For those who have an interest in (or passion for!) games development, it only takes a handful of weeks to realise that performance is a key factor in the games you make. Being able to run your game loop sixty, ninety or one hundred and twenty times per second is the deciding factor on how responsive and smooth your game feels; and by inference how polished the game experience feels.

Over the decades there have been many ways that crafty coders have coaxed a speed boost for their games; often by hacking ingenious shortcuts to provide content that would otherwise take weeks to render to your screen if the laws of physics are to be consulted.

In more recent times a new weapon has emerged in the game developers toolbox called Upscaling ?

Not a new technique by any means, but one that has seen considerable advances over the years and is now approaching a state that seems to have the magical power to increase the speed of your game without compromising quality. In the past quality was the first to suffer when you rendered a small rectangle of pixels and then stretched them to fit a larger area. Well, it seems the tech boffins at all the major GPU manufacturers have cottoned onto the idea of using their vast processing power and a little machine learning to bring back the quality and keeping the speed boost.

In a world that strives for more photorealism in games, this little party trick could very well give the power-up we need to bring great looking faster experiences to more gamers around the world?

Just when you thought GameGuru Classic was settling nicely into its bug-free and self-assured existence of easy and fun game making, the distant sound of hooves cause the community to look up from their keyboards and squint at the horizon to find the source. For it is the source that comes a riding!

That's right! After almost 2 years of steady bug-fixing of the GameGuru Classic private repo, and the release of the Early Access version of GameGuru MAX into the wild, the team now have the opportunity to change up a gear on GameGuru Classic to support a community that is still very much going strong.

In May we looked at the logistics of updating the public repository to the very latest version of the source code and updating key aspects of the code to ensure GameGuru Classic remains a capable tool for its community of game makers.

We are pleased to say work commences this month and you are likely to see the fruits before too long! Tune into next month’s newsletter for all the nitty gritty and our plans going forward ?

There was little rest for the GameGuru MAX team in May as they produced quite a plethora of goodies to enhance your game making adventures. Firstly, a sizable chunk of bugs were organized, prioritised and the worst offenders squashed in our pursuit of keeping the product stable and increasingly compatible with more systems. This work, together with performance optimization will ensure that no matter what variant of the minimum specifications you have, you will get a great experience learning how to make your own games without the niggling hassle of coding or modelling. Unless you want to of course!

The big ticket item however was the release of our first Game Kit, which is a template for one of the ways we wish to deliver content in the future. Unlike DLC's released in the past, a Game Kit is a collection of all the different elements you need to make a game in a specific theme. We have chosen the Aztec Empire for our first foray, and by providing ancient and modern scenery, characters, collectables and weapons, you will be able to make your own Aztec flavoured game with this kit.

If you need more game assets, we doubled down and threw in an extra goody in the form of an integrated Marketplace that opens up GameGuru MAX to third party asset stores. That, combined with the model importer, enables you to explore the world for content you need for your next game idea and bring it into GameGuru MAX. We have also been lucky enough to deeply integrate the 'Game Creator Store' and items purchased there can be downloaded directly into your object and sound library without even leaving the software.

Look out for more fixes, performance boosts and cool content in the weeks to come - but next we reveal THE WINNERS of our Real World Game Level Competition! ?

The competition was based on using the Terrain Editor height map import feature in GameGuru MAX which cleverly allows you to bring in real world height map data to your game level's design.

Yogesh Namdev takes first place with his game 'Indian Strike Force'! The game uses height map data from the Jammu and Kashmir region in India and includes an intro video to show the heightmap, and has great gameplay and level design.

In a close second place is Dave Tummly with his game based around the famous Horseshoe bend in the Grand Canyon.

Ali Abdulrahman is awarded third place with his game based in the Amazon rainforest.

Seasoned community member Gary Trickett took the competition to a whole different level with his game ‘Special Delivery’ and in the final winning slot is Martin Oliver with his game based on the great wall of China.

A MASSIVE well done to all our winners and to everyone else who submitted entries – you can read more about the winning entries HERE 

Look out later this month for the next bug fix update for AppGameKit Studio and AppGameKit Classic and we’re hoping, with a following wind and a bit of overtime, to sneak in a few new commands too!

