This Week in GameGuru - 03/04/2019

This week's update will be exceptionally short.  I simply can't invest the time with this being crunch week.  My book is going to the publisher on Weds/Thurs.

Official GameGuru News

** Unofficially I have it on good authority the changes to the mega pack 3 are about a month or so out.

Officially - while I haven't seen anything direct I can honestly say it looks like we're going to receive a very large update in the next few weeks.  Time will tell. Code merges on github look promising though.

What's Good in the Store

This week has several great objects by Mad Lobster for a photo booth

 M Stockton's cookout collection is a great price for some awesome assets

Lotgd really awesome low poly cockroach with very good movement patterns.

So all in all, a pretty good set of objects to pick up!

Free Stuff

Lafette did some beautiful beer bottles https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220474?page=1#msg2612553

Lafette is giving away three animated workers https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220474?page=1#msg2612691

Third Party Tools and Tutorials

Several good tutorials by Wolf:
Creating many corpses / dead bodies for your horror game in little time without modeling knowledge 
Getting models with multiple textures into reloaded
Necessary Edits to get EAI's weaponry into GG 

Along with one from PirateMyke:
Graphix Explosion Particle Instructions  

Random Acts of Creativity (WIPs)

Bonesy made a pretty excellent supercut of his work in progress (Cyberfi)

HellreaperX's "Death House of Barker Creek" showed a tantalizing pic of a new monster:

This post  by cybernessence: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/213870?page=5#msg2612636 is a must read if you're a hardcore user.  Wow, just wow man.

In My Own Works

Welp, we're here. 140,000 words, 23 chapters, an appendix with a full Lua, FPE, gunspec, error code and other references.  130+ high res grayscale pictures.  11 months of work, probably about 800 hours of time spent... and it's almost ready to go the publisher.  It leaves the train this week.  Barring any unforeseen circumstances we're talking about a 4-6 month time before it becomes paper in print. I'll be doing giveaways and coupon codes as we approach.

Beyond that I want to throw a big thank you to everyone that's helped.  If you want your name in the acknowledgements section, shoot me a message on my blog (gamegurureport.blogspot.com) or via discord.  Many of you likely already are listed. 

On a side note, I've been working on a whole new set of space skies with some new tools.  4k texture resolution and they're absolutely gorgeous.  Give those a few weeks for fine tuning.

This Week in GameGuru - 01/07/2019

Happy New Year, folks! With a new year undoubtedly will come new changes!

Official GameGuru News

This week we have the official update of PBR assets to the Fantasy Pack -  https://www.thegamecreators.com/post/gameguru-fantasy-pack-updated-2
And I have to say they look quite impressive indeed.  Much better quality than previous PBR re-skins in my opinion.

What's Good in the Store

This week we have some interesting products available:

It's nice to see Dagored getting back into GG projects.  His attack drones have a pretty nice animation to them and are definitely a solid choice.  M2Design continues to add more buildings and shacks.  I personally would be leery of that suspiciously good looking jet fighter as it likely is someone else's work that snuck it's way onto the store and will likely be removed shortly.

One promising piece of work that isn't yet released yet is Openload's RPG-style inventory system.

The screenshots look fantastic and I'm sure it will end up on the store in the near future so keep an eye out.

Free Stuff

Graphix made some nice stuff you can get from his pack.  Check out some of it here:
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/217932?page=13#msg2610284

The new stuff is an ammo bag and a lightsaber-style weapon.

Third Party Tools and Tutorials

A pretty interesting discussion on getting FBX with animations to .X was had over here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220399

You can also glean some really interesting ideas from PirateMyke's EBE structure thread here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220414

Random Acts of Creativity

Guns of solo released an update and I have to say it's looking mighty fine!

Apparently he's hard at work at trying to improve framerate. More details can be found here but overall I like the direction this project is heading! 

Some other new projects have shown, looks like a new year means more projects!

CorzaX has a tropical island game he's working on. It looks like it's coming along well. 

Nier is working on a fantasy/medieval game and so far the screenshots look pretty good.

It's always nice to see someone making a custom HUD.

Maha25 has a jungle-style shooter as well that has some fairly decent atmospherics.

Synchromesh put together a fantastic video of the new AI as a Demo but I have to say the level itself looks great too! https://youtu.be/IxOZ_xvKhto

So all in all it's proving to be a fairly busy January!

In My Own Works

Works is progressing rapidly.  I am doing my first pass over the manuscript, have 3 proof-readers reading the work AND sent the preliminary copy to my personal editor.  Hopefully by next week mid-week I'll be in a much better position for this to move forward.  I also have about 140 pictures to take for the book so that's going to be a solid couple of days progress as well.

Proofers are giving me good reports though, saying it's going to be great for people to have all this info in one place.  Looks good so far!

New project in the works

With respect to projects, I don't know why I choose to do more hard work when I am already busting my buns trying to prep my house for sale.  However, I have some really great stuff in the pipeline.  Primarily I'm working on a toolkit (in the prototyping phase) which will allow pretty heavy duty control of dynamic lights in Game Guru.

We're talking script-based controls of lights which will allow very functional utility for the average game-maker.  It will also be competitively priced, by that I mean very affordable :)  Right now I'm looking at putting it up for around 3.50 or so.

That's what's going on.  I'll post a video here once I finish a few more lighting systems for demoing.

So far I have about half of the following:

• A steady strobing effect
• A random strobing effect
• A 'campfire' effect
• A light up on trigger zone
• Several  lights simultaneously
• Several lights sequentially
• A single light moving in a pattern
• Several strobes at once
• Several strobes in sequence

This should provide some really excellent controls for new and existing users to work with dynamic lights.  As the updates come I'll add further functionality too, for free, to purchasers.

Keep your eyes peeled!