The long road to ruin... or something better?

So as you are aware my on again, off again blog is *MOSTLY* centered around the Game-Guru engine.  I specifically became a backer during their kickstarter-style launch when it was called 'FPS Creator, Reloaded'.

I'd heard bad things about FPSC in the past but figured the demo videos were good.
I covered that about two years ago in a blog post on my old FPSC Reloaded blog here:


http://fpscreloadedreview.blogspot.com/2014/11/general-banter-why-fps-creator-reloaded.html

At the time, the cost was 80 dollars/100 dollars. I got in for 80, I think. At the time, I was short on cash; this was a big deal for me to spend on a hobby.  Now I think Game-Guru retails for something absurd like twenty dollars on steam.  Is it worth it? Well, that's a complicated question.

Let me bring you up to speed first on a few events.  First back in August Lee went on vacation.  Lee Bamber is the primary coder for Game Guru.  It's his baby and he is really the only one qualified to do significant amounts of work on it.   After the vacation we got a token update around early/mid August then.. nothing.  No communication.  No nothing.  Just a blank hole with no updates.  The natives got restless.  They made thread after thread asking for an update.  Nothing.

A lot of us have been real patient; it's been almost two and a half years for me and the engine's development has clearly stalled.  Early limitations were hit due to bad decision making (using Dark Basic, for instance) resulting in big setbacks (A complete recode in C/C++), incomplete feature sets like AI, Lighting, Particle effects all leave us reeling and having to scramble to make a functional game or demo.

Then... Lee came back.  About two days ago.  The discussion has been very lively, to say the least.  I encourage you to take a look at these two threads and get involved.

https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/216394

https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/216393

There's a lot of real honest evaluation by Lee, some critical introspection.  Some good questions and a lot of struggle over what's the right answer.

One thing I agree wholeheartedly on is getting rid of the community voting board.  That thing is a curse.  It has way too many options, often many of which are flatly unnecessary!  I mean come on; what's the point of having things that can be done by community scripting taking up valuable cycles when we don't have a good core engine to work from?

I would love to see this product actually reach the goals it intended.  We're way behind and I realize that at this point they made enough mistakes to probably not achieve what is needed without a major influx of capital.  So could it be the end of Game Guru? Possibly.

It could also get a renewal.  Often with hard questions come good answers so I hope Lee and his team find the ones they need to continue this project and bringing it to fruition.