A defiant and deadly Phaser 2.0.6 “Jornhill” is released
Phaser continues to evolve and grow stronger with every release, and 2.0.6 is no exception. We coordinated this release to land the exact same day as Pixi.js 1.6 came out. As you may know Pixi is the renderer that Phaser uses; its beating heart if you will. So when Mat and the Goodboy team drop a stack of new features into Pixi, everyone benefits.
And 1.6 is bursting with new goodies: from a vastly improved Graphics class, to rope, strips, faster WebGL and Canvas renderers, enhanced mask support and other tweaks across the whole API. Have a read on the Goodboy blog for full details and examples of what’s new.
But it’s not just Pixi that has changed. Phaser 2.0.6 has a huge number of enhancements too. From new BitmapData functions, to much improved Sprite.crop support. There are also lots of CocoonJS specific fixes, thanks to the work of our dedicated developers and direct help from Ludei. The Keyboard class has new callback support, Arcade Physics bodies can now be easily enabled via a simple boolean property, wrapping Tilemap Layers, Emitter updates, Group updates and not forgetting stacks of bug fixes.
As usual loads of these came in from the Phaser community, either directly via pull requests or from reported issues. We do our best to respond to all of these, so please do report bugs! Also we’ve just made our 2001 commit to the repository – how geekily cool is that? 🙂
What’s Next?
p2.js is one of the physics systems found in Phaser, and they’ve just released a huge update as well. There wasn’t time to include it into 2.0.6, and it has a number of API breaking changes within it. But we’re now going to focus on updating Phaser to use the latest build of p2 and this will form the main basis of our 2.1 release.
We’ve also been carefully looking at how we can make a Phaser game easily configurable via external json files. Work on this can be seen in the 2.06 release with the introduction of Asset Pack support, but with 2.1 we’re going to support Scene creation as well. Typically the ‘create’ block in a Phaser State is full of things such as creating Sprites, enabling physics and generally setting-up the game world. What we’re doing now is allowing all of this to be controlled via json. So you load a ‘scene’ json file and it configures everything for you. This will make the task of creating 3rd party game editors significantly easier, as they’ll have a fixed and official format to use. It also means you could do things like creating on-line game level editors much more easily.
Defiant and Deadly
Phaser is being used for more and more games. Our own lists hold over 350 games made with Phaser so far, and more get released every week. We’re also seeing a large up-take in agency created games. Here are two that caught our eye recently:
The Defiant Few
Created by Ignition Interactive for the SyFy Channel, The Defiant Few is an episodic series of web games set in the Defiance TV shows universe. With a strong video linked narrative you can play through 12 missions, one released each week to coincide with new episodes of the show. Photon Storm were pleased to have been responsible for building the 3rd mission, a fun hair-raising driving game where you get to avoid debris, out-run other cars and dodge razor rain.
You can play the games at http://www.defiantfew.com(registration required)
Deadly Defenders
Fancy a tower defence game, where your turrets are venom spitting cobras and the creeps are leeches, gibbons and other forms of jungle nasties?! Then check out Deadly Defenders. Created by Aardman Digital for CBBC it’s a fun take on a popular genre, slowly building up over the levels to an intense degree. Great polished Aardman visuals and funny voice overs lend to the atmosphere.
You can play Deadly Defenders at http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/games/deadly-defenders-game
Help Support Phaser
You may have noticed that we also now have a Gittip account set-up. Everything we raise from this will go towards helping Phaser development, one way or another. To those of who you have already contributed, thank you! For those who’d like to know more please check out the link. If you’d rather not commit to Gittip we’re also happy to receive PayPal donations. Either way you contribute we guarantee the money will be spent on making Phaser better for everyone.
Posted on July 10th 2014 at 7:37 pm by Rich.
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