Category: Game Releases

New game releases.

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Nomad Games announces Fury of Dracula digital port

Nomad Games is a studio to keep an eye on this year, we feel. Having recently extracted themselves from their close partnership with Asmodee Digital, the world is seems is once again theirs for the taking and they’re already putting into action their master plan:

Step One: Get a new Games Workshop license
Step Two: ???
Step Three: Profit

Nomad Games are perhaps best known for their digital port of Talisman, one of Games Workshop’s cult classic board games (before the miniatures firm doubled-down on all things Space Marines). Seems the studio has managed to bag themselves another ‘old school’ license, as Nomad has today announced they are making a digital version of Fury of Dracula.

Originally published by the Warhammer giant in 1987, this is a Hidden Movement game about a group of vampire hunters who need to uncover clues in order to stop Dracula (who is played) before he creates an unstoppable army of mindless thralls! Nomad plan on adapting the fourth edition of the game, which was released in 2019.

We don’t know much more about the project at this point. Nomad aren’t ready to commit specific platforms yet and in what order they’ll be developed, but we did get a “more than likely” comment on the game coming to mobile platforms. Whether it’ll be first, same time as PC/Console or later down the line we don’t know yet.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

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Apple seems very pleased with themselves right now

It’s easy to speculate and talk about the App store as an outside observer, but I always find it more interesting to look at how companies like Apple talk about themselves in official press blasts. Granted, it’s PR and must always be taken with a grain a salt, but it’s still interesting nonetheless.

One such press release has just come through from Apple, talking about how the company has done over the past year (with a few insights of the past decade or so as well). They talk about everything from the App store to Apple Music & Apple Pay, but naturally only a couple of things are relevant to us here.

Apple App store phone2

As far as the App Store is concerned, it seems that since the launch of the store in 2008 developers have earned over $155 Billion USD. A further note claims that a quarter of that ($39-ish Billion) was earned in 2019 alone. Other numbers being shared:

  • $1.42 billion was spent between Christmas Eve and New Years Eve 2019 (up 16% on the previous year).
  • $386 million was spent New Year’s Day 2020, which is a 20 percent increase over last year and a new single-day record.

There’s no information as to how these numbers are split – as we’ve seen in terms of evolving trends the past couple of years, it’s easy to imagine most of this money is going to free-to-play titles. Probably Fortnite.

Apple Arcade is mentioned as well, but there’s nothing worthwhile to be shared. No numbers in terms of subscribers or anything like that, which is a shame. There was a commitment to adding “new games and expansions every month,” though.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI0dWy1CVfw]

So, Apple’s doing well then. Yay? I guess? It’s hard to know how to really feel about this information as an outlet that focuses primarily on a subset of games that many say is on the decline. Numbers like this probably won’t help matters if you’re a company looking at that number and worrying your share is too small.

If any developers fancy sharing some of their profit numbers for 2019, even if it’s just in terms of how it relates to that total figure, you know where to find me!

What are your thoughts on the App Store right now? What did you buy during the holiday period (or on New Years Day, if that was you?). Let us know in the comments!

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GDevelop 5 Beta 84 Released

The open source 2D game engine GDevelop just released beta 84 of their 5.0.0 branch.  Major features of b84 are BBCode formatting support, dozens of new layer effects, improvements to the integrated pixel graphics editor and more.

New features in beta 84 from the release notes:

  • Add dozens of new effects for layers, and allow developers to easily create extensions bringing new effects.

    • See an (incomplete!) list of effects available on the wiki.
    • Thanks @Bouh and @blurymind for porting, trying and setting up these new effects for GDevelop: Black and White, Noise, CRT, Godray, Tilt shift, Advanced bloom, Kawase blur, Zoom blur, Displacement, Color Map, Pixelate, Reflection.
    • Want to add a new shader effect to GDevelop? Take a look at the explanations about effects here.
    • Support for effects on objects will be added in a next version

  • New object BBText (thanks @blurymind!)

  • Improvements in Piskel sprite editor (thanks @blurymind!)

    • Color index shift brush (useful for cell shading sprites)
    • Ability to source all layers when using the bucket tool
    • Palette transfer tool (apply the currently selected palette colors to the frame you are on)

  • Add an option to automatically resize game resolution to window or screen size. It’s recommended to activate it especially for games on mobile phones.

