New game releases.
Today we are checking out Ct.js, a cross platform open source 2D game engine/editor. Available for Windows, Mac and Linux, Ct.js is a surprisingly full featured and easy to use game engine with a modular full level editor, easy programming and excellent documentation. It’s source code is available on GitHub under the MIT open source library, along with complete building instructions.
We go hands-on with Ct.js in the video below.
Raw Fury has announced a big expansion for Kingdom Two Crowns that features characters from the hit Metroidvania Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. It’s called Dead Lands, and it allows you to play as a few of your favourite characters from Bloodstained on a wide variety of new mounts. This also marks a new feature for the series, which allows you to change your mount on the fly.
Each of the mounts have different abilities too, including a beetle that lays traps, an undead mount that summons barriers, and the horse Gamigin, which has a powerful charge attack. Perhaps more exciting than this is the new ability to swap between the four different monarchs available as part of this expansion: Miriam, Zangetsu, Gebel, and Alfred. Each monarch has its own unique trait, allowing you to adapt your approach on the fly like never before.
The best news is that the Dead Lands expansion will launch entirely for free, along with the mobile version of Two Crowns, on April 28. The mobile version costs $8.99 (£8.99) and includes new co-op modes, a brand new touch control scheme, and controller support.
In other Raw Fury-related news, the publisher is holding a big spring sale to celebrate the sunshine. Many of its excellent titles are available at huge reductions across the App Store and Google Play. This includes the likes of strategy great Bad North, cyberpunk point-and-click adventure Whispers of a Machine, and Metroidvania Dandara, which recently saw a big content drop itself.
The prices across the board appear to have dropped by roughly 50%, which is pretty substantial. In a disappointing move, Kingdom: New Lands hasn’t seen any discount in price, which seems a bit surprising given that the sequel, Kingdom Two Crowns, launches in just over a week on April 28. You’d think this would be a good opportunity to pick up a few new users.
You can pre-register for Kingdom Two Crowns right now on Google Play or pre-order it on the App Store. You can also check out Raw Fury’s sale on iOS or Android and grab yourself a bargain.
Today we are taking a look at Spaceship Generator, an open source procedural space ship creator add-on for Blender. Spaceship generator can automatically create a variety of space craft, like the ones below.
The above link is for Blender 2.7x only. Fortunately a user has created a Blender 2.8x compatible port that is available here on GitHub.
In the video below we demonstrate Spaceship Builder in action as well as showing how it can be installed and used.
You’ll soon be able to select your own partner Pokémon in Pokémon Masters, thanks to the brand new eggs feature coming soon. When it arrives, you’ll be able to select from one of three gen one monsters: Bulbasaur, Charmander, or Squirtle, at which point your chosen monster will hatch from its egg and you can form a sync pair with them.
Developer DeNA has also revealed three more eggs planned for a future date, which appear to feature Meowth, Scyther, and Tauros. Even more eggs will arrive in future updates too, so it seems like you’ll soon have a huge list of Pokémon you can partner up with.
In other news, DeNA has also revealed that the next legendary event will feature Ho-Oh, and will debut a brand new feature: the prize box. This allows you to collect prize coins by participating in the event, which will allow you to progress further in the event. This event will also see the introduction of the reward boost ticket, an item that boosts the rewards of a battle of your choosing.
DeNA has also detailed plans to make sync orbs easier to obtain by introducing the following measures:
In short, you’ll now be able to get a fixed number of sync orbs for specific sync pairs from supercourses, and you’ll get more from events too.
Looking forward, a legendary arena mode is coming soon, though we likely won’t hear about it until mid-May, when DeNA will provide the next message.
If you’d like to get back into Pokémon Masters, you can grab it right now on iOS or Android via the App Store and Google Play respectively.
Microsoft MakeCode is a game engine aimed directly at getting people started with game development with an easy to use game engine. MakeCode can be run directly in the browser using MakeCode Arcade requiring no login or signup to get started. Programming is done using a Scratch like visual programming language, but at any point in time you can switch over to JavaScript that is being generated. There is also the ability to extend the capabilities of MakeCode with extensions, that can also be written as JavaScript.
In addition there are several simple consoles and projects that can be used to run your generated games, which can also be simply saved and shared in the form of a custom encoded PNG image file. If you are looking to start game development, or are interested in getting a child involved in game development, MakeCode is a great option.
Additionally MakeCode Arcade is an open source project available on GitHub under the MIT license, if you wish to contribute or simply run the server locally.
We go hands on and show creation of a simple game in the video below.
Inskscape, the open source cross platform vector graphics application, just released the first release candidate on the way to a full 1.0 release. Along side the RC1 release, they also released version 0.92.5 of the stable branch.
Details of the two releases from the Inkscape news pages:
Inkscape 0.92.5
While we are working to release Inkscape 1.0 in the very near future, we have addressed some bugs in the stable 0.92 series. Most notably, an issue for Windows 10 users that prevented Inkscape from discovering fonts that have not been installed system-wide has now been fixed. Inkscape extensions written in Python will now also run with Python 3, while compatibility with the (deprecated) Python 2 is maintained.
Read all about the changes in the latest stable Inkscape version and download it from our website.
Call for Testing the 1.0 Release Candidate
Inkscape 1.0 will mark a major milestone for the project. This upcoming release is loaded with features and polish! You can find a draft of the release notes that lists all the goodies in our Wiki.
