Welcome to the start of a new week and we’re pleased to report some great progress. You can read below about the amazing work our development team have crafted and the advancements made over the last seven days.
We also report on the latest GameGuru competition and announce the results.
We’re highlighting the work of some of our talented users, including some gallery screenshots of work in progress games and a great video.
You’ll also read of more exciting store news and of the latest updates as well as a reminder of some of the work of our longer standing artist.
So, without further ado…
Competition
The 4th GameGuru level design competition has drawn to a close and this was our most exciting and well subscribed of them all to date. As always, this was a difficult event to judge as we receive a lot of high quality entries. In the end, the team whittled the entries down to five winners. All winners receive $200 cash and 5,000 GameGuru Store points. We’ll be contacting the winners very soon with their prizes!
Although there is no direct prizes for positions, we felt that the winning entries should be in the following order.
FIRST Prize!- Construction Destruction – By Susysyay
We loved this level for its great design and well thought out entity placement, it plays really well when there are 4 or more players running around this construction site themed level. A good solid design and it was clear a lot of care and attention went into it’s design.
2nd – Bridge Over Troubled Water – By Wizard of id
An exciting level of criss crossing bridges and tunnels with a central pool area that can be walked through.
3rd – Limbo – By Slaur3n
A very clever and sureal level, featuring floating platforms and narrow slopes. The style of this game is unlike anything we’ve seen before. It was enjoyed by many of the development team.
4th – Firing Range – By Kravenwolf
This tightly packed level leads to some very exciting and fast paced gameplay. A clever use of box crates makes for a very different atmosphere. We had a lot of fun and laughed lots as RPGs took down many poor guys in and among the tight corners.
5th – Hide & Seek – By E30Legend
Our final choice uses the players flashlight to great effect which accompanied with some good use of spooky sound effects makes this level very atmospheric.
Congratulations to everyone and many thanks to you all for entering, you’ve given us all a lot of fun as well as helping to develop GameGuru. The winning levels will soon be available in an updated version of GameGuru so you can all enjoy playing them.
Guru Lee on Twitch!
Last Friday our CEO Lee Bamber was part of a live stream on Twitch that focused on GameGuru.
If you missed the stream and would like to view it in your own time then you can here.
From the Forums
This excellent demonstration from GameGuru user Dvader really caught our eye. If you have aspirations to create a role playing game you could should look at what this talented user has achieved.
From the galleries
As always, we love seeing what our GameGuru users have achieved and this week is no exception. These two shots from our GameGuru forums really impressed us and are two more that we’ll be keeping a close eye on.
Project ICE – Cube by VRG
My own prison cit.CREED by JC_Leon
Store news
The store continues to go from strength to strength with some excellent new uploads this week. We’re also taking the opportunity to highlight some media that’s been on the store a while that you may have missed.
Featuring fourteen World War 2 themed vehicles, including US and German combat vehicles, a great steam train with rolling stock and several burnt out vehicles to add that extra layer of quality to your games.
Here’s one that may have slipped your notice but this is such a useful pack that can be used for a massive range of genres from medieval through to the far future we thought it worth reminding you about it. The packs has thirteen log variants from single logs, piles of cut wood and neat stacks. This pack complements the default foliage and would be a great addition to any developers library.
Models so Far by JForthDesigns
Another pack that’s been on the store for awhile and is worth looking into if you want some great value scifi media. Featuring a large range of animated futuristic machines, static gun turrets, crates and boxes as well as a few other items from other genres.
GameGuru Foundations by Valuable Assets to accompany his Guru Buildings Volume 1 pack. If you’ve not seen the buildings pack, we recommend you check it out, but even if you don’t own the pack you can download the foundations pack for the great price of FREE . The image above demonstrates how well the 2 packs merge and both are great for single and multiplayer games.
Want to sell your own media?
The Game Creator Store
The Game Creator Store connects creative artists and musicians with enthusiastic GameGuru game developers. Can you create game ready 3D models or themed atmospheric music for the GameGuru community?
Artist’s benefits
- You’ll receive 70% of all sales revenue earned from your published assets.
- The agreement is non-exclusive so you are free to sell your assets elsewhere.
- Payment is made monthly via PayPal.
How do I sell my assets?
It’s easy to become a seller on the store;
- Sign up to become a store seller. Click here to be redirected to the seller’s sign up.
