Discover
Learn
Get
Create
Community
Login
Navigation

Dev Logs

Dev Logs

Phaser 3.60 Released on our 10th Anniversary

Published on 13th April 2023

I'm very happy to announce that Phaser v3.60 is finally out and is available for immediate use.

It has been published to GitHub and npm and is now the main release version for both.

https://github.com/photonstorm/phaser/releases/tag/v3.60.0

and on npm

https://www.npmjs.com/package/phaser/v/3.60.0

Those of you familiar with Phaser know that I keep comprehensive Change Logs, and v3.60 is no different. However, this time, rather than dump a monstrous document with thousands of entries on you, I spent a good amount of time splitting it all into logically grouped sections which is much easier to navigate.

As a result, you can find the index of the 3.60 Change Log here.

Below is the Change Log index. Click any section to jump to that part of the Change Log on GitHub:

New Features

These are the headliner features in this release:

System and Plugins

Pick any of the following sections to see the breaking changes, new features, updates, and bug fixes for that area of the API.

Game Object Updates

Finally, here are the updates related to Game Objects:

New Examples Site Update

I've also updated the Labs site, which is now the best way to browse all of the Phaser examples.

By default, when you visit the site, you will only see the 3.60 examples, and it will use the 3.60 version to run them.

https://labs.phaser.io

There are over 2000 examples on here now! And they have all been updated for v3.60, and all recoded in ES6, too. That was quite an undertaking, let me tell you :)

If you would like to access the 3.55 examples, you can do so at:

https://labs.phaser.io/3.55/

The Phaser documentation has also been updated for 3.60. You'll find that at

https://newdocs.phaser.io

There are definitely still some things to fix here and there, outdated links and such, but I'll get around to that in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, I'm very happy that Phaser 3.60 was released on time and with all the features I wanted it to have (and then some!).

A Decade of Phaser - It's our 10th Birthday!

I still can't quite believe it has been a whole decade since I released the very first version of Phaser 0.5 all the way back on April 12th, 2013!

I had been working on it for a while before that point, but only privately, using it in my commercial client work. With v0.5, I was happy with the feature set, had finished off doing the docs and examples, and figured I would unleash it to the wider world. I mean, what's the worst that could happen, right? :)

As it turns out, it quite literally changed my life.

It felt like the perfect marriage of everything I had been building up to by that point in my life. I'll be 48 this year, and my passion for technology, especially in gaming the web, has never wavered even once. I still fondly remember my first year at University and someone showing me the Lynx web browser, running on the mainframe terminals we had access to:

I was amazed, and I dived into this new technology and, indeed, this new "cyber" culture headfirst.

In my second year at University, the NCSA Mosaic Browser gained a stunning new feature: the ability to display an image :) You have no idea how revolutionary this felt! After leaving University, I went to work for CompuServe, which had just opened in the UK, and had access to the internet from work, day in and day out. I carried on learning how to build websites and embraced JavaScript, Perl, PHP, and other server-side technologies.

I left CompuServe and worked for a company that had opened its own Internet Service Provider. Thrown head-first into router, switch, and network management, it was a real eye-opener. I also worked with the development team there on websites for clients. Things were changing rapidly. Internet Explorer gave us the ability to change the background color of a table cell, and I remember being amazed at the time and loving it! For all the grief IE got over the years, it was truly innovative in the early days.

During this time, I was still an avid gamer. I always had been, cutting my teeth on the 8-bits, then moving to the Atari ST and Falcon. You can see my Falcon on my office desk in the photo above. Still going strong!

I loved making games, drawing graphics, and immersing myself in the 16-bit culture. This never changed, even though the technology was improving in leaps and bounds.

Some years later, I found myself working for The Game Creators (they were called DarkBASIC Software back then). The team there had been responsible for the production of the STOS and AMOS game-creation packages for Europress, both of which I loved in my 16-bit days. They were now moving to the PC and had released DarkBASIC. It offered amazing and easy access to Direct X via a BASIC syntax. You could literally 'create cube', and a 3D cube would appear on-screen.

I loved it and loved working for them, too. I was chiefly responsible for their websites, so was actively keeping my love of the web alive via this and merging it with my game development passion. The ease with which you could use it was a heavy influence on me, and I feel can be felt in the way Phaser was structured.

Leaving The Game Creators, I moved on to Aardman Digital. They were a new department within Aardman Animations, the UK film and production company responsible for the likes of Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep.

I got to work with an amazing team of highly talented and creative people. We made some wonderful games (now using Flash), and I really got to see what working on much bigger titles was like.

It was an exciting time. Creating games at work and on my own at home. The web was changing yet again, and it was during this time the first rumblings of the Canvas tag started to emerge. As much as I loved Flash, its cost was a real barrier to lots, and even worse, mobile phones were now becoming more and more dominant, and it didn't work there at all. Perhaps this little canvas tag was the solution? I thought so, anyway.

