Newsletter
Welcome to Issue 47 of Phaser World
You know how last issue I wrote about these two great games, and they were both region locked? Well I'm sorry, but I'm doing it again this week. Our cover game is Hirviot. It's beautiful, fun, and for Finnish people only. Even so, the story behind its creation is an interesting one, and there's a video too!
Several Ludum Dare games are featured this week, and the insane but brilliant Simplify My Horse. I mean, where else can you get game dev and Balkan dada-dub music?!
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 channel.
Patreon Updates
Thank you so much to the following new Phaser Patreons who joined us this week: Slava Dzyba, Az Cross and the team at GrimPanda Games, and Vladimir Zakar.
Patreon is a way for you to donate money towards the Phaser project, on a monthly basis, starting from just $1, and receive discounts, forum badges, private technical support from me, and my eternal gratitude, in return :)
Games made with Phaser
Game of the Week
Take on the role of a monster hunter, and free the imprisoned fairies in this Finnish lottery game.
Staff Pick
Play the universe’s first interactive balkan-dada-dub experience.
Travel through an ancient maze to discover long lost knowledge.
An atmospheric and polished LD36 entry.
This medieval MMO update introduces a new blacksmithing ability.
Phaser News & Tutorials
A Cordova template aimed to help you create Phaser native apps faster.
A guide to smooth state transitions with a new plugin.
Phaser Game Design Part 1
Phaser Game Design Part 2
Phaser Game Design Part 3
Development Progress
This week has been an interesting mixed-bag of development. Felipe has been cracking through some issues with filters and multi-texture support, ready for the Phaser 3 release. While I've been splitting my time between:
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Planning Phaser 3 API changes
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Literally filling an entire notebook with plans for a Phaser magazine
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Working on porting the Beam Renderer to ES6
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Swearing at the convoluted build processes involved for ES6
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Loving the clean code that ES6 provides
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Swearing at node packages that work on OS X but not on Windows
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Loving the speed of our new Transform class
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Probably a bit more swearing
As you can probably tell, it's been a bit of a rollercoaster week. On the plus side I've completed a huge chunk of work getting our new Transform system ported to ES6, and it's working really nicely. This under-pins pretty much everything, as it controls the new display list. Any object (such as a Sprite) can extend our Transform class, and instantly inherit all of the properties it needs, such as x, y, rotation, scale and so on. You can immediately read the world values, and they'll be perfectly correct, regardless if the renderer has run or not. Updates intelligently propagate down to children, but only as needed. It's something I started last year in fact, in the Lazer code base, and have finally finished off.
All of the hard work that Pete did on Beam, back in 2015, (Beam being the code-name we gave our new renderer) is being ported to ES6. This, and the Transform Manager, are two vital pieces of work. It feels like lots of loose-ends are coming together. All of those technical tests, and pieces of code we worked on over the past year, finally being put to use.
What does this mean for Phaser? I'm still undecided. My gut instinct tells me that this will all form the basis of Phaser 4, a pure ES6 module based release. And that we use that release, and the experience gained from it, to help shape Lazer development next year. Whatever the outcome, wheels are now turning, and I'm looking forward to sharing early releases with you all soon.
Geeky Links
A new kickstarter for The Masters of Pixel Art Volume 2 is out. I backed the first volume, and it was an amazing book. So I'm looking forward to vol. 2!
Not wanting to be out-done, Microsoft are bringing WebVR to the Edge browser. I guess you'll be able to literally fall over the Edge now.
Finally this week: Boing Boing have released the awesome Psygnosis Game Generator! If you remember those sleek. black game boxes as fondly as I do, then this will entertain you. Stick in a title and it'll create you an authentic looking Psygnosis box in seconds. Sadly I guess the "Parallax Scrolling" and "2MB of graphics!" part will be left up to you :)
Phaser Releases
The current version of Phaser is 2.6.2 released on August 26th 2016.
Phaser 3.0.0 is in development in the GitHub dev branch.
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.