Hello once again and welcome to the GameGuru weekly update. We had a very successful week here in GameGuru development land and some very useful and positive feedback from our beta testers. You can read all about that and other GameGuru news below.
As usual, let’s see what our community has been up to and take a quick look at the GameGuru galleries first. This very atmospheric screenshot from Valentin321 is not only inspiring but showcases the same artist’s lighthouse model now available in the GameGuru store.
Lighthouse by GameGuru user Valentin321
Also from our excellent community is this great freebie from artist Disturbing13. Start the week by adding these to your game asset collection!
Legacy urban buildings are free to download and match the artists store media perfectly.
That’s it for our quick review of the GameGuru community, now let’s take a look at what else has been happening.
Store News
Another great week on the GameGuru Store with a lot of new uploads from artists new and old. You can browse nearly 6,000 items now and we’re sure you’ll find something to suit your needs regardless of your chosen game genre.
Popular store artist Dagored has continued to add to his amazing collection of critters with this great looking animated fly! Yes, you read correctly, an animated fly – every game should include them! 
There’s also another critter pack, this time from Gtox. His range of fish is excellent and builds on his other ranges perfectly. The Alligator Gar shown below is just one of 8 models which also include a longnose gar, a bull shark, a bluegill sunfish, a catfish, a Mayan cichlid, a peacock bass and finally a snook. Virtual aquarium anyone?
Lastly this week is just one of a range of cars from artist Pasquill. This rusty sports car is ideal for modern day and post apocalyptic games.
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 become a store artist!
Twitch News
GameGuru lead developer Lee will continue with his regular Twitch Broadcasts this week and you’ll be able to listen to his musing as well as hints, tips and teasers every Wednesday at 4pm GMT/ 11am EST and 8am PST. It is always great to see you there, and don’t forget that you can ask Lee any questions you have about GameGuru and it’s current development.
For those of you who missed last Wednesday you can catch up with the latest broadcast as well as every broadcast we’ve made by simply clicking the image below.
GameGuru Latest
The very first round of beta testing ended on yesterday. The early results were very encouraging and backed up a lot of the finding of the internal development team. There were a few small bugs reported, but no showstoppers and we don’t anticipate a lengthy bug fixing session will be needed before we can move onwards and upwards. Performance results varied, but every tester reported speed increases, some of which were very impressive considering we’ve not actually started our planned optimisation work. This is of course a great start and we expect to improve massively on this in the weeks to come.
In other GameGuru news, Lee has been delving deeper into the world of DirectX11 and has uncovered some real gems which he’s sure will yield a decent mix of performance and eye candy. Of course this work is still in it’s early phase but he has reported back some very exciting progress. The end of last week saw him getting his head around dual quaternion a mathematical process that could soon lead to some excellent performance increases. Already on Lee’s planned work list is Deferred Rendering, FXAA post processing (for much smoother visuals) and Instance Buffers (A trick where the same models can be drawn in a single draw called – so if you have 25 characters, they would all be drawn in 1 draw call rather than 25). We’re sure that you can all see the massive advantages of such a technique and we’re all very excited about seeing it in action.
We’re still a little limited in the way of eye candy, but we can share this image from Lee’s blog demonstrating the beginnings of the improved rendering process.
Signing Off
We have a lot of work to do this week if we’re going to bring you more exciting news, so that’s everything for now.
Thank you once again for your patient and continued support, we really couldn’t do it without you!
Don’t forget Lee’s regular blogs, the weekly Twitch sessions, and we’ll be back every Monday with more on GameGuru development news and hopefully some mind blowing facts and figures.
The GameGuru team
