Welcome to Issue 6 - so much has happened since the last issue that I'm not going to bore you with any pre-amble, but instead let's just dive right into the meaty stuff...

As always, please share your feedback on the forum

Over at Goodboy Digital they’ve been working away on Pixi v2 for some time now. As Phaser is built on-top of Pixi we’ve a vested interest in everything that happens in Pixi-land and what implications that may mean for Phaser and its developers. Pixi v2 certainly bought some big changes with it, but they're all great ones! There’s a detailed blog post explaining all about it, but the headliners include:

• Full High DPI canvas support
• iOS8 WebGL fixes
• Improved rendering performance across the board
• Significant updates to the Graphics class
• Sprite level shaders & more!

There have been Pixi API changes to accommodate all of this, but we’ve been able to blend these features into Phaser with no changes to our API, so nothing should ‘break’ if upgrading from an earlier build. Instead you just get to reap the benefits :)

As well as changes to Pixi there are also Phaser specific updates and fixes in this release, including little gems like Sound.fadeTo, BitmapData.getFirstPixel, BitmapData.getBounds, Rectangle.scale and more. See the change log for full details.

As usual you can grab the latest build of Phaser from github.

The concept behind Gratipay (previously Gittip) is that if enough people can commit to contribute a small weekly amount (say $1) then with a decent number of people doing the same it all adds-up.

Your money is used directly in furthering Phaser development and also will be used to pay active community members to write tutorials and examples. If you're able to contribute even a small amount we would very much appreciate it.

More details at: https://www.gittip.com/photonstorm/

We have 3 new premium plugins for Phaser gearing up for launch:

Phaser Box2D – Adds complete Box2D support directly into Phaser, with lots of help methods, over 50 examples and 5 demo games.

Phaser Path Manager – Create complex motion paths for Sprites with a lovely visual editor and this new plugin. No longer rely on tweens for motion :) Instead draw a path, with full branch support, path orientation, segment speeds, path events and more. The screen shot above is of the path editor that comes with the plugin.

Advanced Particle System – The particles included with Phaser are flexible and can create attractive effects. But Advanced Particles is a complete replacement offering professional level particle effects for your games. From multiple render targets, to bitmap caching to all kinds of events, emitters and properties.

Each plugin will come in a range of versions to cater for all budgets.

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I've been slowly working away on DocGen, our tool for generating the new Phaser API documentation. It was built to bridge the issues between Phaser and Pixi documentation format incompatibilities and to take the API docs to the next stage.

The Phaser 2.1.3 release includes the first fruits of this work. Inside the docgen/output folder you will find json files contain every method and property for every class, including all inheritence, properly formatted return types, inline help, line numbers and everything else you should need.

Having the docs in JSON will be handy for a number of things. First and foremost it will allow us to generate much more comprehensive official documentation in a variety of formats. But it is useful in other cases too, especially with online game editors like MightyEditor becoming so popular. As it lets you write your own web or app interface to them. And maybe we could see a Sublime Editor code-completion plugin now  :)

Here is a round-up of hot new links:

• Ghosts 'n Goblins remake Only the first level, but superbly well done!
• Phaser CoffeeScript + Browserify + LiveReload Development Boilerplate Oh my, oh my!
• Using Tilemaps in Phaser A nice little intro to tilemaps by Svejk Games.
• HTML5 Mobile Game Development with Phaser A 2.5 hour complete video course.
• Code Liberation's Web-based Storytelling Series A weekly event including Phaser coding.
• How to use Tweens in Phaser A nice overview of Phaser Tween support.
• Handle a Pause Screen Loopeex shows how to build a full pause screen into your game
• Arcade Font Writer Hundreds of classic video game fonts with a Phaser interface :)
• Flash to Phaser JSFL Script Build your game scenes in the Flash IDE and export to JS.
• Build Games with Phaser Video Gabe Hollombes presentation is now online to watch.

Over on the Game from Scratch site are a series of tutorials looking at developing games using Phaser and TypeScript. The series currently has 11 parts to it, ranging from the standard "Hello World" right up to the latest one: using Tile Maps, and lots inbetween.

Aimed squarely at TypeScript developers it covers TypeScript specific issues such as IIS configuration and all sample code is of course in TypeScript. But if you're one of the many Phaser developers who uses TypeScript then their series is well worth checking out and subscribing to.

Adventures in Phaser with TypeScript

The team working on MightyEditor have delivered a raft of new updates and a tutorial video too. For those not familiar with it, MightyEditor is a visual tool for creating Phaser games. You can lay out sprites, edit their properties and configure all kinds of game data from a clean browser based editor.

The latest updates include fixing text alignment issues, adding support for bounding boxes on custom fonts, a new 'zoom level' feature and a locate object tool. There's also a new video tutorial to get you up to speed quickly.

Check out MightyEditor and share your ideas and experience on the forum

Duck Up is a fun little platform / distance game from Grindhead Games. With lovely visuals and fun gameplay it's great to see Phaser used for titles such as this. Apparently development took the team just 3 days, which is probably as much of a testament to their skills as anything else!

You can play Duck Up in your browser or download for free from Google Play

Over on the Invrse site you'll find a well put together Phaser Cheat Sheet. It covers all the main areas of game development, links to the relevant parts of the documentation and also shows examples. A great resource worth bookmarking!

Created by Nuvorm, a new small game studio based in the Netherlands, Gunflux is a hardcore shoot-em-up. With a powerful weapon upgrade system in place you can blast your way through wave after wave of increasingly challenging baddies.

HTML5 shoot-em-ups are quite rare, so it was great to see Nuvorm tackle this genre head-on, and great a compelling (if damned hard!) game as a result. Due to the sheer amount of stuff flying around it works best in a WebGL enabled browser, but that's no real surprise.

Play Gunflux and check out the forum thread

Over on HTML5 Hub Pablo Farias Navarro has published a massive new Phaser tutorial that covers how to create a side-scrolling game, from start to finish.

The tutorial is huge and goes over everything you'll need. From the initial set-up through to adding mobile specific touch controls. The code and assets are available to download and this is a great learning resource for those new to Phaser.

Read the tutorial on the HTML5 Hub

The game has realistic gravitational effects i.e. the gravity in the solar systems you explore are fully modelled, asteroids orbit planets which orbit the sun. This as author says makes things interesting but tricky, so they'll love some feedback on the controls.  The game has implemented gamepad support using phaser but a recent chrome update stopped it working, and will be added back in the future, for now it's keyboard.  It works best in Chrome.

You can play the game on their website and give your comments in the forum.

Chad Engler has created this comprehensive Phaser debug panel. Integration is a breeze as it runs as a Phaser plugin. And when activated you're presented with all kinds of useful debug information - including the timings of all the core preUpdate, update and postUpdate modules.

Download the Debug Panel from github

Quite frankly this says it all :)

If you'd like a game, tutorial or product featured in the newsletter then please get in touch.

Enjoy Phaser 2.1.3 and we'll see you soon with Issue 7 (sooner than the gap between issue 5 and this one!)

Also don't forget you can forward this newsletter to a friend - and we'd certainly appreciate it if you did so, helping to spread the news of what's going on.

Cheers,

Rich
& the team at Photon Storm

"A delayed game is eventually good; a bad game is bad forever."