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