Welcome to Issue 208 and two new product releases, Studio Developer logs and of course a Cyber Monday special offer. Read on …

🔥 Cyber Monday - 30% Off!

Get 30% off our annual subscriptions for a limited time.

Use the code CYBER30 during checkout to get 30% off.

This code expires on December 6th, 2024.

🚀 Phaser Editor v4.7.1 Released

Settings panels, keyboard shortcuts, support for JetBrains IDEs, font files, and more!

We are pleased to announce the release of Phaser Editor 4.7.0. This version introduces the long-awaited built-in web font loader. This new feature allows you to load web fonts directly from the editor asset pack editor, making it easier to use custom fonts in your scenes. This new feature was possible thanks to the latest Phaser version (3.87), which introduced the new FontFile API.

In addition to the font loader, we built a brand-new UI system that allows you to configure most Phaser Editor settings.

Today (Monday 2nd) we also published the 4.7.1 point release, which has a small fix for adding Tilemaps into Layers.

Read more about Phaser Editor 4.7.0

🎮 Arena Survivors

Visit interesting places and destroy everything in this bullet hell game.

Arena Survivors, developed by 2kblater, builds upon the addictive auto-shooter mechanics popularized by Vampire Survivors while carving out its own unique identity. This rogue-like RPG drops players into dynamic arenas where survival depends on quick thinking and strategic character building.

Like its inspiration, Arena Survivors excels in creating that "just one more run" feeling. The game sets itself apart through its diverse enemy roster – from mythological beasts to surprisingly deadly farm animals. Boss encounters and special events keep players on their toes, requiring quick adaptation of tactics and loadouts. The procedurally generated levels ensure no two runs feel identical.

Play Arena Survivors

🌮 Creat Game CLI Update

This new version adds multiplayer, Discord Activities and physics templates.

Today we released version 1.2.7 of our Create Game CLI app. This release introduces a new 'Middleware' section that offers you the ability to download and install the following new templates:

Rune Multiplayer Tic-Tac-Toe Example Discord Activities (Single Player) Discord Activities (Multiplayer) Rapier Physics Connector To use the tool, simply issue the command:

npm create @phaserjs/game@latest

Read more about the CLI Tool Update

💾 Game File Hosting

Free, easy drag-and-drop game file hosting for all Phaser users!

We're super excited to announce that our Game File Hosting Service is now available for everyone. Register an account on the Phaser site, and you'll have immediate access to our new file hosting service.

Because of the way browser security works, it's often quite complex to simply put a file somewhere and get a URL that you can use in your games. Direct linking to files, such as those stored in Imgur or GitHub, is nearly always blocked via restrictive CORs policies. And if you want to test something quickly, using our Phaser Sandbox is perfect for that — but again, how do you access your files from within it?

Previously, you'd need to run your own server and manage your security settings manually to achieve this. Now, you can use our free drag-and-drop file hosting service!

Read More about Game File Hosting

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Phaser Studio Developer Logs

Here is what the Phaser Studio team has been up to this week:

🧑‍💻 Rich - CTO & Founder

This week was strange. Obviously, with Thanksgiving, several of the team members were away for two days. Plus, Ben contracted Covid, which knocked him out for the entire week. As a result, sadly, there are no Tales from the Pixel Mines in this issue! So we were much lighter-staffed than usual for most of the week. Even so, we published a new CLI create game tool version and a lovely Quality of Life release for Phaser Editor.

Internally, the design and build for the Box2D pages are now entirely done! This is super exciting. :) The library is solid, the documentation is done, the examples are coming together, and we’ve got lots of tutorials, too. All in all, it’s a compelling bundle of a package, and, touch wood, it should be on sale this week.

Once Box2D is out, my focus will shift to Phaser v4. Now that Ben is well again, the pace will ramp up this week, and we’ll push towards a new beta release. We’ve also got the Game Publishing service to go live, hundreds of new examples to upload, and new Discord Activities tutorials! It’s going to be a busy final month of the year 🙂

🧑‍💻 Francisco - Phaser Launcher

¡Hola a todos!

Phaser Template Installer

This week, we updated our Phaser Template Installer with the release of version 1.2.7, which brings three new templates and some important adjustments. One of the existing templates, Rapier, has been moved to a new section called Middleware, where you’ll find templates related to tools and extensions for Phaser. Some of these templates are contributions from third parties that we’ve carefully reviewed to ensure their quality and usefulness.

Phaser Launcher

Regarding Phaser Launcher, I’ve been working on the component responsible for displaying the game. This component has a rather unique behavior: it needs to open with the DevTools window enabled right from the start and allow users to toggle it open or closed at will.

At first, this turned out to be quite challenging, especially on Windows and macOS. The main issue was the iframe used to load the game—it captured all events, making it impossible to open the DevTools window. This limitation caused a lot of frustration as I experimented with different approaches to find a solution that wouldn’t break other functionality.

After what felt like hundreds of tests, I finally found the right approach: taking complete control of the component by injecting code directly into the game’s index.html. This allowed me to capture all generated events, making it possible to open and close the DevTools window smoothly, even with the iframe in place.

The exciting part about this solution is that it opens the door to injecting additional scripts dynamically into the game. This gives us a lot of flexibility to introduce new tools or features in the future.

That’s all for now — stay tuned for more updates!

🧑‍💻 Zeke - Box2D

This week, I focused on completing the Tiny Wings demo and started working on our Box2D Javascript documentation. Pete has done an amazing job porting the entire C library to Javascript and the demo’s the team has made are just beautiful to watch.

Here’s a gif showing the final step in the Tiny Wing’s demo featuring endless terrain generation.

As for Box2D documentation, I worked on reviewing existing code examples to ensure it works as intended. This also involves creating fully working examples of each tutorial so you can see how all the code is put together to make it work.

Here’s an example of a one-way platform:

This documentation will continue for the near future so expect to see more examples posted.

Have a good week ahead!

🧑‍💻 Pete - Box2D

It's a wrap! ... nearly! For my last week on Phaser Box2D I helped convert the entire contents of the iForce2D website from talking about Box2D v2.X in C++ to relevance for Phaser Box2D v3 in JavaScript.

Together Zeke and I went through the material several times, and hopefully I didn't miss too many of the old-style references for Zeke to clean up before it all goes live. Looking back at what this Phaser team has achieved is incredibly rewarding: a complete, fast, JS conversion of the newest version of the leading 2D physics engine.

With a fully documented API, tons of examples, and an entire website worth of tutorials. We truly "stand on the shoulders of giants" because none of this would have been possible without the amazing work done by Erin in creating Box2D v3 and Chris in writing such a wonderful tutorial resource.