For anyone who has been in the games industry long enough, it can be amusing to see an old idea come full circle and re-enter the arena through a side door in the crude disguise of a new idea ?

It is certainly true that innovation largely depends on the foundations and creations that came before it, but a new idea has come strolling along that might give the old timers pause to think.

You will no doubt have heard of NFTs in one sphere or another. The term, meaning 'non fungible tokens', is not some exotic digital mushroom but is in fact perhaps the basis of a future ecomony as we march towards the technological fantasy of uploading our brains to the cloud and living forever. Back on earth, and right now, you can simply think of them as unique digital assets you can own and that cannot be stolen from you as they are backed by the same amazing technology used to keep track of cryptocurrency.

It's taken a few years but the champions of NFTs are starting to amass their armies ready to do battle. Quite literally in fact, as it is likely you will get your first NFT when you play one of the crop of next generation games that actually grant you ownership of real estate and digital items within the game universe. If the game you buy and spend time in becomes a hit, your NFT grows in value and in all likelihood, you can sell your NFT for more than you paid for the game.

Welcome to the future!

AppGameKit Studio and AppGameKit Classic both get updates in late September and you can look forward to some massive bug fixes AND some great new features. These include the addition of new In-App Purchase commands to deal with subscriptions with multiple plans and offers. So, for example, you will have the ability to offer time limited subscriptions (ie 1 month, 3 month, 6 month) with a free trial. This provides much more flexibility when it comes to offering in-app purchases in your apps.

We’re also adding commands to return the size and position of any display cut-outs on Android so your content doesn’t cover pinhole cameras or cut-outs on Android devices and we’re working on adding a GetAppReceipt() command on iOS to return the list of AppStore transactions. This can then be used to determine if a user is eligible for a free trial when signing up to a subscription. Text shader commands are being added too, which will provide complete control over text rendering.

Full details of all the new features and squashed bugs will be released when the update is available at the end of the month ?

While you are waiting you might want to take a look at the Animation Sheet Editor (Animshed) which is available now on Steam ;-)

Next, a quick shout out to our very own Dave Hawkins. It's always good to see developers using our products to make commercial games and Zannon by JimJams Games (Dave’s company) has just launched on Steam. Dave says that Zannon is a retro-themed vertical shooter and takes a lot of inspiration from the classic arcade games of the 1980s and early 1990s.

JimJams' love of this genre shines through here and they've created a fast-paced action shooter, which shows just what you can make with a little effort using AppGameKit ?

Finally, the 3rd Itch.io game jam is well under way and we're looking forward to seeing what our talented entrants come up with. This time the challenge is to create an App that aids game creation. As always, we expect the competition to be high and, don't forget, the winners are chosen by a public vote, so you can help decide who wins when the competition closes on the 15th September 2022.

To get involved (or just find out more) head straight over to the itch.io AGK game jam page register and get coding!

As regular readers of our blogs will now know, we finally released the long awaited 64-bit version of GameGuru Classic to everyone’s delight!  It was a feature that took years in the requesting and the amazing talents of community members to see it through to a general release. The update comes together with access to the source code which is ready and waiting for you on our GitHub page – just in case you wish to take your skills into the mysterious world of C++ coding ?

We are also fortunate to have seen the addition of a few new features including an improved screen space ambient occlusion system called HBAO, additional controls over LUT values in the final render, and additional saturation and sepia controls in test game. With the source now available to everyone, expect to see a few more treats, along with our regular bug fixing work in the months to come.

If you don’t already know we now cover GameGuru Classic in our weekly live broadcasts on YouTube, so for the latest news and chat both about the Classic and MAX universes join us every Wednesday at 7pm BST/2pm EST/10am PST on our YouTube channel

Finally, we are pleased to announce the release of Cine|Guru - our first collaboration with Tanner Productions.

Cine|Guru adds the often-requested option to add cinematic cut-scenes to GameGuru Classic, providing all the scripts and camera tricks you'll need to provide that extra gloss for your games.  You can generate these live in GameGuru Classic or even use 3rd party screen capture software to create videos of the action for later use.

