Newsletter – Issue 010

📆 2023-02-21

🎉 We're already at the 10th issue of the Web Game Dev newsletter! I hope you find it useful and interesting. Let me know via Discord (opens in a new tab) or Twitter (opens in a new tab) if you have any feedback. Please consider ❤️ sponsoring my work (opens in a new tab) if this newsletter is valuable to you!

🔥 Headlines

Web Push (opens in a new tab) for Home Screen web apps and third-party browser support for Add to Home Screen are (finally) supported on iOS and iPadOS (opens in a new tab). This is a big win for PWA games! Learn more about 🌐 Progressive Web Apps (opens in a new tab).

PixiJS (opens in a new tab), the 2D WebGL library by Goodboy (now Playco (opens in a new tab)), has big plans for 2023 (opens in a new tab). They assembled a full-time team to work on releasing a new website (opens in a new tab) (✅ done), an updated PixiJS React (opens in a new tab) (✅ done), open-source games, a UI library, the framework-agnostic AssetPack library, a CLI bootstrapping tool, dev tools, the Comet editor, PixiJS v8, PixiJS 3D, and a game engine. 🤯 That's one hell of a roadmap!

Last month, Kaboom (opens in a new tab) by Replit (opens in a new tab) released their v3000 beta (opens in a new tab). See this thread (opens in a new tab) for video examples of the new features, which include a scene graph, more font formats, tweening, rotated areas, up to 50x performance improvement (opens in a new tab), custom loading screens, post effects, gamepad support, and pathfinding.

Tangle (opens in a new tab) is a new experimental library by Ian Kettlewell (opens in a new tab) that syncs WebAssembly apps and games between multiple users in peer-to-peer via WebRTC connections (initialized by a central server). Try the demo (opens in a new tab)!

Don McCurdy (opens in a new tab) released glTF Transform 3.0 (opens in a new tab). New additions include flattening the scene graph, joining meshes to reduce draw calls, AVIF image compression, sparse data compression, and an all-in-one optimize command.

One of the most demanded CSS features, Container Queries (opens in a new tab), is now supported in all three major browser engines (opens in a new tab) (Can I Use (opens in a new tab) Global support: 80%). Container Queries allow you to style a container based on its content instead of the viewport. This will change how we approach responsive design, including CSS-based game UI!

progressive-shadows (opens in a new tab), a vanilla Three.js port of React Three Fiber's AccumulativeShadows (opens in a new tab) by V_Prime (opens in a new tab).
R3F v8.11.2 (opens in a new tab) – Improved hot reload (opens in a new tab) by 0xca0a (opens in a new tab).
TresJS 1.7.0 (opens in a new tab) – The Vue (opens in a new tab) wrapper for Three.js got a big upgrade! New features include a realistic preset for the renderer, better HMR disposal, better state management with useTres, and an environment abstraction.
PlayCanvas Editor v1.24.9 (opens in a new tab) – Adds support for Draco (opens in a new tab) mesh compression imports.
Phaser 3.60 Beta 19 (opens in a new tab) – Adds a built-in Special Effects system, Plane Game Objects, Spatial Audio, and more. The documentation (opens in a new tab) has been updated to reflect the latest beta.
Pixi React v7.0.0 (opens in a new tab) – Adds support for React 18, PixiJS v7, and tree-shaking. New up-to-date docs (opens in a new tab).
Babylon.js v5.47.0 (opens in a new tab)

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