So I bet the farm on it. Quite literally.

With a young family, mortgage responsibilities, and all the things that entail, I left my Technical Director role and a great team behind. I set up my own company and launched into HTML5 with more aplomb than I had ever dived into anything before. Because now the success and welfare of my whole family relied upon it.

The gamble paid off. We had plenty of work and were positioned in the right place and at the right time. During all of this, Phaser was being tweaked internally and used for clients' games.

When I finally released Phaser to the world, it was the culmination of all my passions up until now. From my wide-eyed wonder at computer games all those decades ago to my love of coding, creating, and those first exposures to the early internet.

Technology waits for no one, and the web is no exception. Gaming is no exception, either. But those two things are perfect bed-fellows, and I'm so happy to be able to spend my days making them sing and dance together.

I was recently asked, "Why do I still do it? what keeps me going?" - after all, ten years is a long time. Could I face staring down the barrel to another 10?

And the answer is simple: Yes, absolutely.

Why? That's simple, too. It's because of you. It's because you are all making such amazing games with Phaser. It's genuinely exciting for me to see what you all release. To this end, we created a little Showcase video and put it on YouTube that highlights a few Phaser games:

My thanks to gammafp for his work on this.

I know it's not every day when stand-out genre-creating hits like Vampire Survivors come along. But it's not just about those. Even those of you just tweaking the My First Phaser Game template should be proud of what you've achieved.

It amazes me that there are thousands and thousands of games out there made in Phaser. The amount of playtime the world has put into them over the years is likely incalculable. Hundreds of millions of people, billions of hours.

It doesn't get much more exciting than this! And as the face of Phaser, I couldn't ask for anything else.

And things haven't slowed down, either. The web is still changing. We're gaining new APIs and language abilities on a monthly basis. WebGPU will become the standard within the next couple of years. ES6 is now dominant. TypeScript 5 is out. Bundlers are now lightning-fast, and our tools are evolving, too.

I'm also genuinely excited about what AI can bring to the party. I fully intend to investigate it to see how we can use it to help developers learn and use Phaser better.

Now that v3.60 is finished, I'm going to dive back into Phaser 4 again. Don't worry. Phaser 3 will still be maintained. I will release much smaller, bug-fix-focused versions as needed. There will be no need to wait a year for a v3.70 release!

In my mind, Phaser 4 is the natural evolution of both web technology and Phaser itself. It tickles all of those excitement buds that make my inner geek sing with joy. I can't wait to get back to it again, but equally, I can't wait to see what you all create with v3.60!

Please, please do come and tell us when you release something. We've got a dedicated Showcase channel on our Discord you can use specifically for this.

Some thanks

In closing, I would like to thank a few people directly.

First of all, thank you to Ilija Melentijevic. Ilija (or Ilkke as he's known online) is the artist responsible for creating the Phaser logo, characters, and wonderful pixel art that adorns the site. He also did the superb 10th Birthday banner :) If I wish for one thing, it would be to find the time to create another game again with you, mate!

Thank you to Tom Waterhouse. Tom is the designer responsible for the Phaser website and lots of the graphic elements you see all over the place. His art style is superb and compliments the characters Ilija created

Thank you to a couple of very special Phaser community members, including Samme and RexRainbow. Samme is responsible for countless Phaser contributions and maintains the Phaser CE release. It's at the point where if I see a Pull Request from Samme, I often just merge it on instinct alone!

RexRainbow also contributes towards Phaser by releasing stacks of really awesome plugins and resources! They make Phaser even more enticing for developers, plus he helps report issues and fixes. So for that, thank you.

Also, I would like to take Kal_Torak, Antriel, and the other dedicated Discordians, who help other members with their questions, day in and day out.

And, of course, thank you to everyone else out there! Those who support me on Patreon, those who just like what I'm doing, and even all of those who have no idea who I am - the ones who just downloaded Phaser one day and needed it for a project or college assignment :)

You may not realize it, but you're holding a decade worth of devotion there in your code editor and four decades' worth of love and passion for technology and gaming.

I'm not 100% sure what the future is going to bring. Who can be? But I'll continue being here, working as best I can, embracing the technology, and refining Phaser to give you the best experience possible.

And as a very final parting message, this release, or indeed anything I do, wouldn't have been possible without my wonderful family.

My long-suffering wife Susannah, my (now teenage!) kids Tommy and Alice, and even our crazy dog, Morris. But most of all, I dedicate this release and, indeed, everything I am in this life to my parents:

I miss you both like crazy and was robbed of you far too soon. I hope you're looking down and happy with what I've achieved, even if you never quite understood it! Because it was a privilege being your son.