ENGINE UPDATE PROGRESS REPORT
This week Lee made a massive update by placing all of the source code to Game-Guru live on github. He's created an issues tracker (link here) which can be used to publicly follow all of the ongoing developmental issues and bugs. He's got old hats who worked on FPSC (classic) code working on Game-Guru now. He's literally paying outside developers to work on features that are taking him too long to develop personally. This is what you do, folks, when you truly want to reinvent a brand. Game-Guru has stalled in development and has had a massive amount of 'under the hood' changes. Unfortunately as a usable product, it's maybe 30 or 40% more than what I could use a few years ago when it was FPSC:Reloaded. That's only because of additional Lua extensibility. The core engine itself hasn't really added much in terms of functionality within the GUI driven IDE.
So this is a huge step and in a sense a massive gamble at the same time. It's what's needed though, if Game-Guru is going to thrive in a market increasingly dominated by AAA providers like Unreal, Lumberyard, and Unity.
I believe Game-Guru has a lot of potential. It's easy to get into, easy to work with. It's got too many flaws to be functional though and until those are addressed, it's really caused a lot of project stagnation for many, many people.
NEW PRODUCTS IN THE STORE
This week on the store can be summed up in the following picture:
So a few things here. First, it really looks as if Colosso has improved a lot. His newer stuff is coming along well and that's saying a lot - I can plainly say his art style was not my cup of tea previously. This current style fits him well.
Second we have a relative newcomer putting up an interesting looking boat. While I can appreciate anyone trying to market their first real go on the store... it's plainly not up to spec for the price they're asking. If I were 1CE I'd lower the price by at least 50% until my texturing matched other artists pushing that price point.
Of particular note is the fact that Wizard of Id has put his newest sewer pack up as both a PBR and Non PBR asset sets. This is important because frankly a lot of people may not want or need PBR. While I'm a little disappointed in his pricing (it always is a lot higher than this crowd can afford, initially), I am happy with the quality of his work. If you're going to spend 29 dollars on a product Game-Guru, usually you want one of his. I've spent the money and have been satisfied. His are the closest to 'professional grade' products available on the Game-Guru store.
FREE STUFF
Free stuff this week is pretty substantial. We got not one, but TWO free weapons!
Weapons are like solid gold. They are something we don't get a lot of, that are expensive on the store because they take just so much work to do. We got two of them! It's really awesome of both Graphix and Gtox to produce these for us.
First we have a chainsaw provided by Graphix: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219263
 |
| Vrrrrrrrrrm! |
All I can say is FINALLY. Being a Doom 1/2 freak, this is something that's been desperately missing. I could nitpick the sort of rapid animation and overly chromatic textures, but I mean comon - it's a freaking chainsaw! Best part is there's no hands rigged to it so it can literally be used with any other game.
Next we have Gtox's damn fine work on a crowbar, Ala Gordon Freeman.
This thing is freaking gorgeous. I mean it just looks fantastic. And Gtox even included an alt-attack (he's done this for some of his other weapons too) where when you hit left-alt it will do a secondary attack. Very good stuff indeed.
Some freebies by Honkeyboy were posted as well. One is a set of 'English trees' , the other was a few items for his crafting survival script: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219211 which include things like a furnace and workbench.
THIRD PARTY TOOLS
This week in third party tools we have nothing really new. I need to update my Lua API for Notepad++ to include global variables like g_Entity and g_PressKeyE(etc). That should show up later this week in a separate post.
RANDOM ACTS OF CREATIVITY
'Death by daylight' - Honkeyboy's latest creation. This zombie shooter looks promising and while it lacks the maturity in graphical refinement it does offer a crafting system which should help tilt the balance in favor of this being a more interesting title. What impresses me most about Honkeyboy is how many irons he can keep in the fire and how many he keeps throwing in. The guy has endless energy, which is a good thing to have when you're an Independent Gamedev.
'Cowboy Shootout' - Len the Man has been working on this title for quite some time but it's coming along well. He's obviously putting a lot of effort into it and it's really starting to show. Lots of custom models and interesting components in a much needed cowboy action game.
 |
| Pretty high end for GG! |
As you can see, the quality is definitely there. Nice to see someone sticking with it, through all the ups and downs.
IN MY OWN WORKS
I have too many irons in the fire myself. I really ran into some stumbling blocks with my upcoming kits and it's just.. frustrating trying to find the time to sit down and work on them uninterrupted. Life has been hectic enough, but it just keeps adding more and more to my plate.
Currently I have too much going on and need to clear some items before adding new ones. Look for any of the following to have something on them later this week:
- any of 3 different scripting kits
- a new sky pack for 2018
- a new terrain PLUS very interesting foliage (includes custom script)
- one of two books I'm writing
- one of two tutorials I'm writing on this blog
- A final(?) update to the notepad ++ Lua API.
I'm glad I am able to keep all this rolling and was able to get the Lua API workable. The scripting kits are about 10%, 30% and 40% there, respectively. Any one of those could get completed this week depending on how my brain decides to plop out it's workload.
No comments:
Post a Comment