I’ve long been a fan of the Phaser HTML5 game library, as my ongoing tutorial series might indicate. Somewhat recently Phaser started adding premium commercial plugins. The most recently added plugin adds support for Box2D, the popular 2D physics based library. This is a commercial plugin (aka, you’ve got to pay for it. $65 for premium $45 for standard – only difference is number of samples ), but don’t fret, Phaser still has a number of physics systems built-in that are completely free.
Box2D is a feature-rich 2D physics system used by thousands of hit games.
This plugin opens-up the power of Box2D directly within Phaser. It has the same user-friendly approach to its API that the rest of Phaser does, making integration and game development a beeze.
It uses the excellent box2d-html5 JavaScript port by Isaac Burns. We found that this library had the best performance of those tested, even on mobile.
Development of the plugin was lead by Box2D experts iForce2D – the company responsible for the excellent Box2D visual editor R.U.B.E
See the Box2D Plugin Page for More Details
The Download includes
- Getting Started Guide – You’ll be coding in next to no time.
- 90 Code Examples – From games to core mechanics.
- API Documentation and Box2D User Manual
- Free Upgrades
- License free – Use it in commercial games
- Ready built and minified source files + grunt scripts
- Delivered via download from FastSpring.com
Try it out
We’ve added 40 of the Box2D examples to this site.
Run them, play with them and edit the code to get a feel for how it all works.
The full release details are available here.
I actually like to see this form of monetization. Developers need to eat and we want them working to make better and better products. Keeping the core free while adding premium but optional features as a premium plug-in seems like a good middle line to me. The key is to keep developing the core free product at the same rate that commercial plugins are added.
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