Newsletter โ Issue 005
๐ฅ Headlines
Duelyst, a turn-based strategy game that shut down in early
2020 (opens in a new tab), just got
open-sourced (opens in a new tab). You can still play on their
staging deployment (opens in a new tab). It was coded with
Cocos2d-JS (opens in a new tab), a library merged into
Cocos2d-x (opens in a new tab), which is now legacy, and got merged into the
cocos-engine (opens in a new tab), which you can use via Cocos
Creator (opens in a new tab) (are you following? ๐
). Cocos Creator is a
Unity-like cross-platform editor which supports TypeScript and
JavaScript (opens in a new tab).
Use.GPU (opens in a new tab) (GitLab
repo (opens in a new tab)) is a set of declarative, reactive WebGPU legos by
Steven Wittens (opens in a new tab). It's a standalone
React-like (opens in a new tab) library that uses JSX. Version
0.8 (opens in a new tab) (Hacker News
thread (opens in a new tab)) brings conveniences like scenes and nodes
with matrices, mesh instancing, shadow maps, visibility culling, and a new rendering pipeline.
Learn more (opens in a new tab).
NYTimes (opens in a new tab) released Vite and Rollup plugins to optimize
3D glTF
assets (opens in a new tab). By
Don McCurdy (opens in a new tab) and Or Fleisher (opens in a new tab).
The results of the State of JS 2022 (opens in a new tab) are
available. For a TLDR, check out the tier
list (opens in a new tab) (Fireship
video (opens in a new tab)). A safe bet is still
React (opens in a new tab) + Vite (opens in a new tab) or Next.js (opens in a new tab), but I
can see Svelte (opens in a new tab) gaining more traction thanks to
SvelteKit (opens in a new tab) this year.
โฌ๏ธ Updates
Drei v9.52 and v9.53 (opens in a new tab) โ Adds
<Caustics> (opens in a new tab) and support for
THREE.LineSegments2in <Line> (opens in a new tab).
PlayCanvas v1.60.0 (opens in a new tab) โ Adds
standard material invert for gloss channels and improved WebGPU support, including directional
light shadow maps. GLB imports in the Editor are coming soon.
Phaser 3.60 Beta 18 (opens in a new tab) โ Updated
Particle System.
Babylon.js v5.42.0 (opens in a new tab)
PixiJS v7.1.0 (opens in a new tab)
โ๏ธ Content
- ๐ฌ Cocos Creator Gets a Major
Upgrade (opens in a new tab) by
Gamefromscratch (opens in a new tab).
- ๐ฌ Porting Unreal Scenes to Browser with
PlayCanvas (opens in a new tab) by Leonidas
Maliokas (opens in a new tab).
- โ๏ธ
RTS Devlog #8: How To Beat
Lag (opens in a new tab)
(Construct (opens in a new tab) engine) by Ashley
Gullen (opens in a new tab) - โ๏ธ
Rendering 100k spheres, instantiating and draw
calls (opens in a new tab) by
Daniel Velasquez (opens in a new tab).
โจ Games & Demos
- ๐ฎ Summer Afternoon (opens in a new tab) by Vicente
Lucendo (opens in a new tab). A very charming and relaxing multiplayer experiment. ๐
- ๐ฎ Keyboard Heroes (opens in a new tab) by
console_buche (opens in a new tab). Guitar Hero meets speed typing. ๐ค
- ๐ฎ Candy Riot (opens in a new tab) by Long Story Short
Games (opens in a new tab). A cute and spooky game that came out for Halloween.
๐
See more on the โจ Games & Demos (opens in a new tab) page or ๐ฎ WebGamer.io (opens in a new tab).
๐ฌ From our Discord
We had our second Discord video meetup (opens in a new tab) on January 12th:
- Renegade Lab Studios (opens in a new tab) presented
Exiles (opens in a new tab), their upcoming multiplayer futuristic vehicular combat
game.
- Anslo (opens in a new tab) explained the procedural terrain generation
techniques (opens in a new tab) used in Slow
Roads (opens in a new tab).
- Trezy (opens in a new tab) presented his upcoming Debug (opens in a new tab) puzzle game (custom engine), based on his js13k 2020 game: Not Found (opens in a new tab).
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