Category: Game Releases

New game releases.

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Wick Editor Hands-On Review

The Wick Editor is a surprisingly capable free and open source tool that defies categorisation. At it’s core it’s a 2D graphic and animation tool, but it also has programmability features making it capable of creating simple games. It supports publishing animated GIFs, movies, soundtracks, sprite sequences and even single click html applications.

Wick Editor is described as:

The Wick Editor is a free and open-source tool for creating games, animations, and everything in-between. It’s designed to be the most accessible tool for creating multimedia projects on the web.

The Wick Editor is a hybrid of an animation tool and a coding environment, heavily inspired by similar tools such as Flash, HyperCard, and Scratch. It was developed in response to a growing need for such a tool for the modern web.

As mentioned the project is open source with the code hosted on GitHub under the GPL v3 license. The Wick Editor runs entirely in the browser and can be run by visiting https://editor.wickeditor.com/. You can also install locally and run using node and npm. You can learn more about Wick Editor and see it in action in the video below (or watch on Odysee).

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xy_J9ZgJ3Y?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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Win a free copy of mystery-adventure game The Almost Gone!

Who doesn’t love a good mobile mystery? Whether it’s inspecting intricate objects in The Room, or exploring a whole planet in Krystopia: Nova’s Journey, mobile is specially equipped to offer little mysteries to dip in and out of. That’s why, this week, we’ve decided to partner with Playdigious and give away some Android and iOS copies of The Almost Gone. This mystery-adventure game is a little like if Monument Valley collided with Gone Home – a mobile mystery game where you uncover secrets by moving between rooms, and inspecting them for clues.

But each room or scene in The Almost Gone is a beautiful 3D diorama, that you can move, and tap to highlight objects of importance. If you hadn’t guessed, we absolutely love 3D dioramas on mobile, whether its Bad North, Monument Valley, or Game of Thrones: Tale of Crows, and The Almost Gone is no exception. We’d honestly play this game just for how aesthetically pleasing it is.

But luckily it also has a pretty captivating mystery, as you unlock each scene like a little puzzle box. If this sounds like your kind of game, be sure to enter for a copy below!

There are two entry boxes, one for Android and one for iOS, so please be sure to enter the correct one for your platform, as otherwise you won’t be able to play the game. Also, if you plan to enter, be sure to have a glance at our terms and conditions first.

android

The Almost Gone – Android Giveaway

ios

The Almost Gone – iOS Giveaway

Alternately, if you can’t wait to play The Almost Gone, you can purchase it on Google Play or the App Store. For more similar recommendations, our list of the best mobile puzzle games will help.

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Epic Games Lead $15M Round of Funding For Manticore Games

It was announced today that Epic Games was leading a $15M round of funding for Manticore Games, the creator of the Core game creation platform. Core is a member of a growing segment of “games for making games”, similar to other titles such as Dreams and Roblox. Core is built on top of the Unreal Engine and provides most of the tools required to make modern online games in an easy to use package.

Details of the investment from Manticore Games:

Manticore Games has closed $15 million in funding, led by Epic Games and validating the vision and the progress of Core toward an endless gaming multiverse.

Manticore’s mission is to unleash a new wave of creativity in games by radically lowering the barriers to game making and publishing the same way that YouTube revolutionized video creation.

“Core is very impressive,” said Adam Sussman, President, Epic Games. “At Epic we believe the industry is ultimately headed to games becoming more like open platforms where creators can build their own worlds. Built in Unreal Engine, Core exemplifies this future and goes one step further by providing the environment for anybody to create great multiplayer games, and a metaverse playground where players discover endless entertainment.”

You can learn more about the acquisition and get a brief overview of Core in action in the video below (or watch on Odysee here). For more details on Core be sure to check out our previous coverage here when they announced alpha, and here when monetization for creators was announced.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wxMxuTIzpI?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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Unity Humble Bundle Improved With 6 New Assets

The ongoing  Unity Game Dev Humble Bundle got even better today with the addition of 6 new assets. Don’t worry if you already purchased the bundle, you will receive all of the added assets up to the tier you purchased.

The new assets added to the pack include:

  • SNAPS Prototype Asian Garden
  • SNAPS Prototype Car Park
  • SNAPS Prototype SciFi Urban
  • SNAPS HD Asian Garden
  • SNAPS HD SciFi Urban
  • SNAPS HD Car Park

The prototype assets are low polygon models ideal for lower end hardware or as the name implies level prototyping. The HD kits on the other hand contain high quality HDRP pipeline assets for use in a commercial grade game. It should be noted that the HD packs are not currently updated to the most current HDRP and some breakage may occur. Unity have stated they intend to update the assets to the most current Unity version soon. You can learn more about the additions and see the SciFi Urban HD asset in action in the video below.

