Welcome to another weekly news bulletin. By now we imagine most of you have updated to the latest version of GameGuru and have been enjoying the new post processing effects and other exciting additions we launched last week. If not, we recommend logging into your Steam account and grabbing your update now.

We are also pleased to announce our competition winners for the long awaited co-op competition and the more recent screenshot competition, the latter of which was very well received and we had a difficult time working our way through over 200 entries to whittle down the list to find the winners.

For this weeks GameGuru screenshot, we thought we’d share this very atmospheric image from our very talent support team member PirateMyke.

So, let’s see what’ been going on in the world of GameGuru!

Steam Summer Sale

Summer is officially here and the Steam summer sale has launched. As part of this, you can grab a copy of GameGuru for yourself or a friend at a 55% discount. You can find all the details here.

So, if you or someone you know has been pondering getting their hands on a copy of GameGuru, now is the perfect time.

Competition Winners

We have to say well done to everyone who entered our screenshot competition, it was great fun seeing the amazing screenshots you’ve been working on, and was a very tricky competition to judge. After a lot of debate, we finally realised that we couldn’t choose a final five, so we have decided that the ten below stood above the rest in terms of quality, design and atmosphere.

1st place winner – Nuncio wins $250

2nd place winner – MooKai wins $200

3rd place winner – Rolfy win $100

4th place winner – Matt Harper – wins 4,000 store points

5th place winner – JC_Leon – wins 4,000 store points

6th place winner – OldFlak wins 2,000 store points

7th place winner – Spike314 wins 2,000 store points

8th place winner – Stefos wins 2,000 store points

9th place winner- Bisella wins 2,000 store points

10th place winner – 3com wins 2,000 store points

Congratulations to you all, we will be contacting you soon with your prizes. Thanks to everyone who entered we really do appreciate the effort and time you must have put into creating your levels and sharing your screen shots.

 

Multiplayer Co-op Winners

It’s been awhile coming, but we’re pleased to announce we have finally chosen our Multiplayer co-op competition winners. We have chosen the five winners and as we only had 7 entries that qualified we decided to award the authors of the other two entries with 2,000 store points.

1st place winner – Sparrowhawk wins $250 and 5,000 store points

2nd place winner – Tarkus1971 wins $250 and 5,000 store points

3rd place winner – Dvader wins $250 and 5,000 store points

4th and 5th place both went to Slaur3n for two of his entries, and he wins $250 and 5,000 points for each one.

Finally, we’ve awarded 2,000 points as a thank you for entering to Stefos and z2a2008.

We’ll be contacting you soon with your prizes.

Congratulations to you all, thanks to everyone who entered both competitions and for once again making this a very enjoyable event to run and judge. The levels will find their way into a future build of GameGuru so you can play them too!

Store News

This week, we’re looking at two new characters and a new critter that have recently launched onto the store. It’s great to see artists pushing forward with new media types and we’re sure all users will appreciate these great additions.

Mickey by Rafhalzer is another character from this artist, this time with a more modern day theme (LA Noir style!)

Dylan, again from Rafhalzer, is ideal for a bodyguard or secret service agent and again spans several genres from 1950 to modern day.

Warg by Dagored is another unusual and excellent addition to the store, and will suit anyone’s collection if you are looking to expand a fantasy collection or even looking for just something slightly different for your levels.

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? If so, sign into the GameGuru website and sign up to HERE!

From the Forums

This third party piece of software really caught our eye. StyleGuru from GameGuru user Sanguis is a free community project which allows users to create their own GameGuru menu.

You can read all about it and follow it’s progress in the forum thread right here.

GameGuru update news

Following on swiftly from last weeks release, the development team have continued to progress with the internal ‘to-do’ list, finalising a few of the smaller, but never the less very important tweaks and fixes needed before turning our attention to some more pressing improvements. Here’s a list of the recent changes;

• Added new WIZARD EVIL and WIZARD ROYAL to the character assets
• Increased speed of APPLY CHANGES in Entity Properties
• If no water exposed in terrain, test game will skip water mask generation
• Fixed issue which ignored ROT values when spraying entities with ‘I’ key
• Re-activated code which XZ rotates entities slightly in spray mode
• F1 Help Page now stays on screen when F1 key held down
• Changed CLIP mode (TAB then CTRL+Wheel) independent of zoom
• Fixed issue of shotgun loading two shells when only one remained
• Added new STAFF icon and ammo icon (and new HUD mode of 11 to gunspec)
• Ensured all Fantasy Creatures do not ‘repeat-hit’ and only hit once
• Ensured Fantasy Creatures can hurt at double range to make combat tougher

In another area of development there are more improvements to the character creator taking place. This new feature allows players to blend any face photo onto a Character, opening up your creations to an almost limitless range of characters. Here’s a test with a famous face being mapped onto the character, can you see who it is?

This feature still has a little way to go, but we’re sure you’ll agree that this is a great addition and will really help in creating some exciting and unique characters for your single and multiplayer games.

Signing off

We’ve been very hard at work at the beginning of this week to move forward on some new features, but we intend to spend a day midweek planning the next big step forward for GameGuru, and we’ll have more updates on this in next weeks news.

Don’t forget Lee’s Blog for daily updates on development and of course the usual sneek peeks.

So, until next week, enjoying your game making and see you all soon.

The GameGuru team