New game releases.
Play Fallout 76 for FREE starting now through Monday at 10AM Pacific Time. You can also pickup Fallout 76 at 25% off the regular price!*
If you already have Steam installed, click here to install or play Fallout 76. If you don’t have Steam, you can download it here.
*Offer ends Thursday, May 21st at 10AM Pacific Time
NetEase has announced a crossover event between robot battle game, Super Mecha Champions, and the popular anime series, Granbelm. The event will last four weeks, giving you a chance to test your mettle – literally – in a new game mode; mangetsu battle. You will also get the chance to play as Mangetsu and Shingetsu from Granbelm, and even pilot some mechas taken right out of the show. The most significant of these are the powerful, yet subtly-named, cat mech; Viola Katze.
For any unfamiliar with the show, it’s based in a world where magical girls pilot giant robots called Armanox, fighting them in the Granbelm tournament to earn the title of Princeps Mage – basically the person who gets all the magic. As with most anime, there’s a lot of detail, but the show fits perfectly with Super Mecha Champions, as both feature giant Japanese robots clobbering the daylights out of each other.
For the mangetsu battle mode, the decor of Mecha City has been revamped with a new full moon aesthetic, and features will pop up around the map, such as a portal which randomly transports you to either great riches, or some angry fellow robots.
All of these details and more are shown off in the crossover event’s trailer:
A smattering of Rune Fragments are also scattered around for collection, allowing you to unlock an amulet granting special skills, reduced cooldown, and protection shields.
It warms the heart when two beloved IPs bond over their mutual love, and something which can give us all hope in this fractured time; giant robots destroying stuff.
If you’re a fan of Granblem, a fan of mech games, or just want to give a whirl in a mean machine, you can find Super Mecha Champions on Google Play, and the App Store.
Announced back at GDC 2019, after a brief delay Epic Games Online Services are finally here. EOS provide all of the commonly needed networking components for game development, completely free. This includes tasks such as leaderboards, lobbies, matchmaking, storage, P2P and more. EOS provides the following services:
- Game Services deliver lobbies, matchmaking, peer-to-peer connectivity, player data storage, achievements and stats, leaderboards, game analytics, and player ticketing. More features are coming later, including voice chat. You can use these services together with your own account system, with platform account systems, or choose to use Epic Games accounts.
- Epic Account Services support cross-platform accounts, login, friends, and presence, and are interoperable with console account systems. Reach an audience of over 350 million players with 2.2 billion friend connections on over half a billion devices across seven platforms.
You can learn more here and here. Log in to the developer portal to download the SDKs, with both C++ and C# SDKs available. EOS services are game engine agnostic and can be run in Unreal Engine, Godot, Unity, CryEngine and more.
It is hard to understand why Epic Games are making their networking solutions available free, so I reached out to Tim Sweeney for comment:
You can learn more about Epic Games Online Services in the video below.
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There is a new Humble Bundle of interest to game developers, this one is the Humble Learning Game Coding and Development Bundle. As with all Humble Bundles, this one is organized into tiers:
1$ Tier
15$ Tier
25$ Tier
As with all Humble Bundles, you decide how your money is allocated, between Humble, charity, the publisher and if you so choose (and thanks if you do!) to support GFS using this link. You can learn more about this bundle in the video below.
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Epic games just made a trio of announcements today that are going to be absolute game changers for the game development industry.
This one is huge! Retroactive to January 1st, 2020, Unreal Engine has been changes so developers only pay royalties after their first MILLION dollars in revenue!
Starting today, you can download and use Unreal Engine to build games for free as you always have, except now royalties are waived on your first $1 million in gross revenue. The new Unreal Engine license terms, which are retroactive to January 1, 2020, give game developers an unprecedented advantage over other engine license models. For more information, visit the FAQ.
Wow!
Epic also gave us a first look at Unreal Engine 5, showing off the two major new features, Nanite and Lumen.
Nanite is describe as:
Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry frees artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see. Nanite virtualized geometry means that film-quality source art comprising hundreds of millions or billions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine—anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans to CAD data—and it just works. Nanite geometry is streamed and scaled in real time so there are no more polygon count budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw count budgets; there is no need to bake details to normal maps or manually author LODs; and there is no loss in quality.
While Lumen is:
Lumen is a fully dynamic global illumination solution that immediately reacts to scene and light changes. The system renders diffuse interreflection with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections in huge, detailed environments, at scales ranging from kilometers to millimeters. Artists and designers can create more dynamic scenes using Lumen, for example, changing the sun angle for time of day, turning on a flashlight, or blowing a hole in the ceiling, and indirect lighting will adapt accordingly. Lumen erases the need to wait for lightmap bakes to finish and to author light map UVs—a huge time savings when an artist can move a light inside the Unreal Editor and lighting looks the same as when the game is run on console.
Preview releases of UE 5 should arrive early 2021 with a final release later in the year. You can see UE5 in action in this video. Additionally UE 4.25 was just released as you can see here.
