Hello and welcome to the weekly GameGuru news.
Once again the development team has been hard at work with a large number of tweaks and fixes. We’ve been focusing on stability and weapons in the last week as well as making great headway with the new character creator!
As a small teaser of the work on this great feature, we’re sharing the first ever screenshot of it. We’re sure you’ll agree it’s shaping up to be a very exciting addition which we expect to bring to you soon.
With the Character Creator you can edit many properties. From changing the character’s head style to colouring and choosing facial hairs. Characters can be male or female and you can choose clothing styles, skin colouring and extras like hats. You’ll also be able to map your own image onto one the heads and become part of the game! So soon you can start multiplayer sessions and play as you against your friends, we think this will be an awesome new feature.
It’s super easy to use and developed to be expandable in the future.
Remember, this is work in progress and subject to change!
You can read all about the new additions at the end of this bulletin, but we’d like to report on some feedback from Lee regarding some requests for a ‘roadmap’. We asked him to layout some of the plans for the future and to give you all an idea of the direction we intend to take GameGuru
Lee reported last week in his blog:
“Right now my road map is to add a third person control system, improve and extend the character AI, add a simple inventory system, player progression statistics, character conversation engine and a better way to associate entity logic (i.e. key + door). Sprinkled in all that is the daily grind to fix issues as they occur which slows down the addition of the new stuff. As for an estimate how long this will take, I would guess a date sometime in June, with many builds released as each feature is added.
The longer term road map includes improvements to the game itself such as better explosions, fire, smoke, particle effects and debris, a constant stream of new content both in the core product and through the store and DLCs, the addition of big features such as swimming and underwater action, vehicles, destruction system, new kinds of weapons and player abilities, composite entities so several entities can club together to form a single larger entity and the list of ‘definitely going to do’ goes on. We then stray into the ‘might do’ list which includes replacing the light mapper with something that runs in the background all the time, eliminating the delay between clicking test game and playing the game, optimizing the media when saving a standalone executable, vehicles that fly, underground and cave systems that can cut through the terrain, a water pools system for different water bodies at different heights in the landscape, weather systems, day and night cycle, third party plug-in system tied with LUA, engine optimizations and load time reductions. The longest road-map then extends into supporting more platforms and form factors, both desktop and portable devices. Along the way we may also be distracted by cool technology like Virtual Reality, Hands-Free control systems, dedicated multi-monitor support such as EyeFinity and as yet undiscovered gaming hardware.”
From the Galleries
Our weekly look at the galleries has revealed some great looking screenshots from a couple of our regular contributors.
This amazing looking custom terrain from Rolfy really impressed us, and we’re looking forward to some more from this great artist.
Another nice looking work in progress shot, entitled Shelter from Tarkus1971. We’ve been watching the progress on this users game for a few weeks and it’s shaping up nicely.
Competition News
As a reminder, we’re running two competitions this month, with prizes varying between $50 and $250 as well as store points on offer.
You can join in on our The Great Outdoors competition and win $50 or $100 if your level is chosen.
Our second competition is focusing on co-op play and you could win $250 and 5,000 store points.
You can find details of both of the competitions by clicking the links above.
Store News
This week we’re looking at some new uploads from a number of artists, as well as our journey back through the store archives to remind you of some of the great media you may have missed.
The spotlight this week is on 3 recent uploads from 3 separate artists that all come under category of critters.
First off, Velociraptor by Gtox
Next on our list of critters is this animated snake for Dagored
Last on the list of this weeks critters showcases is these flying crows and swooping seagulls for Lafette really add a sense of life to your levels. No video this time, but these birds both fly and glide around the maps very realistically.
Become a store artist
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 up to 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
GameGuru Updates
GameGuru received two updates in the last week. Each adding additional functionality and fixing a few issues that were reported by users.
This small release focused on multiplayer and co-op fixes, it always prepared the engine internally for some updates to come.
Core fixes included a fix for an issue caused by a recent Steam update, and tweaks to allow custom characters in co-op play.
This more substantial release updated the default weapons, with improved function and smoother gameplay. In addition further fixes to the engine improved player movement and tweaked the lightmapper for a more stable performance.
You can read all the information on the latest releases by following the links above.
Signing Off
That’s it for us for now , as always, don’t forget Lee’s daily blog to keep up with all of the latest in GameGuru development and we’ll be back next week with some more exciting news and sneak previews.
Thanks to you all for your support and see you next week.
The GameGuru Team
