Category: Game Releases

New game releases.

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Mad Miramar heads up content for PUBG Mobile season 13

Tencent Games has announced a major update for PUBG Mobile. The content drop is set for May 7 and will kick off the thirteenth season of the game, introducing a variety of new features and updates. The main highlight of this will be Mad Miramar, which will add two sections to the pre-existing map, including an oasis in the north, and ruins in the north-west. There will also be more resources spawning throughout the map.

The crowning glory of the update, however, is the new rust-punk style race track which runs through the entire area, as well as a new vehicle to race on it. The golden mirado, a one-of-a-kind golden convertible, will spawn on the map, and only be available to whoever grabs it first.

Some other quality of life changes include the addition of vending machines, which will dispense painkillers and energy drinks, with the possibility of you collecting eight at a time. The other main map update is the cheer park, an area where you and your friends can kick back and relax after a match, with shooting ranges, and an outdoor BBQ.

Full update notes haven’t been released yet, but should appear in the next few days before it rolls out on May 7. You can find more details in the trailer:

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There are changes to the results screen too, which now lets you see stats such as revives, assists, distance traveled, and time survived. This, as well as a variety of weapon-based information, will be a great tool for perfecting your game.

Guns are also getting some love, with the P90 submachine gun’s  inclusion in arena mode, a new 2.7x scope for the Win97 carbine, and a new canted site for classic mode, giving you three modes of weapon fire to switch between.

All in all the changes should be a great increase to the game’s quality of life. If you want to find out more about upcoming PUBG content, check out the PUBG mobile website.

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Core And American McGee Launch Art Contest

Core, the game engine we covered just yesterday, have teamed up with designer American McGee to launch a new Alice in Wonderland themed contest Through the Looking Glass.

What beauty or horrors await Alice in her adventures? This is the question you must answer as you create a game-ready environment to fit this theme. We have gathered concept art from Alice Asylum to inspire your work.

All entries must be created in Core, our new, free to use game and world creation platform, powered by Unreal, that gives you all the tools you need to turn your vision into reality. To learn more about Core, visit coregames.com or read “Art Directing the Multiverse” by Dan Fessler, Core’s art director.

The contest ends May 31st, 2020 and has several prizes available, including:

image

If you are looking for guidance on how to create art using Core, be sure to start with this tutorial for the basics.  They also launched a new learning portal available here.  You can learn more about the contest in the video below.

Art GameDev News

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Catalyst Black is an upcoming hero shooter by the makers of Vainglory

Super Evil Megacorp has just announced Catalyst Black, an upcoming hero shooter that features a wide variety of inspirations, including its own Vainglory. It takes the top-down gameplay of Vainglory, mixes it with the hero shooting mechanics of Overwatch, and sprinkles the loot and loadouts from Destiny 2 to create possibly the ultimate mobile game.

The closest comparison to Catalyst Black right now is Supercell’s Brawl Stars, which is a more traditional hero shooter that plays like a MOBA. Catalyst Black will massively expand on this format thanks to the sheer amount of control you can have over your playable character. You can equip primary and secondary weapons, and active and passive abilities.

You can also equip your character with a mask, which basically functions as its ultimate ability. Masks let you basically become the avatar of a god, changing your appearance and providing you with powerful new abilities whenever you activate it. There are a bunch of different masks to choose from, and you can tweak the active and passive abilities for each of them too.

It’s entirely possible to create your own playstyle using the loadout system, which is a welcome change to similar shooter Brawl Stars, where your hero choice determines how you play. You can fight from the safety of distance or get stuck right in with a shotgun. It’s entirely up to you.

In terms of modes, we don’t know anything concrete yet, but we do know that there will be a bunch of them, and they’re designed for 10-20 players to compete against each other in teams. What’s perhaps most interesting, is that you can drop in, and out, of matches at any time, allowing you to play no matter how much time you have on your hands.

We’re not sure exactly when we’ll get our hands on Catalyst Black, as it’s only in pre-alpha right now. We do know that it’s designed to be cross-platform though, and if it follows the same path as Vainglory, it will launch across iOS, Android, PC, and Mac. In its introductory trailer, Super Evil Megacorp mentioned that it will support touch, controllers, and keyboard and mouse.

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We’ll keep you posted as we learn more about Catalyst Black. If you’re intrigued, you can visit the official site, or follow the game on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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Core Now In Open Alpha

Core is a new game creation platform built upon Unreal Engine that recently went into open alpha release.  Core is a game creation platform in a similar vein as Dreams, Roblox and Second Life.  It comes packed out of the box with models, audio and materials and can be coded using the Lua programming language.

