Welcome to Issue 84 of Phaser World

Yes, two issues in one week again! But it just wouldn't be a Friday without aPhaser World :) and we've some stunning content too. Check out that Game ofthe Week, sure it involves bubbles again like last issues game, but it's so prettyand slick! and we've kittens, mmo Tetris and even Jeremy Corbyn in pixel form :)

So, until the next issue, keep on coding. Drop me a line if you've got any newsyou'd like featured (you can just reply to this email) or grab me on the PhaserSlack or Discord channels.

Games made with PhaserBubble Hunter Game of the Week Travel through the jungles of a mysterious island torecover the treasures buried there.

Happy Kittens Puzzle Staff Pick Flip the kitties to turn the grumpy red cats into happyyellow ones in this 60 level puzzle game.

Infinitris A massively multiplayer Tetris variant with some subtletwists and new features.

General Election Game Take on the role of Jeremy 'Wise Wizard' Corbyn asyou try to turn evil into good!

Mortal Mini Golf An overhead mini golf game with some nice touches.

Phaser News & TutorialsSunnyLand Pixel Art Pack A beautiful free pixel art pack including Phaser platformgame code.

Mike Dangers Tutorial Part 2 The tutorial series continues, this time addingdiamonds and real object pooling into the mix.

Rocket Emitter Demo A beautiful showcase of the new Particle Emitterfeatures in Phaser CE 2.8.

Phaser Aseprite Parser A small open-source library for loading and parsingAseprite files.

How to get a Phaser Game on Steam How to prepare build and wrap your EXE file for Steam.

Patreon Updates

Welcome and a massive thank you to the new Phaser Patreon who joined us thisweek: Marc and Zack Proser. Also, thank you to Francesco Maida forincreasing their pledge.

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 reasonwe'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 tofree monthly coding support via Slack or Skype.

Development Log

Welcome to this week's Dev Log! We've been busy, adding in features acrosslarge parts of the API. Before I dive in I just wanted to say that Mozilla is meetingto discuss the v3 funding application today. So I'm extremely nervous but at thesame time pumped because it's been a great week of dev work (as you'll seebelow). Internally I should know next week if our funding application wassuccessful or not, but publically it'll be a little longer before I can announce it.Fingers crossed though, believe me!

RetroFonts Return

I added RetroFonts to Phaser 2 mostly because I really like using them in myown games and because they were a nice processing step-down from BitmapText, working more like sprite sheets and not needing any kerning data. I wantedthem in v3 but they were a really low priority and more importantly I didn't want toclog up the API with yet another Game Object type just for them.

Then it occurred to me - they don't need to be their own type of Game Object atall. In fact, I could just write a simple parser that took a config object and imageand converted it into the standard BitmapText that we had already implemented.So I bashed out a 'ParseRetroFont' function and voila, it works perfectly! You candefine your font in an easy to read object, throw it into the cache and use it justlike any other BitmapText. Have a look at the code in this example to see how itworks.

Personally, I think the end result is a lot better than v2 because the BitmapTextobjects are much more powerful, and it works with both Static and Dynamicversions.

Scroll-line Massacre

While implementing the RetroFont I realised I could very easily add the ability toscroll the contents of a Dynamic BitmapText object. A few hours later and itworked nicely:

In the demo above the BitmapFont itself never actually changes x coordinate, it isthe contents of it that are being scrolled via the new scrollX and scrollYproperties. There is also the ability to crop the display, which allows you to dosome fun stuff, like this:

Woo! That's a whole load of WebGL batched scroller goodness right there.Another feature I added this week was support for the `pixelArt` gameconfiguration setting in both Canvas and WebGL. It's a boolean value and if youenable it then the GL and Canvas texture managers will automatically apply thecorrect scale-mode or texture filter required for lovely crisp pixel art, without youhaving to do anything else. It's a feature I wanted in v3 from the very start andthis week it arrived :)

However, the biggest addition this week was nothing to do with text, but to do withTilemaps.

Super Mario Level Scroller

Felipe pushed a whole stack of Tilemap renderer updates into v3 over the pastcouple of weeks. As I mentioned a few issues ago we've got twoimplementations: Static and Dynamic. Static is basically just a crazy-fast tilerenderer. You feed it an image and an array of data and it gives you a slick andspeedy tilemap. The map can be scrolled with the camera and positionedanywhere in the world, as you can see in this example:

Use the left / right cursors to scroll. What you're seeing are 2 completelyindependent tilemaps rendering. I offset the bottom one a little so you can see thepositioning working. The maps are from Super Mario Bros on the NES (Worlds 1and 3 respectively) and although simple due to the low volume of tiles, serve asgood horizontal examples.

But, we can do more, right? I promised the tilemap renderer would be fast, solet's take it full-screen in a nice 30,000 tile example. Again, use the cursor keys tomove around:

Sweeeeet, right?! So this is showcasing two things at once here. First, of course,the tilemap renderer. This is a Static tilemap which means you cannot do anyper-tile effects (i.e. animating a tile, or setting its alpha, or removing it), for thatyou need a Dynamic Tilemap. But, if you've got 'standard' tilemap requirements,which I guess covers the majority of games, then this is the system you'd use.

The smooth cursor key scrolling is enabled by a new function available via theCamera Manager. Take a look at the code for it:

You give it a Key object for each direction you wish to be enabled (you can leave

them out if you like) and then just set some speed values for acceleration anddrag. And that's it! Call 'controls.update' in your update loop and it will take care ofthe rest. The full code for this example can be seen here, and I hope you agreethat's pretty compact and easy to follow!

The Key Control functions for the camera are entirely optional and like the rest ofv3 they live in their own single function files in the camera folder. So they're deadeasy to replace with your own custom ones, or enhance, or just ignore entirely.This is the philosophy of avoiding 'God classes' in v3 at work and we're trying tostick to it everywhere.

Next week I hope to show you Dynamic Tilemaps. It's where things get reallyinteresting because although it has to use a slower method of rendering, it's a lotmore flexible allowing for per-tile effects and manipulation. Even so, StaticTilemaps are superb too and I can't wait to get them hooked to physics so youcan start charging around them :)

Phaser 3 Labs

Visit the Phaser 3 Labs to view the new API structure in depth, read the FAQ,previous Developer Logs and contribution guides. You can also join the Phaser 3Google Group. The group is for anyone who wishes to discuss what the Phaser 3API will contain.

Geek Links

RPG Scrollbars has a tasty article on recipes for meals from RPG games youcan cook for real :)

If you're interested in playing around with Web Assembly in your browser thencheck out WasmFiddle!

Adam Saltsman wrote this great piece about how they approach collaborativedecision making at Finji (publisher of Overland and Night in the Woods).

Phaser ReleasesThe 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.

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