Category: Game Releases

New game releases.

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Flax Engine 0.7 Released

Flax Engine, an in development closed beta game engine, we first covered in August of 2018, just announced the release of version 0.7 beta.  This is one of the final closed beta releases as the close in on a full 1.0 release and there are some major new features available.

Details from the Flax Engine blog:

Today we have published a new Flax 0.7 update! This version is the second Beta release! We plan to release the final 1.0 version soon.

The newest Beta version makes another great step towards AAA-ready engine with lots of tasty features such as C++ Scripting, PlayStation 4 and Xbox Scarlett support, Gameplay Globals, and shaders hot-reloading.

In this post, we will review the newest update highlights and focus on the most interesting parts. To see detailed information visit the official release notes.

You can learn more about Flax Engine in the video below.

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Netflix’s Aggretsuko anime is getting a mobile game spin-off

The latest anime to get a mobile game spin-off is Netflix’s Aggretsuko. The game is called Aggretsuko: The Short Timer Strikes Back, and it’s a match-three puzzler that’s available on iOS and Android. There’s not long to wait, either, as the Aggretsuko: The Short Timer Strikes Back release date is July 28, 2020.

The show is about a red panda who faces relatable, everyday struggles while working a typical desk job. Her boss is an insensitive jerk, talentless suck-ups are progressing quicker than she is, and her mother won’t stop nagging her to get a boyfriend. What gives Aggretsuko her quirk, though, is that she lets off steam by freestyling death metal songs into a karaoke mic.

Aggretsuko: The Short Timer Strikes Back has a simple premise. Your company is relocating offices, and it’s up to you to handle the decoration. Of course, those decorations don’t come for free, so you’ll have to complete match-three puzzles to acquire the means you need to complete the task. As far as I can see, there’s no death metal karaoke element here, and, yes, I am gutted about that.

If you’d like something to play in the meantime, though, then we have a best mobile puzzle games list we keep on top of.

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If it’s something newer you’re after, then we also have a new mobile games list that offers a variety of games across different genres.

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MudRunner Mobile brings the popular off-road driving sim to Android and iOS

Focus Home Interactive has announced that the highly successful off-road driving game, MudRunner, is coming to mobile. MudRunner Mobile takes what made the original game so popular, as you transport deliveries between destinations, using a wide array of vehicles and any means necessary to traverse the treacherous terrain. MudRunner Mobile boasts 16 all-terrain vehicles and 15 open world maps for you to get messy in.

For those that don’t know, the first MudRunner, originally called Spintires: MudRunner, is developed by Saber Interactive and was released back in 2017. Since then the series’ iconic off-roading and realistic physics has found huge popularity with audiences, and even spawned further spin-off games like SnowRunner. We’re excited to see how the game’s all-terrain craziness is going to fare on mobile.

MudRunner Mobile is set to release July 15 on both Android and iOS, and is currently available for pre-order. The original MudRunner also has multiplayer and co-op, but currently there’s no mention of either making the transition to mobile on the app store pages. We’ll be sure to keep you updated though.

If you want to get a glimpse of what MudRunner is like, you can watch a trailer for the original release below:

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If driving around the wilderness getting muddy is your idea of a good time, you can find even more details on the MudRunner Mobile App Store page, though Google Play isn’t live just yet.

If you’re looking for some other great mobile car games to play in the meantime, be sure to have a look at the ‘Racing’ sections in our lists of the best Android games and the best iOS games.

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Substance Alchemist Hands-On

Allegorithmic (now Adobe) are well known for their excellent Substance Designer and Painter texturing tools have recently released a major update for Alchemist, their Quixel Mixer competitor.  The biggest new feature to Alchemist is the AI driven Image to Material, an image importing option along side the existing B2M functionality.  From the release notes, Image to Material is describe as:

Bring the outside world into your creations. For the first time, tap into the power of AI to convert a simple photograph into a full material with incredible accuracy. No need for complex and expensive photogrammetry equipment; use pictures taken on a holiday or in your backyard, in any lighting condition.

The Image to Material filter will generate a perfect albedo, as well as normal and displacement maps which closely match the original real-life surface.

The release also adds new filters, texture importing and management tools and more.  Substance Alchemist is available as part of a Substance Subscription, and there is a 30 day fully functional trial available here.  You can check out Substance Alchemist and the new features in the hands-on video below.

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Sinoalice is an RPG from the Nier Automata creator that’s out now

While plenty know Yoko Taro as the developer of Nier: Automata, fewer may know that he’s also created a mobile game. It’s called Sinoalice, and it’s now available globally on iOS and Android after an initial release in Japan in 2017. The news was revealed from the game’s official Twitter account, which Taro then retweeted with a message saying “Please enjoy killing each other” – lovely stuff, mate, will do.