If it all goes to plan, we’ll be adding noise generation commands, some additional commands for Box2D and possibly even tweening commands ? However, these might change, somebody might be off ill, the bus might be late, etc - so don’t hold us to it but we’ll do our very best!

That’s all against a background of fixing bugs including investigating a number of bug reports relating to the IDE and problems when exporting. If you have been affected by any issues please report them asap on the GitHub issues list or in the AppGameKit Discord channel.

We all love a challenge, and this one is AMAZing! Ok, well, maybe we're overselling it but we're very excited to be running the first of what we intend to be a series of regular game jams on itch.io.

For now, the jams are for games made with AppGameKit Classic or AppGameKit Studio and will be based on a chosen theme. For our first outing we're running a maze theme, and while it's really just a bit of fun and a chance to show off your coding talents, we're also offering a few small prizes ?

There are still a few days to join in the first one – head over to the itch.io AGK game jam page register and get coding!

This month we hear from CJ (aka Casigus on the TGC forum) about his journey into game-making.  Take it away CJ!

“Outside game-making my world prior to the pandemic and lockdowns centred around hectic booze, cigs and headaches. But when that first lockdown came I realised something had to change and so I decided to ditch the booze and turn my focus back to the creative fires. I’d always been a creative type; creativity has driven me to keep going. For me, life is a constant battle with depression, something that effects every aspect of my life.

And so there I was, lost in lockdown, when I found Twitch. I made amazing new connections with people, sharing a love of both the creative and the world of gaming, I became a part of a wonderful community and decided to give them something back.

So, I made my first game. An RPG, a very silly, like seriously silly game, but an immense amount of fun. A year later I decided that the game needed a sequel and so I began to play around with GameGuru Classic, really pushing it to see what it could do. During this process another game was made and then streamed live on Twitch to around 400 lovely people. It was an amazing feeling that made me realise I want to create something original from my own heart and head.

Then I tried GameGuru MAX! GameGuru Classic is a great fun tool but when you compare it to MAX, well it’s a game changer. GameGuru Max is visually stunning, the lighting, the landscapes, it’s a fantastic engine. It gives anyone and everyone with the mind set to create something a way to do it. GameGuru MAX is an amazing tool and I'm so excited to see its continued development. 

So, Titanic has always been present in my life, something I was emotionally connected to. I never fully understood why but I just knew I wanted to do something with it and through GameGuru MAX that time had arrived. Titanic isn’t just history, or a story. It's the stuff of legends, something that I wanted to explore, to give people a taste of what happened, to tell a story that will leave the player touched, and maybe even inspired to look into history themselves. 

So unsurprisingly my game is called ‘Titanic: Historia’ and the important part of that is the “Historia.” In the game world and story, Historia is a foundation that explores lost and forgotten History. They gather “memory” stones which in this game’s narrative hold the memories of past events. Historia exists to find as many as these stones as possible. In this game, we follow a character named Lily who was recruited by Historia to be connected to one of these memory stones which takes her on a journey from the construction of Titanic, all the way to the sinking.”

CJ created a video of his game exclusively for TGC newsletter

CJ continues, “The ‘Titanic: Historia’ series will build up to a grand epic game set in the same world, following some of the same characters in which the memory stones have given rise to a new age of science and technology.  However, it’s a forbidden science that eventually leads to the collapse of everything we know. There is a big game plan for ‘Titanic: Historia’ - all the way to an epic post-apocalyptic world where time and space have been shattered. I hope ‘Titanic: Historia’ will be the first in an anthology. 

 

My game has two main driving forces: the creative aspect to tell this epic story but also to be a fund raiser. We are all now living through a cost-of-living crisis but even before this hit I was always on the front line of poverty and there have been days where I’ve not had food or electric, but despite this I’ve endured and carried on. The dream, and the reason I want to share this, is because I want this game to fund a new PC. The one I have meets the minimum requirement spec for GameGuru MAX but if you take a look at what I’ve done with it you’ll understand what I could do with more power to play with. I hope if this game works out to be something really special, it could lead to doing exactly that.

I'd also like to take this moment to thank everyone for their interest in the game. It’s given me a fresh new lease of life moving forward. TheGameCreators community are a mix of multi-national people from all around the world and it’s been a honour and a privilege to talk and share ideas with these fantastic people.”

You can follow CJ’s progress with ‘Titanic: Historia’ on: