In 1975 Intel co-founder Gordon Moor projected that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit would double every two years. It’s worth checking in with Moore’s Law to see if it’s still holding up ?

With transistors now so small, it’s becoming ever more difficult to see how they can be scaled down to squeeze more into the same spacer.

Apple’s M1 Ultra chip (it’s most powerful one to date) has a staggering 114 billion of them packed into over 100 processing cores that are dedicated to logic, graphics and A.I – and the Ultra is actually two M1 chips fused together! This method avoids the issue of scaling ever smaller and starts a new way to expand transistors across chips.

So, in a way, Moor’s law continues to ring true, and we should expect ridiculous transistor numbers on chips in the coming years!

We’ve been a bit focused on GameGuru MAX but now that it’s out and in Early Access we’ve been able to turn our attention to AppGameKit – hurray we hear you cry!

So, our next quarterly bug fix will be accompanied by some NEW FEATURES including:

  • The addition of 2D noise generation commands that are useful for procedural data
  • Additional support for Box2D (e.g. new commands to access data not currently exposed to AppGameKit)
  • The addition of new tweening commands

If you’ve worked on an AppGameKit project and would like to show it off to our great community (and further afield) please do load up your app or game to our Showcase page

We’d love to see what you’ve been working on!

It was a busy old month as we recovered from the euphoria of the release of the Early Access version of GameGuru MAX and leapt straight into supporting our community with help, fixes and features in the subsequent updates we have launched to date. A lot of our attention has been on the issues reported that affect the most users, and we gave those top priority! As a result, many of our bugs marked high were squashed by the team.

We continued releasing Demo Game projects created by the community and also started work on the first of our pioneering Game Kits that aims to give you a starter kit to make a whole mini game within a specific theme. The theme we have chosen for the first of these Game Kits is the Aztec Empire and, unlike other asset packs you might find, we are approaching it differently by giving you both ancient and contemporary versions of the scenery. So, you can set it in modern times and discover ancient Aztec ruins or visit the empire during its heyday and set your game in the savage northern Mesoamerica territories.

We are further supporting this with additional features in GameGuru MAX itself, including a new weapon system that we hope to expand in the months to come.

Watch out for many more bug fixes in May, and a few nice treats each week to keep you excited during your game making adventure.

And…..if you haven’t yet taken the plunge, the launch discount is still in place on our website for both GameGuru MAX and the Booster Pack DLC!

Calling all GameGuru MAX users - make a demo level using real world height map data and enter it into our Real World Game Level Competition - there's $500 in cash prizes up for grabs!

The Terrain Editor height map import feature allows you to bring in real world height map data on which to base your game level's design. To show what's possible with this awesome GameGuru MAX feature we brought in 'Ghost lol' from our great community to make us a demo level.

His game uses height map data from the actual Grand Canyon in Arizona, USA and includes a cool intro video. He also used extra free-to-use assets from the SketchFab website to make the level stand out – take a look at the The Grand Canyon Adventure then head over to our website to check out the prizes and the competition rules ?

We’ve been releasing bug fixing updates every three months that pretty much squash all the bugs reported up to that date. We are excited to see that, despite the high number of GameGuru Classic users, the new bug reports are starting to slow down as the product gets more and more stable.  

It took us a few years, but we got there in the end in no small part to those users who took time out to let us know how we could improve this now Classic game maker. We’d also like to reveal some early news in relation to features.

So far, we have been fixated on fixes for GameGuru Classic, but we feel 2022 is the time to open up Classic a little more and give users the chance to add to the core engine itself. We are still finalising our plans, but if there is a feature you’d like to see in Classic, and think if only you could access the source code, then hopefully you will not have to wait much longer ?

More on this grand reveal soon, but for those who are interested, brush up on your C++ and LUA skills, you may need them sooner than you think!

Finally, if you’re tempted to have a look at GameGuru MAX then take a look at the great value new ‘Twin Pack’ available on Steam!

This month we talk to Marc Wollschläger aka MadBit who lives in Germany. He is a gamer and programmer, and his favourite games are Mass Effect (ALL parts), Elite Dangerouse/Horizon/Odyssey and Mech Warrior.

Programming is purely a hobby for Marc as in real life he is a firefighter, and latterly, following an accident at work, he swapped putting out fires, providing technical assistance (danger prevention) and rescue services for an office-based role installing, repairing and distributing notebooks for the fire brigade's administration.

Marc bought his first computer in 1984 - a Commodore 64 (which he still owns) and went on to own an Atari ST, then an Amiga 500 and he bought his first PC (i486-DX50) in 1992. His first TGC product was DarkGDK, promoted together with MS Visual C++. It was a library the way he wanted it - simple and straightforward. He then moved on to DarkBasic and created some great plugins for DBPro:

Marc picks up the background to his work with AppGameKit, “I started using AppGameKit in 2016, first with Tier2, because I'm more familiar with C/C++ than AGK-Basic, but when I did some tests with AGK-Basic, I found this Basic interesting. However, I missed some functions for game development like vector and matrix calculations, so I published my first modules for 2D/3D Math Lib in the forum. Then the call for a JSON reader and writer library became louder and so I created a module for that too. Shortly after the release, the command set of AppGameKit was adapted so that my module was no longer necessary.”

“AppGameKit was then granted plug-in capability and to test how it behaves with the plugins I created the first GLInfo plugin, followed by  the FileExplore plugin.”

Marc’s latest projects are the plugin Nuklear an immediate mode graphical user interface, which wraps the functions of Nuklear in AGK-Basic, and the AgkSharp plugin which provides the AGK-Tier2 functions to the programming language C#.


Marc says, “If I am not mistaken, AgkSharp was used in one of the Towerdefence contributions (not mine ?) and I feel very honoured about that. At the moment I'm trying my hand at using Blender and Python script (absolutely new to me!). Maybe I can create something useful for the community ?”

Screenshot from Marc’s Towerdefence contribution