- Follow the easy to use guides on how to prepare your assets
- Upload your assets for approval
- Once approved, TheGameCreators will publish your assets live onto the store
Update news
We’re very pleased once again to have been able to announce another three GameGuru updates since last week. We’ve listened to your feedback and are targeting the areas that concern you the most. As a result, the last week has addressed some bugs, tweaked some other areas and continued to work and release multiplayer Team Deathmatch mode – a particularly exciting and well received feature. We joined users on Friday night for two hours of fun gameplay and had a great time doing so.
So, what’s changed?
GameGuru V1.00.019
- Fixed an issue in the importer where the mouse would disappear sometimes when saving
- When hosting a multiplayer map containing light maps, the system will now use them and show them in the game.
- On initial spawn in a multiplayer game you can no longer invisibly move
- Added polish to end of a multiplayer game to fade out neatly
- Fixed an error relating to a missing image
GameGuru V1.00.020
- Added Team Multiplayer mode! To use just add at least 2 multiplayer markers, set one set of them to Team A, and the other set to Team B. The map will then follow team based logic, the first team to get 30 kills wins the round!
- We’ve added a new TEAM field to the MULTIPLAYER START MARKER. Set it to A or B to choose which team will spawn from this location. If set to No the multiplayer game will remain as standard death match.
- We changed the ‘VIOLENCE’ field to ‘BLOOD EFFECTS’ for more accurate naming.
- Three new team based multiplayer maps have been added:
– Rocket Arena (Team MP)
– The Beach (Team MP)
– Desert Fortress (Team MP)
- Script change: multiplayer_teamfirstto10.lua now has friendly fire off by default and handles both team and free for all games
- New script: multiplayer_teamfirstto10FriendlyFire.lua to enable friendly fire in your game (handles both team and free for all games)
- New LUA command SetMultiplayerGameFriendlyFireOff() to disable friendly fire
- New LUA command GetMultiplayerTeamBased() which returns 1 if the game is team based, 0 if not
GameGuru V1.00.021
- Prevented the camera from sinking into floor when zooming into large entity
- Replaced entity highlighter with shrink wrap colour, removed old circle highlighter
- Transparency on locked entities removed when in TEST GAME (great for placing objects inside buildings
- When hold down SHIFT, any locked entities are instantly highlighted
- Added (auto flatten) text to status panel when U key mode activated
- Terrain Editing Ramp Mode now smooths out the ramp edges to avoid stretch effect
- Editor now reports if entity is locked, and hints about holding SHIFT
- Editor now asks if you want to save an unsaved level before quitting
- Removed red circle highlighter in F9 Edit Mode in favor of shrink wrap method
- Added cursor icon to F9 Entity Edit Mode to allow finer entity selection
- Entity selection now more accurate in F9 Entity Edit Mode
- Changed camera raise/lower keys to [ and ] (to avoid confusion with entity Y change)
- When selecting an entity in F9 mode, entity no longer shifts and resets rotation
- Changed entity Y modifier from – and + keys to PGUP and PGDN for consistency
- Added ability to replace a weapon by pressing T when collecting new one
- Extra prompts preventing player collecting more than 9 weapons
- Full Automatic Weapons now overheat and jam in response to GUNSPEC jamming fields
- Fixed issue with full-auto weapons showing bullet-sequence after reload
- Fixed issue of custom scripts being flagged as needing to make the level a Workshop item
- Fixed an issue where you would sometimes appear to be underwater when spawning in or dying in multiplayer
- Improved multiplayer gui when playing a team match
- Field of view settings from the host of a multiplayer match no longer get imposed on everyone else
- Fixed flashlights being left on when joining a multiplayer game
- When waiting for other players before the initial spawn in a multiplayer game, a list of who has joined and who is waiting to join is displayed
- Added new LUA globals;
– g_PlayerFlashlight = Switches to 1 when player is using the flash light (F)
– g_PlayerGunID = The currently held weapon ID value
– g_PlayerGunCount = The total number of weapons currently carried
– SetNameplatesOff() = Hides player nameplates (great for multiplayer games in the dark where you don’t want player to be easily seen)
- Solved issue of multi-level standalones using the wrong terrain paint texture
- Fixed issue of rogue sprites corrupting standalone menu after one round of playing
- Amended the Sound DLL binary to avoid creating false positive with BitDefender
- Added extra debug code to trace steps during software initialisation
- Added a full Display Mode data dump if software fails to create D3D device
Signing off
That’s it for another week, still lots to do but the team is in great spirits, and as always we are grateful and encouraged by your support. Don’t forget that as always you can keep up with more or less daily update via Lee’s development blog.
You can also have your say or keep up with what other users are up to via the GameGuru or Steam forums.
Until next week, enjoy creating!
The GameGuru team