This new DLC add-on is a revolutionary asset and script pack that gives you the tools to create your own in-game cinematics and scripted sequences for GameGuru Classic games. From fully-controllable cameras, to actors that move, perform and speak according to your instructions. Cine|Guru gives you the power to create stunning story sequences, all without barely touching any code.

You can find out more by visiting the official GameGuru Classic CineGuru Steam page or taking a look at the Cine|Guru video

It’s been busy in the GameGuru MAX universe with a number of releases, announcements and additions to your game-making space. The first was a successful release of the Animation Booster Pack, adding more animations to the stock collection, the re-factoring of the Particles Editor into the Particles Booster Pack and making the Particle Editor tool itself free as part of the core GameGuru MAX product.

We have also made a commitment not to add functionality into booster packs or game kits and new DLC will only contain additional assets to supplement your game asset collections. All functionality and features will be part of the core so anyone with GameGuru MAX will have access to all functionality, with nothing hidden behind a pay wall.

We added a slew of new behaviours, far more than we think anyone expected, well over 30 in all. We are so ramped to add more behaviours in the future that we have made the decision to break up the behaviour library into a few more categories and begin the work of offering RPG and PUZZLE specific logic, the first few steps in offering the ability to create your own RPG and Puzzle games.

The meat of our work in the last month however has been on the conversion to DirectX 12 and, while we had our arms elbow deep in updating large chunks of the source code, we set up a public repository for GameGuru MAX to make the source code available to anyone who wishes to view or contribute to the project.

As excellent as our team are we are still very much a small (though perfectly formed) team and, as has been proven with GameGuru Classic, even a handful of community contributions can bring great things. We are still putting the finishing touches to this work and will release more news on availability of the DirectX 12 version in the weeks to come.

Looking ahead there is lots of activity here in the engine room; some VR work, a new tool called the Building Editor in the works and some exciting tinkering with behaviours.

 

And finally, we must take our hats off to the amazing submissions in our recent Screenshot Competition - so much imagination and craft on display. We are eager to share with you all the entries to give you a sense of what your adopted community can do. As with all competitions, there needed to be some winners and here are the top five.

For this month’s store summary take a look at our GameGuruMAX-ready game bundles. Already available in the GameGuru MAX Booster bundle, you can buy many of the collections on The Game Creator store, just containing the elements you need. Looking for a Sci-Fi medical bay, or a modern hospital, check out the medical bundle

Looking to get outdoors with your games, the camping bundle includes everything you'll need to make a great home away from home.

If these suggestions don't inspire you, why not simply browse the Game Creator store for ideas and inspiration ?

This month we catch up with John Douglas, aka jd_zoo, an avid fan of AppGameKit Studio and the creator of Automation ?

John works as an electrical designer for an engineering firm in Halifax, Nova Scotia and has been programming in his spare time since he was young.  John explains how Automation came about.

“The idea for ‘Automation’ first came from the process of learning PLC programming and thinking back to The Incredible Machine series of games. There was an early Flash iteration called the Logic Simulator, but then came kids and life got busy before one day seeing AppGameKit advertised and lo and behold the programming bug was back ?

Coding on evenings and weekends, it took four years before Automation was released on Steam. 

My kids were also an inspiration to create Automation. My daughters are talented artists and having them contribute to this has been the biggest highlight a dad could ask for.  

There are a lot of plans for Automation in the future and I plan to dedicate a lot of time to updates, but during this journey I have also amassed a long list of game ideas. Maybe it’s a midlife crisis type thing, I’m not sure, but I am excited to keep creating new games and learning new things along the way. For the immediate future, outside of Automation updates, I plan to take advantage of AppGameKit’s mobile development for my next release. 

Coming from Canada, my family tends to take the summers quite seriously and spends as much time as possible outdoors in the warm weather. We have been lucky to get some camping and travelling recently but will be back into the school routine very soon which is when coding seems to happen most – watch this space!

A big thank you to everyone at TheGameCreators forum for all the help and great feedback I have received over the years and feel free to visit my constantly-under-construction website”