In addition to the new assets, we have already covered several of the assets included in this bundling including UModeler, Clayxels and the highly recommended Peek.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IK1IELdeN8?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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Microsoft acquires Bethesda, creators of The Elder Scrolls, Fallout and Doom

Microsoft just announced its purchase of ZeniMax Media, parent company of Bethesda Softworks, for USD 7.5 billion. This deal means that Bethesda Game Studios, id Software, ZeniMax Online Studios, Arkane, MachineGames, Tango Gameworks, Alpha Dog, and Roundhouse Studios are now part of the Xbox family. It gives Microsoft ownership of franchises such as The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Wolfenstein, DOOM, Dishonored, Quake, Starfield, and more.

Bethesda has been a big supporter of Xbox Game Pass for some time now, and Microsoft will be adding Bethesda’s beloved franchises to Xbox Game Pass for console and PC. You can also look forward to some highly anticipated titles such as Starfield, an upcoming space RPG in development by Bethesda Game Studios, that will be available day one on Game Pass, and many yet to be announced titles.

It will be interesting to see how this affects Nintendo Switch, as many popular Xbox titles have recently launched for the console, including Ori and the Will of the Wisps, which was revealed during the Nintendo Direct Mini recently. Hopefully, this will lead to more Bethesda titles coming to the console.

See the announcement tweet below

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Hands-On With Peek For Unity

In the next part in our going look at key extensions in the Unity Game Dev Humble Bundle, today we are looking at Peek from Ludiq. In previous features we have looked at UModeler and Clayxels if you are interested in learning more.

Peek is a powerful add-on the greatly changes the way you work with Unity, including features like:

  • Dynamic toolbars the replace the requirement for the Inspector windows
  • Pop up support on Ctrl+F replacing the need for the Hierarchy window
  • Sticky drag and drop
  • Quick reference inspection
  • Creator to quickly create and place objects and instances in your scene
  • Multi-object grouping

You can see Peek and most of these features in action in the video below (or here on Odysee). Peek is regularly $60 on the Unity Asset Store and is half that price (with dozens of other assets and games) in the current Bundle, expiring in 9 days.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzao1-RrSkw?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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Castle Game Engine Hands-On

The Castle Game Engine is a pretty unique option. It’s a long running open source 2D/3D game engine for Pascal and Delphi developers with a recent emphasis on improving the editing experience. Hand and hand with the Castle engine is the Lazarus IDE and the open source Pascal implementation Free Pascal, which are required for Castle game development.

Top features of Castle include:

  • Use any 3D or 2D software to create your models in various formats: glTF, X3D, VRML, Spine JSON, Collada…
  • Develop cross-platform applications, for desktop (Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD…), mobile (Android, iOS), consoles (Nintendo Switch) and other devices (Raspberry Pi).
  • Visual editor to design games UI and to build applications, powerful command-line build tool under the hood.
  • Optimized rendering with a lot of graphic effects (physically-based rendering, shadows, mirrors, bump mapping, shader effects, gamma correction…).
  • Build and edit the scene graph (X3D) at runtime. Create 3D processing, visualization tools and CAD applications.
  • Extensible system for game objects, with physics, creatures with AI and navmesh, and more.
  • Access numerous services, like in-app purchases and game services on mobile devices.
  • Create cross-platform user-interface with anchors and automatic scaling.
  • Code in modern Object Pascal, an efficient OOP language with cross-platform open-source compiler (FPC), compiled to a native optimized code.

If you are interested in learning more about the Castle game engine be sure to check out the video below (or watch it here on Odysee). The Castle developers have also recently released a document making it easier for Unity developers to get up to speed with key concepts in Castle, which is available here. If you are interested in getting started with Castle and Lazarus, step by step instructions are available here.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqTgbRa5Bq0?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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Brackeys Calls It Quits And GameFromScratch Is Now On Odysee

We have two news stories in one today, the first a bit of sad news for Unity developers. Popular YouTube Unity tutorial creator Brackey has called it quits after 8+ years of making tutorials. Thankfully he is leaving under happy circumstances, it’s basically the digital equivalent of retirement. So to Brackeys, congratulations and best of luck to you in your future endeavours, I am sure you have helped a legion of developers learn Unity. The channel will remain up, as will the community Discord server, only the Patreon page is being removed… and of course no new content will be posted.

In completely unrelated news, GameFromScratch video content is now available on Odysee. This is not actually all that new, as Odysee is ultimately a new front end for Lbry.tv. Lbry.tv and now Odysee are the only other place beside YouTube where GFS video content is officially available. Shortly after the YouTube Extortion strike experience it became incredibly clear to me that having all of my eggs in one virtual basket was a very bad idea. Unfortunately the Lbry end user experience was never all that great. With the recent improvements and the launch of Odysee, it has become a much better alternative to YouTube, so be sure to check it out if you are looking for a YouTube alternative. There are already several game development channels on there, including GDQuest.

Learn more in the video below, or once it’s mirrored, you can watch it on Odysee too! 😉

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTt2Wx83jUo?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]