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In a cloudless sky the heat incessantly sears down, relentlessly sun bleaching every exposed surface and the sound of the pop song ‘walking on sunshine’ increases the feeling of being barbecued. A high pitched “ping” breaks the mood, waking the slumbering individual from their relaxed and immobile state. “Ah, it’s an email from the office!” they grumble ? A quick type of some characters and a reply is dispatched back at the speed of light.
A sip of water, a smothering of sun cream and very soon they are nodding back to sleep in their island paradise… It’s amazing how we can manage our work/life balance in these modern times ?
We should be careful not be a slave to these technologies and should have clear times when to work and when to relax, otherwise what’s the point of it all?
If you’re lucky to have a vacation this year, make sure you’re there in the present moment with your family and friends, and maybe leave the little black slab in the hotel safe for most of the time ?
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We are pleased to report that work on the newly updated 64-bit supported repository for GameGuru Classic is progressing really well - and quickly too thanks to some fantastic community support from the magnificent Cybernesence and Preben.
More will be revealed as the changes and fixes go through the final testing process, but we are excited to see an early take-up for access to the Classic source code and it’s fair to say the update we are releasing shortly will be very exciting!
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For the low down on GameGuru Classic, users can now tune into our weekly live broadcasts on YouTube to hear what is happening in both the Classic and MAX universes.
Join us every Wednesday at 7pm BST/2pm EST/10am PST
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The GameGuru MAX team have been hard at work on several fronts in the last month, some of which we are keeping secret a while longer, but we can reveal it has something to do with the creation of structures. Watch this space!
However, news we can shout loudly about is that we have been working on improving the animation and weapon system of GameGuru MAX to accommodate a new Booster Pack that we are sure you will love to get your hands on.
For the longest time, most GameGuru MAX users have had to stick with the animations and weapon choices provided out of the box, which is fine when you are just getting started. That said, at some point you want your game to look and feel unique to match your creativity, which means changing how soldiers, attackers, zombies and other objects animate. We knew that the first step was to find a top artist to create lots of animations for you and provide them as an official DLC, but what we discovered during the process is that MAX needed more control of how those animations are chosen, what the animations can be employed to do, and above all, ensure it is easy to do.
To that end, as well as preparing a new Booster Pack, we are updating the core functionality to introduce a new Animation Library feature that, even without the extra animations, taps into over 250 animations already provided in GameGuru MAX.
To make this development complete, as weapons (and tools) are instrumental in the interplay between characters, players and animations, ie there is no point running an animation of a worker hammering at a wall if there is no hammer being held, we have extended the weapon system further to support tools as well as weapons and made sure any tools added could also be used by the player. We also created a Technical Guide to show users how they can make their own melee weapons and tools.
We are excited to share this with you - and we’re looking forward to expanding the capabilities of both these systems as more ideas come flooding in from our awesome community.
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Finally, a heads up! We are channelling more of our resources into development and bug fixing so instead of supporting and juggling multiple delivery platforms we will spend more time on making our products great!
To help achieve this we'll be issuing all GameGuru MAX updates for both the core product and DLC via Steam only - all non-Steam users will be given a Steam key for any products they own.
We’ll be phasing this in between now and the end of the year but thought it best to give an early heads up!
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Here’s our quick round up of what's new and hot on the Game Creator Store for GameGuru MAX and GameGuru Classic right now.
Add a little element of horror to your GameGuru MAX games with these excellent cobwebs by 42 Pixels.
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What about shaking things up a little, with this great FOV script by Teabone, giving your Classic games a new look.
How about modernising the kitchen with Campana productions' kitchen appliance pack for GameGuru Classic?
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If these suggestions don't inspire you, why not simply browse the Game Creator store for ideas and inspiration ?
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GAME JAM TIME!
Congratulations to Virtual Nomad who has won the latest Itch.io Game Jam with the excellent submission ‘Mars Keeper’. The prize is the entire catalogue of JimJams games (all developed in AppGameKit) but, as they already owned some of the titles, Virtual Nomad asked that the duplicate games go to the second place winner Godling - now that's sportsmanship.
Our next AppGameKit Game Jam launches on 12 August and we’re asking you to come up with a tool that will help your fellow game-makers create games - how you approach that is up to you! Will it be a graphic tool, or some clever way of making 3D worlds, or something else entirely? It's up to you :-O
If you want to join any of our jams, why not check out our growing community on itch.io
or head straight over to the itch.io AGK game jam page, register and get coding!
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This month we catch up again with Riley Cairns aka C4ever08 aka Casper ?
Riley is based in Owen Sound, Ontario in Canada (about three hours away from Toronto) where he went to the Toronto Film School for Graphic Arts & Design. It was a two-year course and right now is setting up his own graphic design business. That’s in addition to being a father of five (three daughters and two sons), so it’s fair to say he’s always busy ?but he always finds time for his game dev.
Riley first got into game development in 2015. Armed with no knowledge at all, he bought GameGuru Classic on Steam to try it out and spent a couple of years on a learning curve while he got used to it and then went on to use it to create a project called ‘Dietara’.
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Dietara is a Medieval open world RPG he started developing in early 2018 and is one of the main projects he’s worked on in GameGuru Classic.
Riley explains, “I was always in love with medieval games such as Skyrim, Two Worlds and the Stronghold series and wanted to create my own game with its own story and lore. At the time I knew I could get the attention of some of the well-known GameGuru devs so I put the game up on the Forums for feedback and from there it kinda got a lot of attention ? The game is still in development, as it is a 20 level game with over 30 or more quests to do. However, with the release of GameGuru Max I have now moved Dietara to this engine and I will be doing a whole new rebuild with a 5km map and lots more once RPG is added.”
He continued, “Now I'm working on a game called A.R.C - Artificial.Resistance.Corporation. A.R.C is a first person shooter located in the A.R.C research facility in the Gale crater on Mars. This game will feature three campaigns, and each campaign has three to four levels to complete. You start at the hub level where you can load into the three campaign missions and, as an A.I humanoid, your main mission is to take down the A.R.C and destroy their chance of taking control of the human population. A.R.C has been in development since May 2022 and was made for a contest hosted by Duchenkuke and Mipastu. Then I added a 3-level campaign demo for people to play on the forums.”
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Riley is also well known for a game he made called ‘Anthropocene Epoch’, another sci-fi shooter game he released on Steam last January and it’s one of his bigger successes ?
What’s next for Riley? “Well, I recently released ‘The Dam Update’ for ‘Anthropocene Epoch’ which includes a new level and a game launcher using Graphix’s tool Xinstall, plus a bunch of new fixes and add-ons, and I’ll further be working on further development for ‘Dietara’ along with ‘A.R.C’ and in any spare time I hope to create more games in the future ? – keep an eye on my YouTube channel”.
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And Finally……
Reports of the TGC Forums death are greatly exaggerated….!
We can officially confirm at the present time there are no plans to stop or close the forums. They are a rich seam of information, advice and support. As the world moves on and Discord takes over, we may have to move our conversations over to this platform but for now our Forums remain as they are and are there for our communities ?
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