Core is described as:

Core is an endless universe of games and worlds designed by a global community of creators. It’s a radically accessible game construction kit, content exchange, and game-playing platform, all in one. With Core, you can create multiplayer games, using the power of Unreal Engine, with no coding or art skills required. When you’re ready to share your creations, publish them to the Core platform where they’ll be instantly available to play.

Core is in Open Alpha which means anyone can start building, sharing, and playing games. However, Core is not complete, and we will be adding several features and making improvements over time.

Plans exist to add monetization, enabling creators to make money with their Core creations.  There is also the possibility that Core games will be publishable to other platforms, but for now Core games are published on the core website.  Core is well documented for developers, with that documentation available here.  Words do a poor job of describing Core, watch out the video below to see Core in action.

GameDev News

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Aquiris Game Studio lays out its 2020 roadmap for Horizon Chase – World Tour

Aquiris Game Studio has laid out its 2020 roadmap for Horizon Chase – World Tour, which includes a totally new user interface, more free-to-play content, weekly challenges, and more. If you’ve fallen out of playing the retro-inspired racer for whatever reason, now’s as good a time as ever to get back into it.

Some of the roadmap has already been fulfilled, too. If you download the game right now, you’ll find a completely redesigned UI that Aquiris describes as “for modern gadgets”. That also includes improved support for different screen ratios and a higher native resolution, so it should look a lot better overall.

There’s also a lot more free-to-play content, including three whole cups to play before you have to fork out for more. That consists of 30 tracks and seven cars to check out without spending a penny. There’s more to come as well, with May introducing a new weekly challenges feature, which is available to all. Weekly challenges bring you a new selection of tracks each week, each of which have new rules and conditions, spicing up the experience.

If you do own the premium version of Horizon Chase, you’ll receive additional challenges and rewards though, so don’t make the mistake of thinking this is all for free-to-play gamers. You’ll also find a new store, which Aquiris hasn’t announced the details of just yet. All we know is that it will provide “additional content”.

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Aquiris plans to release even more new features during 2020, and will announce these at a later date. If you’d like to give Horizon Chase – World Tour a try, you can grab it right now for free from the App Store or Google Play.

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Diligent Engine | PlayCanvas | New Kenney.nl Assets | AssetForge

Welcome to another NewsFromScratch game development news round-up.  Today we have 2 different game engine releases, a new asset pack from Kenney.nl, as well as an update to AssetForge.

DiligentEngine

Diligent Engine is a cross platform rendering framework that abstracts away the complexities of dealing with OpenGL, Vulkan, DirectX and Metal APIs.  This new release adds Vulkan support for Android and more.  You can learn more about Diligent Engine in our previous feature available here.

PlayCanvas Release 1.27

PlayCanvas just released a new version, 1.27.  PlayCanvas is a complete 3D game engine with tooling that runs entirely in the browser.  The 1.27 releases biggest new feature is a new procedural mesh generation API, enabling a huge swath of new functionality.  You can learn more about PlayCanvas in our multipart tutorial available here or in video form here.

Kenney.nl New Asset Pack + AssetForge Release

Kenney.nl have released another free 3d model asset pack around the concept of Nature, now with over 330 low polygon game ready assets.  Additionally a new version of AssetForge was released, with improved sprite rendering features and more.  AssetForge is a 3D modelling application that takes a kit-bashing appraoch.  You can learn more about AssetForge here.

Learn more about all of these announcements in the video below.

GameDev News

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Phaser 3.23 | Defold 1.2.168 | Verge3D 3.1 For Blender

Welcome to another NewsFromScratch game development news round-up. Today we have 3 different game engine releases, Phaser, Defold and Verge3D.

Phaser 3.23 Released

This release of the Phaser open source HTML5 game framework brings an important milestone in reaching 100% coverage of the entire API, including private members. This task also resulted in better Typescript bindings as well. New features were also added to the framework, including a new Rope object for deformation effects.

Defold 1.2.168 Released

The Defold game engine is a free and cross platform Lua powered game engine. It just received a minor update in the form of the 1.2.168 release, which includes the ability to run the engine while iconified, as well as finer tune control over URL handling. If you want to learn more about Defold, be sure to check out our Defold Crash Course tutorial hosted over on DevGa.me.

Verge3D 3.1 For Blender Released

Verge3D is an engine for exporting Blender scenes to the web, while adding logic using their simple Puzzle system. This release adds support for VR Controllers, new Vector logic blocks, an improved physics engine including a new lighter and faster WebAssembly version and more. You can check out Verge3D for Blender in action here.

