release of Phaser CE, lots of tutorials and a pretty huge update in the Development Report! And 100% germ-free too :) Oh, and we hit 1000 people in the Phaser Slack channel, how cool is that?!
So, 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.
Complete Game Programming Pack
Access to 14 online courses covering Phaser, Unity and 3D modeling, currently at a huge discount.
Games made with Phaser
Game of the Week
Fire the matching colored bubbles from the cannon to clear the level in this attractive bubble shooting game.
Staff Pick
Ever wanted to play the part of a tsunami? Grab your space bar and give it a go.
Become a jumping, fire breathing dragon in The Adventures of Tosha.
Help your bugs to avoid death and embrace the party!
Slash the money in this Fruit Ninja inspired coin-em-up.
Phaser News & Tutorials
A brand new release of Phaser CE is out. With new features, fixes and updates across the framework.
A new tutorial series on creating an endless climber action game using Arcade Physics.
A procedural dungeon generator plugin for Phaser, with easy visual and room configuration settings.
A self-contained, self-updating progress bar that can be attached to a Sprite or created statically.
Cash Ninja Developer Interview
An interview with the developer of Cash Ninja and the work involved porting it to Facebook.
Animal Farm Game Developer Interview
An interview with the developer of Animal Farm Game, his first game ever.
Patreon Updates
Sadly there were no new Phaser Patreon or donations made this week.
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
It's another week, so surely there must be a new Phaser CE release? Yup! Here it is: Phaser CE v2.8.0. It's a great update with fixes for Arcade Physics Circular bodies, particle emitter updates and all kinds of other nice things. More details in the README as always.
Phaser 3 Updates
This week I didn't code a single line of Phaser 3. Not the best way to start a Phaser 3 Update I expect you're thinking? The reason is that I spent the week and several sleepless nights putting together the Phaser 3 Labs site. I definitely pushed myself too hard (which alas almost certainly contributed towards me being ill on Friday) but I was determined to get it all finished and uploaded.
If you support Phaser on Patreon you'll already have received an email about this, but the Phaser 3 Labs is a new section of the Phaser website. I've been working on the content for a while now and it finally all came together. Here is what you'll find there:
Phaser 3 Dev Logs
The Dev Logs are the weekly reports we publish in this newsletter. For a long time now I've wanted to archive it on the website, worried that there is a stack of useful information and history buried away in our back issues and available nowhere else. Getting this content out of the newsletter and onto the website was harder work than you'd think.
In the end, I coded a script that took the horrendous HTML that email newsletters are known for and parsed it into a DOMDocument and then extracted the parts out of it that I needed into MarkDown. It took a while to perfect but I'm happy with the results and it means you can now easily go back through the past 9 months worth of contents.
As a happy side-effect, I also overhauled the Newsletter Back Issues pages, which now show a screen shot, a contents list and option to download the PDF too.
Phaser 3 API Overview
I've been chipping away at this for a while and finally pulled it all together. It's basically a complete overview of all Phaser 3 systems and components, broken down by section. You can see the namespace in which it sits, a progress chart, a link to the source on GitHub and read about the functions it does (or will) contain and even see example source code.
Every section so far is covered and this part of the site will continue to grow and change as the week's progress. You should be able to get a solid understanding of how the API is structured and match up headings in our schedule with the API contents to see what it is we're working on.
Technical Schedule
This took a lot of late nights, planning and discussion to produce. It's our technical schedule for the next 6 months, including beta, alpha and release candidate points and beyond, right up to Phaser 3.1. Naturally, it will evolve over time - hopefully, we can claw back time in some areas, and we may loose it in others, but I feel that based on the past 6 months it's an accurate reflection of what's coming and when.
FAQ, History, Contributors Guide
There's more content to be found too. After getting asked the same thing over and over we collected the most common questions together in an FAQ.
I took the History of Phaser 3 article I wrote, updated it and corrected some parts and added that. There is also an upgraded Contributors Guide if you want to get started building Phaser 3 today. There's a lot to be found on the site and a lot more to come too.
I'm looking forward to getting back into actual Phaser code again but you can't ignore the fact that the website and newsletter are an important part of Phaser too - and it doesn't write itself! It takes me at least 1 full day a week to collect together the news articles, write them, take screenshots, post them, create the newsletter and publish everything. Every single week. This is important work to do because Phaser is more than just me or the source code, it's also about the community - what you ladies and gents are all doing is just as important as what we're doing here. And to be honest it's what keeps me going a lot of the time.
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
A fascinating crash course on Amiga assembly programming.
The Chrome Dev Tools has had a massive update with some sweet new features. The 'Continue to Here' gesture alone is worth reading about, such a time saver!
Bandai Namco and Drecom invest $2.1 million in new HTML5 mobile game studio BXD.
Phaser Releases
The current version of Phaser CE is 2.8.0 released on May 30th 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.