TheGameCreators newsletter #5 – March 2019

Happy birthday to us! TheGameCreators is 20 years old this month! The company was formed in March 1999 by co-founders Lee Bamber and Rick Vanner, who met while they worked for Europress, one of Europe's foremost publishers of education software.

Lee and Rick joined forces with Europress CEO, Meash Meakin, in 2012 and brought in marketeer and brand strategist Deborah Ascott-Jones in 2013.

Over the years the team have created many game-making products including Dark Basic, FPS Creator and The 3D Gamemaker but have latterly concentrated their efforts on AppGameKit and GameGuru.

AppGameKit and GameGuru both have established, passionate and loyal communities and by listening and engaging with our users we are continuing to expand the products based on their feedback and needs.

AppGameKit Studio pre-orders are now live!

So far so good - we’ve had a great response to our launch of pre-orders for AppGameKit Studio!  

AppGameKit Studio is the evolutionary child of AppGameKit where we’ve re-imagined the game and app development user interface with an all-in-one work space – we’ve worked hard on it and believe it really does give you everything you need to take your idea from concept to finished game. 

Sorry for the ‘sell’ but we’re super excited about what we have created and looking forward to the feedback from our great community.

AppGameKit Studio features include:

  • Fully integrated user interface
  • Drag & drop assets to visualise your scenes
  • Code with AppGameKit Script
  • Easily browse app media assets
  • Run live debugging sessions
  • Vulcan rendering
  • Access online help
  • ......and lots more!

Take a look at the web page  for more info and also here are the links to our great series of videos explaining how AppGameKit Studio works and what it can do:

PRE-ORDER NOW TO SAVE MONEY AND GET ACCESS TO ALPHA VERSIONS

If you’d like to join us on the journey with AppGameKit Studio you can pre-order in March for $49 and save 50% on the launch price. You also get full access to the alpha versions until we launch in June.

You can still pre-order in April for $59 (so a 40% discount) or in May for $69 when you’ll save 30%!

Pre-order here

To avoid any confusion, we’ve renamed the original AppGameKit ‘AppGameKit Classic’ so it’s easier to differentiate between the two products ?

As you may know, we have now split the repository branches of GameGuru on GitHub to ensure new features are developed on a separate track to the present engine features. This ensures we can focus on building out the features and continue tweaks and fixes without this effort being diluted with a stream of new features. This second track will be tested internally to ensure the features developed there are in a well-rounded and complete state before migrating them to the master branch for release on Steam.

We continue to look for C++ freelancers who can help us with some of the issues reported in our GitHub tracker and we can then put some of the Donations Pot to good use.

If you are interested or know someone who is, please get in touch. More information on the available funds can be found here: https://www.thegamecreators.com/donate/project/1721

Finally, in addition to our regular news feeds and forum activity, you should definitely check out the news put out by Bolt Action Gaming each week, which gives you a quick snapshot summary of everything going on in the GameGuru universe and well worth a read: https://www.thegamecreators.com/post/a-weekly-roundup-of-all-things-gameguru-from-boltaction-gaming-13

GameGuru DLC news

Don't forget we still run great promotions on our GameGuru DLCs so keep an eye out for announcements about the Buildings Pack, Fantasy Pack and Mega Pack 2.

A special member of the community has been working extremely hard on improvements to Mega Pack 3, and thanks to the Donations Pot, we can even pay him a small token for his time.

We are also working on new assets for the Cold War Pack which are looking amazing and will really add to your military and post-war game themes!

Want to contribute?

Nope we’re not asking for money! We’re looking for anyone interested in contributing articles either to our newsletter or websites. Got something to say about the world of apps, games, coding or programming? It could be to share advice or best practise, it might be a warning or how to avoid mistakes, or you may just want to air your views? If you’re interested please contact DAJ on daj@thegamecreators.com

And finally………meet Mike

If you’re a regular reader of our newsletters you’ll know we’re introducing you to the characters behind TheGameCreators. Each month we’ll feature one of the team – this month meet Mike Johnson…

Mike has been working on the Driving Test Success range of products in the last few years, using AppGameKit as the main development tool. Despite not holding a driving license (due to never attempting to get one rather than any ill fortune with the law) Mike is confident he can at least pass the theory test for car, bike, LGV/PCV and ADI. 

 

Recently Mike decided it was time to spend a little while away from the computer at the weekends and venture into the great outdoors. Initially this started out as long walks, taking the occasional photo with his phone. Over time this transitioned into a keen interest of photography and Mike now owns a DSLR camera and spends many hours wandering around at weekends with his camera, quite often getting attacked by dogs, photo bombed by people, bitten by insects, spending an inordinate amount of time on the floor, getting incredibly dirty and he sometimes takes a nice photo.

Since taking up photography Mike has had several photos featured on Granada Reports on ITV and has discovered it's not too bad being away from the computer every now and again ?