You can learn more about all three releases in the video below.

GameDev News

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Kingdom Two Crowns is out now on iOS, rolling out on Android

April 28, 2020 Kingdom Two Crowns is out right now on iOS, and we’ve updated this article with new information to reflect that.

The wait is over, folks. Kingdom Two Crowns is out right now on iOS, and is rolling out on Android over the course of the day. For those not in the know, it’s the sequel to Kingdom: New Lands and it expands on the original in a variety of different ways, introducing a story campaign, cooperative multiplayer, and a brand new feudal Japan setting.

If you haven’t experienced this series before, you play as a monarch who lands on the shores of a new kingdom and has to make it habitable. You begin by recruiting the locals (you literally just toss coins at them) to build, guard, hunt, and do whatever other menial task need performing. You start with literally nothing but will eventually have your very own castle, which is fully-functioning.

Your overarching goal is to fix a ship that will allow you to travel to the next island, at which point the experience starts all over again; albeit more challenging this time. But where does the challenge come from? Well, each night a variety of monstrous creatures attack your kingdom, and you have to make sure it’s well-defended. It’s a bit like a survival simulator in that sense.

Managing your budget is no small feat either. You start the game with a few coins, which you’ll quickly spend to pay the locals to build you stuff. Each time you recruit a local, build or upgrade something, or order a crafted item, you’ll spend cash. To replenish it, you need to hire hunters, invest in travelling merchants, or explore the nearby area for treasure. That is its own reward though, as the game is visually stunning in a retro kind of way.

The sequel expands on all of this by introducing a new story campaign, which challenges you to build a kingdom that stands the test of time and perhaps finishes off the monsters that plague it for good. There’s also a new cooperative mode that you can play in split screen (we’d recommend a tablet for that) or online.

There’s also a brand new setting: feudal Japan. It pretty much plays the same, but the visuals have seen a huge overhaul, with trees making way for bamboo and your buildings and characters taking on a Japanese flavour. Apparently this isn’t the only new setting we’ll get either, as Raw Fury has revealed that more are coming in future updates.

The first of these arrives today, too, in the form of Dead Lands. This expansion is a crossover with Metroidvania Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, featuring your favourite characters, which you can swap between on-the-fly, and a bunch of new mounts, which have all-new abilities. You can learn more about this expansion by reading our news article, which we’ve linked to beneath this post.

If you’re interested, you can grab Kingdom Two Crowns right now on iOS via the App Store, or keep an eye out on Google Play for when it launches in your territory. You might want to hit the pre-register button to receive a notification.

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Humble C#/.NET Core Book and Video Bundle

There is a new Humble Bundle available today of interest to game developers, specifically C# programmers. It is the C# & .NET CORE Humble Bundle by Packt Press, a collection of e-books and training videos around the subjects of C#, .NET Core, Azure and more.

As with all Humble Bundles, this one is split into tiers:

1$ Tier

· Hands-On Mobile Development with .NET Core

· Modernize ASP.NET Web Apps with Azure App Services

· Hands-On Network Programming with C# and .NET Core

· C# 8 Programming in 4 Hours (VIDEO)

· C# 8 and .NET Core 3.0 New Features (VIDEO)

8$ Tier

· Beginning ASP.NET Core 3.0

· C# 8 and .NET Core 3.0 (VIDEO)

· Hands-On Object-Oriented Programming with C#

· Hands-On Design Patterns with C# and .NET Core

· Learn Modern App Development with C# 8 and .NET Core 3.0 (VIDEO)

· Programming in C#: Exam 70-483(MCSD) Guide

· Hands-On Software Architecture with C# 8 and .NET Core 3

· Hands-On Parallel Programming with C# 8 and .NET Core 3

15$ Tier

· ASP.NET Core 3 and React

· ASP.NET Core 3 and Angular 9

· Hands-On RESTful Web Services with ASP.NET Core 3

· C# 8 and .NET Core 3 Projects using Azure

· Hands-On Domain-Driven Design with .NET Core

· Build a Real-World App with ASP.NET Core MVC

· Hands-On Web Development with ASP.NET and Angular 7

· C# and .NET Core 3.0

Buying a higher dollar value tier gets you all of the items in the lower priced tiers. As with all Humble Bundles, you decide how your money is allocated, choosing between charity, the publisher, Humble or if you so choose (and thanks if you do!) to support GFS purchasing using this link. You can learn more about the bundle in the video below.

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