Every month Epic Games giveaways several assets on the Unreal Engine marketplace and December is no exception. This month we have 5 new assets that are available for free until the first Tuesday in January, but once “purchased” those assets are yours to use free forever. Speaking of forever, there is also one new asset in the permanently free collection.
A common question with these assets is can the be used outside of Unreal Engine. Generally the answer is yes, unless the asset was owned or sourced directly by Epic Games, like the Power IK asset this month, in which case it can only be used in Unreal Engine projects. You can learn more about this months UE4 asset giveaway in the video below.
We first looked at the GDevelop game engine back in 2017 in our Closer Look Game Engine series. In the intervening years, GDevelop 5 has come a long way, bringing more and more features to this impressive open source cross platform 2D game engine. In the past year there have been over a dozen new beta releases to the engine including several community contributions. There have also been some updates as a result of the 2020 Google Summer of Code. While many of these releases aren’t large enough to justify a video, taken as a whole it is certainly time to revisit this game engine and the improvements it has seen.
add support for a new asset store with hundreds of ready made game objects
new analytics system without requiring a third party solution
better support for right to left languages
support for dynamic 2D lights
customizable keyboard shortcuts
peer to peer communication extension
live preview (hot reloading) support
command palette for quickly launching editors
new editor themes
These are just a few highlights of the dozens of releases over the last few months. If you are interested in checking out GDevelop it’s available for Windows, Mac, Linux and Online. It is also an open source project with the source code available on GitHub under the MIT open source license. If you want to learn more or run into problems, be sure to check out their Discord server. You can learn more about GDevelop and see it in action in the video below.
Sound Particles is a one of a kind program for rendering 3D audio, capable of supporting thousands to millions of sounds in your simulation. Sound Particles has been battle tested used in big budgets movies such as Alita, Ready Player One and the new Star Wars films, as well as games such as Assassins Creed Origin.
Sound Particles is a sound design software application capable of generating thousands (even millions) of sounds in a virtual 3D audio world. This immersive audio application will enable you to create highly complex sounds on the fly, which will ultimately enable you to design sound better and faster than ever.
Sound Design The best 3D software for complex sound design. Used for film, videogames and virtual reality.
Postproduction Working in postproduction? Use Sound Particles to add depth and richness to your sounds.
Immersive Audio Supports immersive audio formats, such as Ambisonics, Dolby Atmos, Auro 3d and much more.
If you are interested in trying this unique audio application they have a fully functional demonstration available for Windows and Mac available here. All licenses are currently 50% off during Black Friday/Cyber Monday from indie to enterprise licenses. You can see Sound Particles in action in the video below. Sounds used during this demo were all downloaded from the excellent FreeSound.org website.
Every year here on GameFromScratch we gather all of the relevant game development related Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals and 2020 is no exception. What follows is a list of the best deals we have found for game developers, be it programmers, musicians or artists. It will be updated as additional deals are discovered so be sure to check back. Links below may contain an affiliate code that pays GFS a small commission if you make a purchase.
A collection of 700+ Assets 50% off as well as an asset of the day 70% off. Additionally Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise licenses come with a free gift up to $1600 value.
This one runs until the end of the year, get audio plugins and premium memberships at a 25% discount, with higher discounts the more items you purchase.
Lots of gear, computers etc on sale, free shipping.
Amazon
You Know… It’s Amazon
You can learn more about the above sales in the video below. Leave a comment on the video or the GFS discord if you spot another deal you want to share with your fellow game developers and I will add it to the list.
If you are creating a commercial PC game using Godot there is a good chance you are going to want to publish on Steam. If that is a case if your game requires any network services such as achievements, a leaderboard or DLC you are probably tempted to use Steam’s own Steamworks suite of APIs. In that case you most likely want to know about GodotSteam an open source implementation of the SteamWorks API for Godot 2/3, providing convenient GDScript interfaces for the vast majority of the Steamworks features.
GodotSteam is an open source project hosted on GitHub that is implemented using the Godot module system. The source code is under the flexible and permissive MIT license. There is a GDNative branch available although sadly it appears to have been abandoned. Being a module means you will have to download and build your own version of Godot, a process I describe in this video. If the world of Godot, modules and GDNative are all new to you, don’t worry, we have an overview available here.
If you want to get started with GodotSteam there are excellent tutorials and comprehensive documentation available here. You can learn more about Godot, Steamworks and GodotSteam in the video below.
