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- Phaser World Issue 229
Phaser World Issue 229
Phaser Studio
March 27, 2026
Hey there, game dev! 👽
This week Phaser 4 RC7 landed, and it's a big one. Image-based lighting, noise shaders, a completely overhauled tint system, and a GPU dithering pipeline that makes gradients look genuinely stunning. The full release is closer than ever 🔥🔥🔥
We've also got horror games, a solo dev shipping on Steam, a game jam with $30k in prizes, and a beginner tutorial to share with anyone just getting started.
Grab a coffee ☕👇
This week:
⭐️ Phaser 4 RC7 is here, and it makes 2D look impossibly good
The latest release candidate is packed with tools that would've seemed overkill for a 2D engine: image-based lighting, cellular noise for real-time reflections, simplex noise clouds, dithered gradients, and more ⚡️
Tint got a full overhaul, several lost FX came back stronger, and a new GameObject.isDestroyed flag finally kills a long-standing class of bug.
The full release is very close! ✨
💀 9 horror games built with Phaser
Phaser has a darker side… 👻💀🧟♂️🐈⬛
This week's video rounds up 9 horror games built with the engine, covering unsettling mysteries, psychological dread, and full survival horror — Vampire Survivors included 😌
A good look at what the ecosystem actually looks like when things get scary 🧛
🦕 Phaser Editor v5 AI Chat powered by Gemini can build your scene for you
Describe what you want in the AI chat and the editor handles the scene for you 👌
Pair that with the new Wipe Filter, which smoothly reveals one image through another, and you get things like seven moons fading into Earth 🌗🌍🤯
The editor keeps getting more interesting 😎
🔴 Built a game with Phaser Editor? 📭
We'd love to see how you're using Phaser Editor in your projects. Share your development process: how you organized your scenes, your project structure, your workflow. Screenshots or short clips work great ✨
20,000 game devs read this newsletter every week. If you've been building something with Phaser Editor, this is your moment. We'd love to feature your project in the newsletter and interview you for our website 😄
🔥 Fresh From the Web This Week
» Tutorial: New to Phaser? 5 minutes is all you need to get started
JSLegendDev put together a quick, no-fluff intro to Phaser covering everything a beginner needs: scenes, sprites, animations, input, and arcade physics 🧑💻
Clear, structured, and done in only 5 minutes. A solid first step before diving deeper into the framework 👾
» Amazing Word Fresh is what you get when Scrabble meets Boggle
Connect letters, build words, beat the clock ⏳
This free browser game built with Phaser keeps the board alive with letters falling from above as you play. Find hidden bonus words for extra points and watch your score climb 🌟
Prefer a chilled session? Switch on Relax mode and ditch the timer. There's also a global leaderboard if you want to settle who the real word nerd is 🏆
» Interview: An open-world slasher built solo with Phaser, now on Steam
Nick Silencer built Five Mysterious Murders alone: an isometric open-world horror game set in rural Louisiana where you play as the killer 🩸
Trap crafting, enemy pathfinding across 144 isometric layers, a custom scene editor — all on a Phaser, React and Electron stack he largely wrote himself 🔪
Nick talks about keeping the codebase sane across so many interacting systems, his take on AI tools in a solo project, and what it actually takes to ship something this ambitious 👇
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🚀 Phaser 4 Dev Log: Gradients, Color Ramps and Dithering
Ben Richards takes us behind the scenes of how Gradients work in Phaser 4.
Flexible color bands, multiple shapes, and color spaces that actually keep your colors looking good — all powered by a clever binary tree texture that makes a million bands in a single quad not just possible, but efficient. 🎨🌈
There's also a look at IGN dithering and the new Quantize and GradientMap filters. A great read if you want to understand what's powering all those pretty visuals in RC7 👇
"With just 8 colors, we can replicate a decent facsimile of a rainbow"
🏆 Gamedev.js Jam 2026: win $30k in prizes
Still on the fence? The jam kicks off April 13th and you've got 13 days to build an HTML5 game around a theme nobody knows yet. Phaser is the recommended engine. Open to everyone worldwide, solo or team, beginner or veteran 🎮
This year the prize pool hits $30k, with YouTube Playables as platinum sponsor and GitHub running an Open Source Challenge 🔥
Perfect excuse to build something with Phaser. Don't sleep on it 🤠
Happy coding, and see you next week! 🐣
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