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By now, it has become pretty clear that energy prices are on the rise and are likely to stay high for the foreseeable future - and we can only hope they don't climb higher.
Regular households will feel the pinch this winter but power users will feel it a lot more as their home office sucks up electrons like a vacuum cleaner gone mad. A typical office at TheGameCreators HQ may consist of 2-3 PCs, NAS backup system, 3-4 monitors, halogen lighting and around 40-50 peripherals at various stages of standby. As home offices go it can easily represent a doubling of the usage of an entire homes energy requirements (at least here in the UK).
Those with the means are turning to solar, wind and batteries to sidestep the price hikes, but there is another way that not only costs you nothing but puts money back in your pocket. Widely available now are very smart and easy to use energy monitors that you can add to your home office to track what all your devices are doing, devices that can power off all your standby devices and let you know what your top-end super gaming rig is pulling. When you next decide to upgrade you might find yourself checking the power consumption of your CPU and GPU, power supply and peripherals, not something many of us have focused on in the past.
There are some amazing technologies today that can merely sip power as needed, and analogous to Miles Per Gallon, you might be looking to go for range with your next purchase.
Stay safe out there and stay warm this winter and look to clever technology to get us out of our over-reliance on our thousand-year-old habit of burning stuff to keep the lights on.
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BOO! Yes, it's that time of the year again, the spookiest and most frightening night approaches. Once again, we're launching a new game jam to celebrate Halloween, and not surprisingly, the theme is to make a scary or spooky game using AppGameKit Studio or Classic. Once again, how you interpret the theme is up to you ? Will it be a zombie fest, or full of ghost and ghoulies? You decide!
As before, the games will be voted on by the public, so make the best game you can and scare the daylights out of them!
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The last few weeks have seen the addition of more goodness into the GameGuru Classic universe with the introduction of real time object highlighting with new LUA commands and the long-awaited support for Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM), which is available to anyone who knows how to change the shader of an entity. For more details of the POM technique you can check out our previous news blogs and for a visual explanation you can check out our YouTube broadcasts which demonstrate the effect standalone and inside a cool Forest demo level created by a member of our awesome community.
Until more new features are ready for release we are on standby to accept any new bug reports you may find in this well-established game-maker and you can post them directly to us on our GitHub Issues Board
And finally if you can, join us for the latest news and chat about both the Classic and MAX universes on our YouTube live broadcast every Wednesday at 7pm BST/2pm EST/10am PST
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Quick on the heels of the last slew of behaviours for GameGuru MAX are even more behaviours for you to use in your game levels, covering a variety of different areas. We were aware that the number of logic you can employ in your games was starting to balloon and the old category system of dumping most of them into the objects folder was not granular enough, so we have added categories for effects, puzzle and RPG to the mix. We also moved some behaviours that are better suited to these new categories and added engine code so your older level can still find the behaviour, even if the script has since moved to a better location ?
You can probably guess from this expansion that we have started to eyeball the next two game genres for our game-maker, namely RPG games and PUZZLE games ?
Logic will come first and you can check out Broadcast 112 for a visual look at how these new categories and behaviours work. The next block of work centres around your front-end control for RPG, such as in-game 2D screens for controlling items, inventories, shops, trading, chests, etc. Rather than hard code or bake set pieces, we are looking to expand the Screen Editor to give you all the control and provide some templates to get you started. This work will take some time but once we have something to show, we will include it in a future broadcast and continue the reveals from there.
In other news, we have not neglected our mission to fix bugs as we go and have made important fixes to the physics system to better represent convex shapes, and to the particle system to retain all geometric forms created in the Particle Editor tool that now comes free with GameGuru MAX core.
Finally, work is proceeding well with the DirectX 12 conversion, with almost all components running well. The last holdout has been a strange glitch on some early AMD cards and required a little bartering with a community member to physically swap graphics cards with a team member to reproduce it. The member in question received his replacement through the post just fine and was pleased with his newer higher spec card and the team member in question now has a lovely crashing engine to fix; a win:win for everyone.
We anticipate this to be the last fix before we can update the public source code to GameGuru MAX and move on to more exciting things such as performance boosts from upscaling technology and the very exciting Virtual Reality support.
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Join us for our weekly live broadcasts where we’ll share our development progress and host our live Q&A covering all things Classic and MAX! We look forward to seeing you on our YouTube channel every Wednesday at 7pm BST/2pm EST/10am PST
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It's time for our monthly round up of what's new and exciting on the Game Creator store. Firstly, let's take a look at some great models for GameGuru Classic from Teabone.
Call home with this awesome phone model
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Add some extras to your city scenes with these great road cones
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Also for GameGuru MAX and on offer at the moment, are these useful Sewer pieces from long time user Wizard Of Id
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That's it for our round up this month but don't forget to visit the Game Creator store for thousands of great models and sprites for GameGuru Classic, GameGuru MAX and AppGameKit.
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This month we catch up with David Mack of Blue Tang Studio, the developer behind Aquillanto, a super-tight platformer with a reactive style of play and a huge variety of unique and fun challenges
Firstly, he tells us how his game dev journey started.
“Like many here I began my journey into developing games with AMOS, which was a basic programming language developed for the Commodore Amiga computer back in the 90's when I was 20. It was a time where video games felt so magic and I was super keen to code my own. In particular I found the platformers Leander, Super Frog, Fire and Ice, etc., really fun to play. I got coding... and then life took over. Fast forward 20-ish years(!) and I stumbled across TheGameCreators and AppGameKit and, being inexpensive software, I decided to give it a go. I was instantly impressed with just how much it could handle. Back in the Amiga days I could get a dozen sprites moving on screen but with AppGameKit (and modern PCs) I could literally have thousands and thousands! This leap in performance sparked my interest in game dev once again and around March 2014 I started coding what would become Aquillanto!
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Fast forward about 8.5 years of working weekends and evenings and then working full time on it for the last 6 months ?and I am finally ready to launch AQUILLANTO! It's like an 8/16bit platformer on steroids and in HD! Gameplay is action-packed, dynamic and re-active. It has:
- 3 Worlds
- 40 Levels
- 120 Missions
- 100's of carefully crafted challenges
- 30+ monsters with reactive behaviours
- Dynamic Boss fights (they are epic!)
- 11 million combinations of magic pen
- ... but only 1 golden combination!
The release date is 13th October and I can't wait!”
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Aquillanto will be available on Steam and can be added to your Steam wish list if you like so you’ll know as soon as it goes live ? Take a look at the Trailer or the Level Playthrough too!
David explains what’s next for him!
“The next steps are to manage the launch of Aquillanto and help anyone with queries, etc. Then... a rest!!! I need to see what the world looks like again!!! After that... who knows... but I think there's another game in me somewhere!
Before I go I want to say a big thanks to forum member Adam Biser who coded a brilliant Steam plugin for AppGameKit - without it I would not have been able to do the steam achievements in Aquillanto. Also, a big thank you to the TGC team for their support – appreciated ? And finally a big thank you to the numerous TGC forum members who encouraged me and offered help when I got stuck!”
Follow David and the progress of Aquillanto on TikTok or Twitter
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