We hope you and your families are staying safe and managing during these unprecedented times.

As you may know over the past few weeks the UK games industry has united to include the governments ‘Stay Home, Save Lives’ messaging within highly popular video games and on console dashboards.

‘Games for Carers’ was launched last week to provide frontline staff in the UK with a FREE game or game subscription to unwind with - either for when they get some well-earned down time, or to provide relief for their families.

NHS staff can claim their free game or subscription quickly and securely by visiting the Games For Carers website and entering their NHS email address.

More than 85,000 free games across a wide range of genres, age ratings and platforms will be available to download, including GameGuru and AppGameKit Classic.

We are also donating 5% of all revenue generated by GameGuru MAX during the UK lockdown to the NHS in the UK.

We are proud to play our small part in thanking our frontline NHS heroes for their inspirational work during the Covid-19 crisis.

In this month’s Guest Developer feature we meet Shawn Bower from StarWraith 3D Games.

Shawn lives in Idaho, USA and has been working on games for over 30 years. From a young age space games were a main interest for Shawn and this is a recurring theme in the games he’s made during his career. Shawn is currently working on PC space simulations as well as several mobile titles.

As a previous user of DarkBASIC it was an easy transition into using AppGameKit, porting games from DarkBASIC and starting new projects for mobile devices. Shawn says, “I appreciated AppGameKit’s expanded capabilities, including things like integrated file compression, multi-instance audio playback, 64-bit support, and AppGameKit Studio's introduction of Vulkan support.”

During the conversion of his PC games he created his own code converter which made the process quicker. Another challenge was adding in a multiplayer system that would work with AppGameKit. There was also an initial learning curve, but thanks to AppGameKit's accessibility, after a few months he felt confident in his ability to develop code solutions and what things to watch out for.

We asked Shawn if he gets help making his games. “I do virtually all of the AppGameKit coding along with much of the shader and other coding work.  However, I want to give a big shout out to Ron Erickson for his help in the past with integrating TrackIR in DBPro which was the basis for the revised version updated for AppGameKit.  And for VR which he also wrote a plugin for. I also want to give credit to Jim Burridge for his help early on getting some of the initial pieces in place a few years ago for migrating shaders and to Jan Bögemann ('janbo' on the forum) for his guidance on some questions I had regarding cube mapping/reflections.  When it comes to art, I've created much of it myself but have also hired out for such work.  I do most of the UI and some model/texture work. Norbert Iacob has created most of the ships, cockpits, and several other structures.  Nikolay Ivliev designed many of the commodity and menu item objects.  I've created most of the audio/sound effects while a few samples are licensed from other sources.  Music has mostly been done by Rich Douglas (richdouglas.net) in recent years with a few songs either created by me or other sources from earlier years.

For games themselves, I'm working on a comprehensive update to Arvoch Alliance for the desktop platform and porting to AppGameKit is a primary part of that effort.  The plan is for the game to migrate to 64-bit and Vulkan along with a number of visual and functional improvements.  The outcome of that update may direct some kind of similar effort for Evochron Legacy.

I'm also working on a version of Arvoch (subtitled 'Space Combat') now in open beta, designed for mobile devices.  It features many of the same capabilities and options as the desktop game, but with a touch-optimized interface and rendering changes to better support phones and tablets.  The six degrees of freedom control, zero gravity Newtonian style physics, and advanced combat options of the desktop game are all featured in the mobile version.

I also released and have been updating 'Arvoch Command' which is a real-time strategy space combat game.  This is my first released effort in the RTS genre and is a game I've wanted to make for a long time.  I wanted to create a kind of chess-like game set in space with a consistent set of rules, multi-role ships, and equitable fleet arrangements (without power-ups, levelling, or tech trees, just pure strategy).  So this game features large capital ships (including one command ship used for constructing new ships during battle) along with role-specific smaller ships.  The game has been designed from the ground up for mobile devices, so ship selection, orders, and view control are all handled by touch and the UI menu is adjustable to accommodate various screen sizes.

Other mobile games of note include:

• Sphere Sector - a puzzle game involving angles and energy balancing
• NormanBerry - an overhead tile-based puzzle game
• Aluxiom - a one or two player overhead shooter