Hot on the heels of the Quixel Bridge release, today Quixel released version 2020.1.6 of Quixel Mixer. Quixel Mixer is a texture generation tool that is completely free for everybody and includes MegaScans integration for Unreal Engine users. The 2020.1.6 release adds the ability to export masks, as well as 65 new free smart materials.
Details of the release from the Quixel blog:
Following the support of 3D Texturing and Smart Materials, this Quixel Mixer 2020.1.6 adds 65 new scan-based Smart Materials along with a powerful new feature: advanced mask export. This highly requested feature enables you to combine, channel pack and export advanced masks, leveraging Mixer’s versatile mask stack and material blending engine.
The ability to utilize these masks in other applications allows you to easily create high-quality variations of your materials directly inside the app of your choice.
Mixer is available for everyone, for free, forever, including its enormous base library of hundreds of free scans and Smart Materials. What’s more — Unreal Engine users have access to the entire Megascans library for free, right within Mixer.
Quixel is available for download here for Windows and Mac OS. You can learn more about the 2020.1.6 release in the video below.
Blender 2.91 was released today another step forward in the rapidly improving open source 3D application. As with other recent releases this one includes several sculpting improvements, especially on the cloth brushes including the ability to collide with other objects in your scene. Other sculpting improvements include several new gesture tools, support for sculpting on the base mesh of a multi-res mesh and the addition of boundary brushes to control the edges of sculpted meshes.
Blender 2.91 Cloth Sculpting
Another major feature includes improved Boolean support including a new exact solver as well as the ability to perform boolean operations on collections of objects. The new exact solver is much more accurate but at the cost of running slower. This improvement is a welcome one, as the boolean functionality in Blender 2.8x was one of the few areas where it was worse than the previous releases.
In addition to the improving volumetric support in the form of openVDB support, Blender 2.91 also has the ability to generate volumes from meshes, as well as apply displacements to those volumes. There are a number of other improvements in Blender 2.91 from EEVEE to Grease Pencil. Learn more about the release in the release notes.
You can learn more about the Blender release, including several new features demonstrated in the video below. The 2.91 splash screen is the work of Robin Tran, a concept artist at UbiSoft Massive, you can see more shots here. Blender is available on all major platforms as a free download here, assuming of course their servers are currently on fire due to demand! If you are interested at looking even further into the future of Blender, Blender 2.92 is currently available here in alpha( soon to be beta) form.
The Unigine engine just released version 2.13. The new release includes an all new GPU based lightmapping tool, a new terrain generation tool, improved clouds, better lighting and a whole lot more. Since Unigine 2.11 there is a free community version available making Unigine a lot more viable for indie game developers.
Quixel have just released Quixel Bridge 2020.4 with a heavy focus on making the tool easier to use. Quixel Bridge is a cross platform (Linux, Windows and Mac), free tool for organizing your textures, as well as acting as a communication tool between your data and your game engine or DCC tool of choice. Quixel Bridge also acts as a handy interface to Megascans massive texture and 3D object library, a library that is completely free for Unreal Engine users!
At the beginning of this year, we overhauled the Bridge browsing experience to help you discover new, relevant content faster than ever before. As part of this ongoing effort to simplify the creative experience for artists, this latest update comes packed with enhancements to the Asset Preview Panel, the download and export settings, and other improvements that make Bridge even easier to use.
Key new features include:
Redesigned Asset Preview Panel
Simplified download and export settings
Managing Plugins made easier
Simpler initial set up
Deeper categorization
Quixel Bridge is available as a free download here and you can learn more about the 2020.4 release in the video below.
Beepbox is a free online tool for quickly generating music via sketching. It’s written in a combination of JavaScript and TypeScript with the source code available on GitHub under the very permissive MIT license. Getting started with Beepbox is as simple as going to the website and starting to lay down some notes. There are a variety of instruments available and you can layer multiple tracks of sounds to easily create music.
Perhaps coolest of all, as you create your song, the song’s data is encoded into the URL. You can simply share your songs URL and others can either open it in the player or they can open it in the editor and make changes. You can also download your song in .mid or .json formats for later updating, or you can export out into WAV format for use in your game engine of choice. In addition to BeepBox is there a modified more complex version called ModBox you can check out here. It is forked from the same source code but offers additional tools and levels of control at the cost of complexity.
You can learn more about BeepBox and see it in action in the video below.