Sinoalice was initially intended to be with us sooner, with Nexon lined up to publish the title in 2019, but various delays resulted in the rights being transferred back to Pokelabo. We then got a 100-day pre-launch campaign before the release date came.

The basic rundown of Sinoalice is that you’re in a world that’s ruled by The Library. You’re tasked with hopping into various, famous fairytales and helping titular characters, like Red Riding Hood and Cinderella, revive their author. To do that, you need to slay baddies to obtain power. Gameplay-wise, it’s a real-time gacha RPG with cooperative and competitive modes to incentivise getting your buds in on the action.

You pick a character and level up their grid to become more powerful. You can unlock more classes and characters by completing missions and rolling for random weapons that accompany them.

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If that sounds like your kind of thing, you can download Sinoalice on iOS and Android now. If you’d like to see what else is on the horizon, then you can check out our soft launch list, too.

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Godot SDFGI

Godot just got a new feature for the upcoming Godot 4.0 release, SDFGI, or Signed Distance Field Global Illumination.  It is described accordingly on the Godot website:

SDFGI stands for Signed Distance Field Global Illumination. It means this technique makes heavy use of Signed Distance Fields (an Euclidean distance based representation of the signed distance function of a grid) to create this lighting.

While implementation is not final, and there will probably be many improvements to quality and performance, it seems to be good enough for general use now.

I would like to thank hugely Matias Goldberg for his enormous help on this, our patrons for their continued support, and Tim Sweeney and Epic Games for their confidence in helping us finance our research via Epic Megagrant. This new technique was developed entirely in the open and implemented under our MIT license, so anyone is welcome to use it in their own engines and games.

Now in terms of what SDFGI actually does:

SDGFI is something akin to a dynamic real-time lightmap (but it does not require unwrapping, nor does it use textures). It’s enabled and it automatically works by generating global illumination for static objects. It does not require raytracing, and it runs in most current (and some years old) dedicated GPUs, even medium-end budget CPUs from some years ago (SDFGI was developed and tested on a GeForce 1060, running at a stable 60 FPS).

Light changes are real-time, meaning any change in lighting conditions will result in an immediate update. Dynamic objects are supported only for receiving light from the environment, but they don’t contribute to lighting. Some degree of support is planned for this eventually, but not immediately.

In the video below, we look at traditional Global Illumination, then show an example of the new SDFGI, including a small tutorial on how to use it.  Godot creator Juan Linietsky also has a video on his channel about SDFGI should you wish to learn more.

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Wicked Engine Gets DX12 And Vulkan Raytracing Support

The open source cross platform C++ powered game engine Wicked Engine, just got raytracing and path tracing support for both DX12 and Vulkan renderers.  Available as both a low level framework for building your own game engine, or as a fully capable engine on it’s own, Wicked Engine boosts the following features:

  • DirectX 11, DirectX 12 & Vulkan renderers
  • Image rendering,animation : 2D,3D space
  • Font rendering (True Type)
  • Networking (UDP)
  • meshes,objects,armatures,animation,materials,lights,hit-spheres,wind,world info,dynamic cameras,ribbon trails,particle systems
  • 3D mesh rendering
  • Skeletal animation
  • Physically based materials
  • Animated texturing
  • Normal mapping
  • Displacement mapping
  • Parallax occlusion mapping
  • Real time planar reflections
  • Cube map reflections (static and real time)
  • Refractions (screen space, blurred)
  • Interactive Water
  • Gaussian Blur
  • Bloom
  • Edge outline
  • Motion Blur
  • Lens Flare
  • Light shafts
  • Bokeh Depth of Field
  • Chromatic aberration
  • Multithreaded rendering
  • Tessellation (silhouette smoothing, displacement mapping)
  • GPU-based particles (emit from point, mesh, animated mesh)
  • Soft particles
  • Hair particle systems (grass/vegetation)
  • Instanced rendering
  • MSAA (Forward rendering only)
  • FXAA
  • TAA (Temporal Antialiasing)
  • Supersampling
  • Deferred shading
  • Directional lights + cascaded shadow maps
  • Spotlights + shadow maps
  • Point lights + shadow cubemaps
  • Soft shadows (PCF)
  • BULLET Physics: rigid body, soft body
  • 3D Audio (Xaudio2)
  • Input: keyboard, mouse, controller (rawinput, xinput), touch
  • Controller feedback (vibration, LED)
  • Backlog: log,input,scripting
  • Gamma correct, HDR rendering
  • Resource Manager
  • Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO, HBAO, MSAO)
  • Screen Space Reflections
  • Skin shader (Subsurface scattering)
  • Stencil layering
  • Deferred decals
  • Forward decals
  • Color Grading
  • Sharpen filter
  • Eye adaption
  • Lua Scripting
  • Dynamic environment mapping
  • Impostor system
  • Tiled forward (Forward+) rendering (+2.5D culling)
  • Tiled deferred rendering
  • Occlusion culling with GPU queries
  • Texture atlas packing
  • Tiled decals
  • Area lights: Sphere, Disc, Rectangle, Tube
  • Frame Profiler
  • Voxel Global Illumination
  • Huge draw distance support with reversed Z-buffer
  • Force Fields GPU simulation
  • Particle – Depth Buffer collisions
  • Ocean simulation (FFT)
  • Translucent shadows
  • Refraction caustics
  • Local parallax-corrected environment maps
  • Volumetric light scattering
  • Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) Fluid Simulation
  • Ray tracing, path tracing (on GPU)
  • Entity-Component System (Data oriented design)
  • Lightmap baking (with GPU path tracing)
  • Job system
  • Inverse Kinematics
  • Springs
  • Terrain Rendering (material blending)

