Hi all!

Most of you probably already know (if you follow on twitter, or read Phaser World) that I released Phaser 3.16 yesterday. Issue 139 of Phaser World has a more detailed write-up about what's new and what you should look out for when upgrading. Also, I saw this nice video summary about the release on Game From Scratch today, which was heartening. He's offering to create a detailed tutorial series for Phaser 3 if enough of you comment to say you'd like that, so please do :)

February Code Bundle

Now that 3.16 is out, I can dedicate time to finishing this bundle off. Please look out for a Patreon post this week with a new download in it. Some of the examples need updating for 3.16, but I think you're going to like the combination of things in there.

Free Support Day

On February 7th, between 9am GMT and 5pm GMT, I will be available on both Slack and Discord. For the duration of the day you are free to quiz me on any aspect of Phaser 3. You can use this as a 'free support' session, including looking at your code, providing advice, discussing new 3.16 features or just shooting-the-breeze. Support offered during the day does not count against your monthly support time (if your tier has any)

What's next

My priority right now is to keep an eye on the GitHub issues, as well as completing the Phaser Spine Plugin. I'm going to try and keep 'new features' out of the API and instead focus on fixes and updates for the next release. The documentation iceberg is being chipped away at too.

Beyond 3.17 the next big task is to sort out the Containers internally. It's time to put the original transform system I created over a year ago now back in place and make it a first class citizen everywhere. This means all Game Objects having a proper transform and having the ability to have their own children, up to any depth. This is quite a deep change but needs to be done. It still frustrates me that Phaser 3 (or Lazer) had this in for ages but it was removed mid-way through development because we wanted to speed the renderer up. In hindsight, flexibility is clearly more important to most of you than blasting around hundreds of thousands of sprites.

I'm going to work on the transform updates in a separate branch, so that I can still manage issues and fixes alongside it. The problem with 3.16 was that although I fixed a huge number of things, it took months for them to surface because I couldn't release with half-finished systems in there. Everything had to come together at the same time. It'd be nice to try and avoid this happening again, so we'll see how branching it goes. It may turn out that, actually, it just makes it even harder to apply the changes I need. Or, it may work fine. Time will tell!

Alongside the transform work I'm also going to start working on a new Phaser 3 book and the new web site. More details about both of these in the coming months :)

As always, thank you for being a patron and backing Phaser. I hope you feel that your investment in the project is being rewarded via the updates and continued progress being made. If there's anything you'd like to discuss feel free to comment here, or drop me a line privately.