For macOS, the 1.0 will feature the easiest installation and best macOS integration that Inkscape has ever offered. There are, however, unique issues that will require additional testing and improvement for our Apple fans.
Please get involved by downloading and testing the Release Candidate for Linux, Windows and macOS.
Report Bugs
If you run into any bugs, especially with the Release Candidate, please help us by reporting them promptly, so we can try to fix them before we release the final 1.0 version.
You can learn more about Inkscape RC 1.0 in the video below. The car SVG graphic used in the demo is available here if you want to compare performance results.
Behaviour Interactive’s mobile port of the multiplayer survival horror game, Dead by Daylight, is out right now. The mobile version plays almost exactly the same as the original, with four players taking on the roles of survivors and a single player acting as murderous psychopath. Survivors attempt to escape without getting killed, the killer does the killing.
It’s not as simple as running to the exit or chopping heads off though, as both survivor and killer have a bunch of mechanics to keep in mind that help them complete objectives. Survivors, for example, can’t harm the killer at all. Instead, they have to use the power of stealth to avoid the enemy, hiding behind or inside objects, and moving as quietly as possible.
However, you won’t always be able to visually see the killer, which is where your terror radius comes in. When you get close to the killer, you’ll hear a heartbeat sound. This becomes louder as you get closer to the killer, at which point you’ll be able to see where the killer is looking thanks to a red cone of light in front of them.
While survivors can’t actively attack the killer, you can help your fellows to escape capture by temporarily blinding or stunning the killer. You can also heal your teammates when they get injured. In terms of actually escaping though, you have to attempt to repair five generators dotted around the map. Doing so makes a lot of noise, which can attract the killer to your position. Once you’ve repaired all of the generators, you can head straight towards the exit gates.
Meanwhile, killers have their own set of mechanics to help them hunt and butcher survivors. Due to your heightened senses, you can see tracks and bloodstains left behind by survivors, as well as track their location when you hear a loud noise. You can also run faster than a survivor, which helps you catch them when spotted. If you do catch them, you’ll have to attack them to knock them down, and you’ve got both a short-range and lunge attack to help you. Two hits, and the survivor is down.
To actually kill a survivor, you have to carry them to one of the various sacrificial hooks dotted around the map. You’ll have to be quick and careful though, as survivors can wriggle free, stunning you in the process, or be saved by their fellows. If you manage to successfully transport a survivor to the hook, you’ll still have to be on your guard, as survivors can still attempt to escape and their teammates can rescue them.
Dead by Daylight Mobile is basically the same game, just redesigned for mobile. You’ll find the progression system, which provides a bunch of different characters, perks, and cosmetics to unlock, intact, as well as a redesigned UI and controls for mobile. If you’d like to check it out, go ahead and grab Dead by Daylight right now on iOS or Android via the App Store or Google Play respectively.
In the aftermath of Microsoft purchasing GitHub there have been several changes for the better with the popular code repository. The first major update was creation of a free tier with unlimited private repositories, with the limit of 3 users per private repo. Today, that limitation has been removed, officially making all major GitHub features available for free to all users. At the same time, GitHub also announced price changes for existing customers.
Details from the GitHub blog:
We’re happy to announce we’re making private repositories with unlimited collaborators available to all GitHub accounts. All of the core GitHub features are now free for everyone.
Until now, if your organization wanted to use GitHub for private development, you had to subscribe to one of our paid plans. But every developer on earth should have access to GitHub. Price shouldn’t be a barrier.
This means teams can now manage their work together in one place: CI/CD, project management, code review, packages, and more. We want everyone to be able to ship great software on the platform developers love.
Teams who need advanced features (like code owners), enterprise features (like SAML), or personalized support can upgrade to one of our paid plans.
We’re also reducing the price of our paid Team plan from $9 per user/month to $4 per user/month, effective immediately. Existing customers will have their bills automatically reduced going forward.
Learn more in the FAQ, or compare plans on our pricing page.
The pricing now breaks down as follows:
You can learn more about the changes in the video below.
The annual Unity Spring Sale is on now. The Spring sale features over 500 of the best selling assets from the Unity Asset Store for 50% off, starting today April 15th and running until April 29th. Additionally each day of the sale there is one asset that is 70% off for a single day only.
The daily 70% off deals are as follows:
April 15: POLYGON – Sci-Fi Space Pack
April 19: Omnity Projection Mapping for Immersive Environments
Keep in mind, for these items the sale only lasts for a single day, then the price will revert to normal. All of the above links contain a code that pays GFS a small commission, so thank you if you use them. You can learn more about the Unity Spring Sale in the video below.
Pixelbox is a brand new all-in-one 2D game engine perfect for game jams or other small projects. Combining an easy to use JavaScript API with a complete set of editing tools including a map editor, sprite tools, palette tools, sound FX and music tools in a single >60MB download. Pixelbox is open source under the MIT license.
Documentation for Pixelbox coding is available on the GitHub page. There is also a beginners tutorial available over on Itch.io. Pixelbox also includes a stand alone music tracker application called Pata Tracker, documentation for which is available here.
Pixelbox is available for download on Windows and MacOS right here. Since it is an electron application, it should be possible to build a Linux install, but no binaries are currently provided. You can learn more about Pixelbox in the video below.