First announced in GDC 2019, Epic Online Services are finally available. This is a collection of free online tools that are battle tested using Fortnite.
Friends, matchmaking, lobbies, achievements, leaderboards, and accounts: we built these services for Fortnite, we launched them across seven major platforms – PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android. Now we’re opening up Epic Online Services to all developers FOR FREE in a simple multiplatform SDK!
Learn more about all of these announcements in the video below.
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The Digital Dragons Indie celebration is now live on Steam, with dozens of demos, live-streams, and a collection of games, hand-picked by the Digital Dragons jury and available on Steam.
Get ready to explore 50 indie games, as the event is planned from 13th to 15th of May. Live-streams will be held in Polish, English and Russian! You can witness the greatness of #indiegames curated by Digital Dragons.
https://store.steampowered.com/sale/digitaldragons
The event is organised by @Digital Dragons, @Walkabout Games, and @AMD.
Concept Graph is perhaps the single most impressive plugin I have seen yet for the Godot game engine. It aims to bring the world of procedural content generation to the Godot game engine and quite frankly, even in an early experimental state, it succeeds. Even in my short hands-on time with Concept Graph, I can really see how this could be a game changer for many Godot developers.
Described on the Wiki accordingly:
Concept Graph is a free node based content creation tool integrated in the Godot game
engine. The node graph is composed of many small independent nodes connected together to create a complex result.
Current status
This add-on is still in alpha. It’s not considered production ready, but if you want to play around with it, I’d love to hear your feedback on the UI, general usability, features or anything else. If you want to contribute to the code, head oven to the Advanced topics section to get familiar with the code-base architecture.
Quite frankly, Concept graph is really one of those things you should see in action to truly appreciate it. You can check it out in our video below including quick installation and getting started instructions. If it excites you as much as it did me, you can then learn more in this in-depth video tutorial by the addon’s creator @HungryProton.
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Maze Theory, the VR game developer, has announced two new Doctor Who games. One is for PC and console, but the other is a horror sci-fi game, which is under development in partnership with Kaigan Games. The Malaysian developer is famous for Simulacra, a Telling Lies-esque thriller where you solve a mystery via an in-game mobile phone interface. This unnamed Doctor Who mobile game will reportedly take a similar format, as a “mobile takeover”. Kaigan Games are also well-known for Sarah is Missing, another found phone horror game, and has cemented the company as an acclaimed developer of handheld horror.
The game is set during the period of the current 13th Doctor, Jodie Whitaker, forming a trilogy of three games alongside Doctor Who: Edge of Time, a VR game that launched last November, and a game coming to console and PC next year.
According to the developer, players can expect “new adventures, new game mechanics, intriguing subplots, and iconic features such as the TARDIS, terrifying Weeping Angels, imposing Daleks and – of course – the chance to collude with the Doctor herself.”
The Doctor Who mobile game is official, and under development in partnership with the BBC.
Maze Theory also has a Peaky Blinder’s VR game in-development, so this isn’t its first time transferring a much-loved TV series and intellectual property into a game format.
We don’t know precisely when yet, but the Doctor Who mobile game is currently set to launch sometime early next year. Plenty of time to prepare yourself, or try out Simulacra if you’re feeling brave. You can find Simulacra on Google Play, or the App Store.
Crocotile3D is a unique level editor that takes the traditional 2D tiled based map creation approach, but applies it in 3D. Crocotile3D is described as:
Crocotile 3D is a tile-based 3d modeling editor. Originally released back in 2015 it is the first of its kind to use 2d tiles to construct 3d scenes. In contrast to most 3d applications that are bloated and over-complicated, Crocotile 3D is a simple to use tool targeted at creating lowpoly models and scenes with pixel-art tilesets or low-res textures. Simply select tiles directly from tilesets and place them into a scene to quickly give them a third dimension. Use various tools to edit your tiles and shape your models, let your imagination go wild!
It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. There is a free trial version available on Itch.io that is limited to saving less than 100 tiles and cannot export in OBJ format. The full version is available for purchase on Steam. Crocotile is frequently updated, with the most recent release coming just a week ago.
You can see more of this unique tool in action in the video below.
Pose Animator is a free and open source implementation showcasing how you can animated an SVG avatar using either webcam driven face and bone data, or from analyzing a static image. On the GitHub repository, Pose Animator is described accordingly:
Pose Animator takes a 2D vector illustration and animates its containing curves in real-time based on the recognition result from PoseNet and FaceMesh. It borrows the idea of skeleton-based animation from computer graphics and applies it to vector characters.
This is not an officially supported Google product.
The GitHub page also includes two demos. The first one showcases using a camera to control an avatar, while the second one showcases how to accomplish the same thing with a static image. Please note there a currently a couple bugs that need to be addressed if you build this from source yourself, with the resolution details available here. I also walk through the process of building and running Pose Animator in the video below.
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