Wicked Engine is open source under the MIT license is and is available here on GitHub.  You can learn more about Wicked Engine in the video below.

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PUBG Mobile’s next map looks like its smallest yet

PUBG Mobile is getting a new map that has been designed with players on the go in mind. That comes from The Verge, which reports that the new map is called Livik and is as large as two kilometres by two kilometres. Matches on Livik support 40 players a game and are intended to last 15 minutes each.

While PUBG Mobile has primarily been designed to bring the PC experience to mobile phone users, Livik has been crafted to accommodate mobile players. That means the design facilitates quick matches you can play on your daily commute to and from work. “We want more people to enjoy PUBG Mobile in a more flexible way,” producer Rick Li explains to The Verge. “The initiative for this map is bringing more flexibility to those players who have tighter schedules and circumstances to accommodate for.”

While the map is notably smaller than others, Li reassures that there are still plenty of points of interest that help games go quicker. The Nordic-themed map features a volcano, hot spring, and a waterfall. While Li didn’t give much else away, he reckons that the current of the waterfall will mix up PUBG Mobile matches. There’s currently no word on when we’ll be able to play Livik, but apparently it’ll be “soon”.

If you’re curious as to what else is happening in the world of Tencent’s battle royale, then you can check out our PUBG Mobile update guide. If you fancy a go yourself, you can find it on iOS and Android.

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We also have a list of the best mobile multiplayer games, so you have more options for games you’d like to play with your friends.

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A new Metal Slug game called Code: J has just been revealed

A new Metal Slug game dubbed Metal Slug Code: J has been revealed at the annual Tencent Games Conference. The game is currently being developed by TiMi Studios, the subsidiary of Tencent Games, in close association with SNK. During the presentation, we got to see a trailer and some gameplay showing the series’ classic run-and-gun formula.

We’ve known for a while that new Metal Slug Games were coming, and that one of those games was being developed by TiMi Studios, but we didn’t know its title or much else about it. Metal Slug Code: J is initially launching in China, and during the presentation, a Code J website was linked with details on how to pre-register, meaning launch shouldn’t be too far off. Hopefully after that, we might hear some details about it launching in the west.

For those that don’t know, Metal Slug is a classic series of bullet-toting run-and-gun games that originally launched in the 90s, but have since moved onto console and mobile, and spawned a good number of sequels and spin-offs.

You can see the trailer for Metal Slug Code: J below:

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The gameplay for Metal Slug Code: J seems to channel the classic experience of the original series, but with a few fun little additions, like the ability to freeze enemies, and some cool looking 3D sections. It also shows off some pretty fancy mechanised bosses – such as that giant armoured tank-crab.

That’s all we know for now, however! We’ll be sure to update the story if we find out anything else. In the meantime, why not check out some of the best Android games, or best iOS games to tide you over?

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NeoAxis Engine Open Sourced

The NeoAxis Engine just released the source code, although it’s technically not “open source” according to OSI compliant licenses.  You can now access the source code on GitHub.

Here is the license:

  • 1. When publishing your product, you must add “Made with NeoAxis Engine (www.neoaxis.com)” with the product information and in its credits.
  • 2. You can distribute the NeoAxis editor with your product. When you do it the window title of the editor must be:

    “Your project name – NeoAxis Engine 2020.3 (www.neoaxis.com)”.

    Or if you made engine modification:

    “Your project name – Modified version of NeoAxis Engine 2020.3 (www.neoaxis.com)”

    This can be done by changing the value of the ModifiedVersionOfNeoAxisEngine field in the Sources\Engine\NeoAxis.Core\Utility\EngineInfo.cs file.

  • 3. You can distribute the source code of the NeoAxis Engine. In the case of publishing any part of the modified source code, for example, by means of creating a fork or other distribution method, you automatically become the contributor of the NeoAxis Engine. This means that the NeoAxis Group Ltd reserves the right to use your modified source code at its discretion, for example, to improve the original version of the NeoAxis Engine. Copyright for modified code is saved to you.

To me that certainly sounds like something an existing OSI license should cover.  You can learn more about NeoAxis making the source available in the video below.

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