Happy Birthday to us! TheGameCreators are 21 years old this month!
Way back in March 1999, as the new Millennium was almost upon us, an aspiring young lad from Wigan registered his own company in the name of a product he’d been busily working on. That company was Dark Basic Software Ltd and that lad from humble beginnings was Lee Bamber, our CEO!
Over the following two decades the company got a refreshing rebrand, the lad from Wigan moved to the wild coast of Wales, and we grew in manpower and experience.
Whilst names and locations may have changed, the fire and ambition to create easy to use game making software still roars in the hearts and minds of the founders.
On this 21-year journey we’ve enjoyed creating many software products, made lifelong friendships from all over the world and been amazed and inspired by you - our creative community.
We’re excited for the future as we dive into more development with both GameGuru Max and AppGameKit Studio ?
Well it's been quite a roller-coaster ride here with the announcement of our new product, GameGuru MAX, set for release in September. This new 64-bit game making tool will come with a new UI, new terrain and rendering system and plenty of features to take your game making ideas to the next level.
You will find plenty of information about this new project on the forums, Steam discussions and our Sneak Peek video series.
We want to assure everyone in the GameGuru community that development on bug fixes and functionality will continue on GameGuru Classic. Classic is the choice for 32-bit game making for lower-spec PCs, while GameGuru MAX will target newer 64-bit systems running higher-end graphics hardware and specs.
There is absolutely no requirement to upgrade, but if you are interested in learning more you can check out the GameGuru MAX Sneak Peek videos or visit the GameGuru MAX pre-order page
GameGuru DLCs
We have a number of DLC promotions planned in March, including deals on:
If you are starting a game project requiring assets from the above collections, look out for these great discounts in March.
Development work continues in the world of AppGameKit Studio and we’ve some significant updates coming your way soon including:
- Vulkan engine for iOS
- Vulkan engine for MacOS
- Vulkan engine for Linux
- Vulkan engine for Android (currently in development)
- iOS storyboard support - the new way splash screens have to be handled with iOS apps
- Android API29 support
- Editor bugs and tweaks – we’re working through the recently reported bug reports and building a more stable version!
All these improvements will be made available in a new build later in March ?
If you’ve still to move to AppGameKit Studio then don’t miss the 30% discount we’re running on Studio until 16 March.
Another great deal will be on the AppGameKit Studio Particle Editor - it will be on offer for two weeks from the 9 March through to 23 March.
YouTube Tutorials
Check out the new video tutorial series on our YouTube account showing how a simple physics game is being created with AppGameKit Studio. We demonstrate how the game is started from scratch through to publishing it as an app onto both the Apple and Google app stores. Subscribe to the YouTube channel here to follow the series.
We’ll be releasing a new update to AppGameKit Classic later in March. The main improvement will be the support of iOS storyboards; a new way splash screens are handled.
DLC
Don’t miss these March deals!
For a 60% discount on AppGameKit Classic check back on 16 March when it will be on offer for two weeks!
Made with AppGameKit!
In this feature we look at some of the great apps and games made with AppGameKit……
This month’s guest developer is Tim Pyle, who works for NASA as a multimedia Producer at Caltech in Pasadena, California, USA.
Tim’s primary job is in a communications and education group doing CG animation, video production, and graphic design. He sees app development as a good tool for communicating with the public in a new way.
Over the years, Tim has illustrated a number of high-profile exoplanets that NASA has discovered including Kepler-186f, Kepler-452b, and a number of images of the TRAPPIST-1 system. He's also produced a lot of educational astrophysics videos including this fun one where GLaDOS from Portal gets installed at NASA.
Prior to NASA, Tim worked for many years in Hollywood doing VFX & character animation for shows like Invader Zim and Children of Dune. He developed online games for Disney for a while, but app production has mostly been a hobby for him. Tim’s most successful personal game was Hogoword on Roku boxes many years ago. Tim recently released a personal Steam game Dum-Dum last year that was produced with AppGameKit.
Tim’s latest app is NASA Selfies. We asked him about the challenges of making this app and why he chose AppGameKit to create it.
"Developing an app that runs well on a wide range of devices is tricky. This did provide a challenge given the way the app captures its selfie images. After a user takes a picture of their face, the app scales and rotates it into place, sandwiching it between a space image & an astronaut suit with a semi-transparent face plate. The result is then captured from the buffer and saved using PrintImage. However, while the app develops its images using a 16x9 template, my original process of capturing that image ended up being at the aspect ratio of the phone. For example, producing a selfie on a phone wider than 16x9 resulted in a 16x9 image with black bars on the left & right sides. Fortunately, the tool was there to crop the final image properly regardless of a given phone's aspect ratio. I just needed to learn it!
Developing this app also taught me the importance of permission checking. Prior to properly requesting a user's permission to access their camera, I couldn't figure out why the app was crashing some devices. A plea on the AppGameKit forum ultimately resulted in one of AppGameKit's developers Paul Johnston kindly helping me find the problem.
The goal of this app was to bring astronomical content to the public in a fun, engaging way. There are different types of space images available when creating a selfie. Some have really fascinating stories behind them, such as a star creating a bow shock as it travels through a nebula, new stars forming inside clumps of gas and dust, and a star's outer layers being left behind after it has exploded as a supernova.
For each image in the app, we include a brief description, a longer multi-paragraph explanation, and a link to even more information about it online. Our hope is that if the app engages people, they may be introduced to a lot of interesting astronomical science and imagery that they may not have been previously aware of. Of course, if someone's using the app just to put their pet into space, that's absolutely fine as well!”
You can download the NASA Selfies app for FREE here:
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