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We have covered AI many times in our newsletter and will certainly be doing so again in the future as this relatively new field provides us with great new ways to create.
A less covered topic, but just as useful, is Automation. That is the process of converting a long series of steps into a sequence that can be run again and again without having to manually follow each step.
In both AI and Automation, we are handing over some work to the machine and waiting for the result. It is undesirable to hand over purely creative work in this way, but automation is perfect for those less-creative, nee boring, workloads; with the bonus that it will be done faster and more consistently than any human could do it.
Back in the golden age, batch files and scripts were the primary tools for automation, and are still used today of course, but the toolbox has been filling up over the last decade. Today we can run sequences remotely, on servers halfway around the world, watch for events in the ether that then trigger your actions. Sometimes termed IFTT (If This Then That), this very simple computer program picks up some of the work you do not want to do, leaving you time to work on the things you are interested in, or have the most value to add.
In the not-too-distant future, developers will be working amongst their robot co-workers, with some bots doing AI, some doing automation, and the creative human wedged in the middle. Not so much robot overlords, more like robot helpers, and in an ever-changing ecosystem like game development, every little helps!
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It has been an interesting month in the GameGuru MAX development dungeon, focused this time on performance.
For a game-maker to be successful, it must produce games, and those games need to run fast on the majority of gaming PCs out there, and for that, we need to optimize.
It’s easier to optimize for a single game as there are many known factors vis a vis what you need the game to do, and you can often offer shortcuts to deliver a game experience in an efficient way. For a generalized game-maker that does not quite know the game being made, performance tuning has more challenges.
To assist in this fight, we continue to use a performance profiler called OPTICK, a game changer when it comes to identifying the next bottleneck in the engine. As you will know, we are still prioritising bug fixing, and we stop performance work when the GameGuru MAX issues board bug count exceeds 10 reports. Then it’s back to the performance work once those bugs are squashed.
Sometimes we get a perfect storm, when a bug is also an opportunity to increase performance, and this happened recently, related to selecting objects in large populated levels. If you noticed a small stall when clicking the objects in your level, watch out for the next update when this delay should disappear completely. We will, of course, send out an announcement and a complete list of fixes and improvements when we release the official public update later in March.
Overall, we are pleased with our focus on fixes, performance, stability and compatibility, and are grateful that the community supports these priorities. Together we can round off and complete a solid V1 of GameGuru MAX and provide an easy platform from which to spring forward into the wonderful world of game creation.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for assets for your game, we’ve had some great DLC released by third party artists – these include:
Plus! We’ve just added some extra FREE characters to three of the Asset Packs released late last year!
Finally, we hope you are pleased with the move of our live broadcast session on YouTube from the last Wednesday of the month to the last Saturday of the month (7pm GMT). We will keep an eye on the viewer count and, if we see a fall-off, perhaps run another poll to see if there is a better day and time for future shows.
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GameGuru Classic, our legacy game-maker ticks along nicely, enjoying an active community of makers and holding its little breath for the next update, the first of four quarterly updates planned for 2024.
At the time of writing, the GameGuru Classic issues board shows just 2 bugs reported, and both of those are awaiting either confirmation of the fix or imparting additional information to the author before it is closed in March. With that known, we are quietly confident we can once again hit our zero bug count status for GameGuru Classic.
If you do find an issue with GameGuru Classic, please post it to the issues board and we will be sure to take a look!
Very rarely we do see a feature request come in for GameGuru Classic and we are always hopeful that, now we have opened up all the source code via GitHub, members of the community can go through and add a feature of their own. As always, when this happens, we will test and confirm the feature works and then include it as part of the official releases.
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For many years the AppGameKit source code has been generally available, split across multiple GitHub repositories, most of them seeing little active community development. The one with the most activity has been the AppGameKit Studio repository, host to numerous issue reports and references.
The official source code to AppGameKit Classic however has mostly been developed in-house in the last few years and has grown into a complex build process, not suitable for easy public access. We have therefore taken the decision to tackle this problem by archiving the old legacy repos and creating a new single destination on GitHub for all AppGameKit source code contributions, including the build step which will allow you to compile your own binaries, compiler and ancillary tools.
This is a work in progress, with the aim of making the compile and build steps as simple as possible, out of the box. We will send out an official announcement when this work is complete, but in the meantime you are welcome to track the progress by visiting the new repository
In the meantime, if you have an AppGameKit project on the go why not enter the ‘FINISH IT’ competition? Take a look at how to enter ?
And finally, this great game, developed in AppGameKit by Renrutgames, was bought to our attention and we had to share it!
Lost-Hero is an Indie 2D top-down, solo-player, fully mouse-driven medieval mystery RPG. It has an MMO-style persistent and immersive world map, from where you can discover and "zone" into various dungeons to do battle. You will need to do quests, fight many monsters, and collect items and equipment to help you level your character up high enough to work out the mystery of why you are here and how to get back home.
Available on Itch, we recommend that all you RPG fans check it out :-O
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This month’s guest developer is Safak Yalcinkaya aka sfkylcnky - who works with both GameGuru and AppGameKit
Safak runs a computer company that he founded in 1996, where he now specialises in cyber security and entertainment productions (games, movies, tv series, etc.). He is based in Turkey, but is trying to move the entertainment side of his business to the United States.
We asked Safak to tell us about coding journey: “I wrote my first game on my first computer, a Commodore 64, while learning the basic language. My coding adventure continued with an Amiga 500 and machine language - I miss the old days! I then started using TheGameCreators products in 2011 and regularly use both AppGameKit and GameGuru. I will continue to use and recommend them – TheGameCreators are doing a great job for a small team and the game-making community is incredibly – always so supportive of my projects.”
Safak goes on to tell us about his projects:
I published 5 PC games using GameGuru Classic on Steam in 2019. I then published 41 mobile games in 2022 using AppGameKit and all its DLCs. Most of these have been published on both iOS and Android. I first made these games so my son could play them but, as time went on, other people who, like me, loved retro games started to show interest ?
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My aim is to have these games, whose novels are also written, adapted into movies, series and animations as detailed here on IMDB.
I am also developing a new game using the amazing features of GameGuru Max. Nowadays, novels are being written about these computer games :-O
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I believe that artificial intelligence, virtual reality and augmented reality will dominate the game development market in the near future and I hope to be part of it.
You can check out Safak on his website, his YouTube channel and on Instagram
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