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Today we're releasing Version 2.0.17 to all AppGameKit owners. It's packed with exciting new features and stability improvements. We're sure you'll enjoy playing with the new features, from the new 3D height map terrain system to the support of the industry standard .fbx support. There's also support for new advert formats, local notifications and more flexible arrays. Here's the full breakdown of all the changes;

Been a wonderful flurry of fixing this last day, including a few extra scripts to show how you can create player shield energy which protects the players own health when damaged, and also shows how you can protect an entity from damage if they are attacked by a specific weapon.  A sample level has been created called HealthTypes.fpm and will show both of these techniques, giving you both an Uzi and some Stones, but only let you explode the barrel full of fuel with the Uzi and never the stones, no matter how many you throw at the barrel.  I added the Zombie for comedic effect, but you could do the same to him as well with the same technique.

We'll soon be releasing AppGameKit V2.0.17 to all our AppGameKit 2 developers. While you're waiting for its impending release you might want to re-discover this great retro game made with AppGameKit.

Echoes+ will make your eyes bleed as you try and remain focused on the myriad of neon coloured enemies spiralling around your small space craft. This free game is a great example of what AppGameKit is capable of and also shows the wide range of platforms you can take your game to. 

With the weekend behind us and a small mountain of forum posts, emails and support tickets to get through, Monday is shaping up to be a big one. Some nice surprises, however, including a store release that I helped in a very small way, showing a glimpse of isometric gaming in GameGuru. When you set the third person camera controls to a top-down view, the camera collision will automatically ignore near-camera obstacles to keep the perspective fixed.

Work continues on the V1.12 release which is now several days into beta testing, and has already yielded a few welcome fixes including an improvement to the occlusion system, which now correctly identifies the actual screen size of any entity in determining when to occlude it due to distance.  At the same time, the occasional flicker effect on entity visibility has also been dealt with meaning you can ramp Occlusion Slide to 100 now and get a flicker free experience whilst still enjoying maximum real-time occlusion in your games.

If you missed our live weekly Twitch Broadcast, you can watch it again and learn about the new content we will shortly be adding to the Fantasy Pack DLC, including new characters that can be broken up and reassembled in the Character Creator, how to change character default weapons via the FPE and a few new weapons you may not have seen before.

It's been a stuttering start to the coding year, but we've finally assembled a respectable list of fixes, which have now entered beta testing and should be with you real soon. We are also taking this opportunity to make a big update to the Fantasy DLC pack, so existing owners will soon receive new characters, better creature animations and better scripts.  As a bonus, all the new characters are parted out the Character Creator too so you can make combinations of your own.

For a list of the fixes our beta testers are currently scrutinising, here they are:

One of the biggest difficulties with making an isometric game in GameGuru has been the camera collision system which will zoom in past any obstruction to stay focused on the player, but in isometric games that require the hero to walk under a bridge or structure, this resulted in a rapid and genre breaking zoom of the camera to the back of the characters head. Hardly desirable. Thanks to the work of an artist creating plenty headway in this genre, I was encouraged to help add a new feature which disables this behaviour when the camera settings are configured for top-down isometric gameplay.

Alas I cannot reveal the cool graphics that accompany this concept, not until the artist is ready with the final shots, but I could snatch a small example of the kind of technique I describe, and you can appreciate that when the character walks under the beam, you don't want the camera shifting from its fixed perspective. This rigid camera defines the game type and the level design choices for the game developer, and ensuring its integrity means you will soon be playing and making much more than FPS games.  This feature will be part of the V1.12 update coming soon.

This week we're moving the often overcomplicated and candid GameGuru dev blog over to our main news feed, allowing insights into the development process to reach further and wider. The news feed hooks into the main TGC site as well as Facebook and Twitter posts, so you will never miss an opportunity to find out what's going on in the world of GameGuru.

Today a well-hidden bug was identified and fixed which caused characters created with the built-in Character Creator module to loose their heads on secondary levels of multi-level standalone games. You may have made many games, never to encounter this one, but you'll be pleased to learn from the next update you never will.  The current update stands at 22 fixes and tweaks, and will be called V1.12, to be released in a few weeks time.

The AppGameKit team are working hard to bring all AppGameKit users a new build later this February. Here's another sneak peek of the gorgeous 3D terrain system. We're currently working hard to optimise the terrain system for mobile devices.

The system can use dynamic skybox objects that draw the sun in the location of the directional light and add the foggy blue horizon colours using a shader.

Earlier today Valve started the Lunar sale on Steam. The whole range of our products are on offer during this sale period so make sure you check it out and grab yourself a bargain!

The best deal is The Game Creators Collection:

Today we have released two of our older flagship products into the open source world.

We're offering all the source code and project files that make up these two elder products and hope that some of our community members will find these resources of use. We wish the projects good luck as we pass the code on. Who knows what might happen when tinkering devs get their hands on them? Only time will tell.

Today's Twitch session has our man Ravey showing you how to expand out from the usual first and third person views and make a top down car driving demo. You'll learn a lot if you watch both videos in this tutorial.

From taking a car object modelled in Blender, importing it into GameGuru and then controlling the car within a game.

Rolling out later in February will be a new version of AppGameKit featuring some very cool features. We're sure you're going to have a lot of fun using them and we cannot wait to see what you create.

An important toolset for any game developer is a great terrain system. AppGameKit will feature commands that make it very easy to generate a terrain on which you can base your games. Here's a screen shot from the current progress on terrain, this first image is a 512x512 terrain matrix which is typical of what many users will use to create a landscape. The colours are generated by a shader based on height which we'll include in a demo when we release V2.0.17

Today we have released a high quality Sci-Fi themed DLC for GameGuru.

This DLC includes over 200 items and is available for purchase from the GameGuru web site here.