Last week we showed off flashy music + shaders, but those wouldn’t be possible without the heavy technical work happening behind the scenes.

We don't want to wait so we’ve forked Phaser 4.0 and added WebGL 2.0 support. That means the game now takes advantage of modern GPU features and has a much stronger foundation for advanced shaders and visual effects. It’s not something you’ll notice at first glance, but it opens up a ton of possibilities — and we can even reuse this work for future projects.

[pic1] Finally, without hackishly forcing a webgl2 canvas phaser.js properly creates it on its own and has all the features we need supported out of the box.

With WebGL 2.0 we now have access to the GLSL ES 3.0 shading language, which brings long-awaited features like proper arrays! Texture handling is vastly improved too: non-power-of-two (NPOT) textures are fully supported with tiling and mipmaps, and floating-point as well as half-float textures are standard. On the performance side, WebGL 2.0 cuts VRAM usage significantly, introduces multisampled renderbuffers for proper MSAA, and enables vertex array objects (VAOs) to reduce binding overhead. More advanced rendering pipelines are now possible as well — multiple render targets let us experiment with deferred shading or HDR, hardware instancing allows thousands of objects in a single draw call, and transform feedback opens the door to GPU-only geometry streaming.

All of this adds up to a renderer that uses memory more efficiently, performs better under load, and gives us the headroom to create richer visuals, from fluid shaders to large-scale effects. In plain English: more stuff on screen, faster, prettier.

And the best part? With this framework update we also refactored our repo allowing us to write a complex game in a lightweight TypeScript + custom Phaser framework, then pack it into a native binary using Rust. That means we’re already targeting Windows, Linux, and Mac with the flexibility to switch to mobile builds without rewriting the game. Down the line, even consoles aren’t off the table if the game takes off.

Next week we’ll move from backend systems to the menus and save/load features and some visual goodies !