Be sure to check the complete release notes for more details of the release.  You can learn more about GDevelop in our hands-on video embedded below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lWGUI_xj0U&w=853&h=480]

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Unreal Engine January 2020 Free Content

Every month on the first Tuesday, Epic Games give away several items from the Unreal Engine marketplace and January 2020 is no exception.  This month there are 5 free for January items as well as 1 more free forever item.  So long as you “purchase” the item before the start of next month’s giveaway, it is yours forever.

This months free items are:

Permanently Free

Free For January

You can learn more about the Unreal Asset giveaway on the Unreal Engine blog, or by watching the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gdg0pqRbQ0&w=853&h=480]

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DOTA Underlords has gone from 200K to 18K Peak Players in six months

By Joe Robinson 07 Jan 2020

It seems y’all have stopped playing DOTA Underlords. A reddit thread on r/Games has pointed out the Steam Charts listing for Valve’s own Auto Chess take, which shows the game as lost over 80% of its player base since launching mid 2019.

In June peak players were just over 200K, where-as of the last 30 days that’s dropped to around 18,000. It’s worth bearing in mind though that Underlords went from 200K to 100K peak players in the first thirty days, with the decline getting more gradual in the months that followed. The average number of players is around 11K for the last 30 days, which while nothing to sniff at still indicates not as many people are playing as there used to be.

I’m not 100% sure if Steam tracks people who access the game via mobile… I want to say yes, because every-time I bring it up on my phone it then appears in my ‘Most Recent’ played games list within the Steam client, even though I don’t have it installed on my PC. I’d be interested in knowing how many of Underlords’ active players play primarily on their phones or tablets.

Reading the thread in full, you can get some interesting insights as to what core players think of Underlords’ journey since it launched into Beta. Many respect Valve for the experimentation and the better handling of the game versus Artifact, although some haven’t been impressed with the specifics of the updates that have come since. The inclusion of the titular ‘Underlords’ hasn’t really hit home, and the Jailbreak system led to so much confusion that the devs simply dropped it as part of of the December 18th update. Instead they’ve gone for a more direct rotation system, with 14 heroes currently removed from the game.

dota underlords rotation

Some argue that the development team at Valve don’t really know what they want to do with Underlords. You can look at what Drodo is going with the OG Auto Chess game as one route for evolution, but I think Hearthstone Battlegrounds has shown that Auto Chess games can be much more than what we’ve got currently. Underlords was offering its own ‘quick-play’ format called Knockout, and it seems they’ve incorporated the lessons learned from that mode into the Standard and Duo format as well, making all games shorter by default. This will serve as a decent enough short-term solution to help with retention, but I feel like Underlords really needs to step up their thinking.

The ‘Auto Chess Wars’ in general haven’t been as heated as I thought they would be – we had an initial rush of knock-offs and me-toos, but nothing major in the latter half of 2019 apart from Blizzard’s‘ own “Hearthstone but Auto Chess’ experiment. TeamFight Tactics seems to be doing the best out of the ‘big’ auto battler games, and so far no other big-name western publisher has tried to get in on the action.

It will be interesting to see where this new ‘hot’ genre goes in 2020 – I hope it doesn’t die off completely, but a lack of real innovation may lead to stagnation.

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3DBuzz Shut Down And Release Content For Free

3DBuzz is one of the original online learning resources for computer graphics, programming and game development, first launching way back in 2002.  Until recently the site was completely commercial, with prices set on a per course basis or available under a monthly subscription.  They announced they will be shutting down, for the most unfortunate of reasons, and have released all of their content for free download.

Details from 3dbuzz.com:

Hello everyone,

The 3D Buzz community has been amazing and inspirational for 2 decades. However, all good things…

3D Buzz, Inc has closed its doors. Subscription and recurring payments have already been suspended. This page is our final gift to such a wonderful community. Below you will find download links to all of our available material, free of charge.

Thank you for so many years of support. You are all, truly, the best community anyone could hope for. May we see each other again somewhere in the ether…

From all of us to all of you,

Remember to always look, listen, and learn.

Goodbye, good health, and good luck.

If you visit 3DBuzz.com you may get a security warning, this seems to be linked to an invalid SSL certificate and can be ignored.  The entire content of the site add up to over 200+GB in size.  As a result, some readers over on Reddit have been working to set up torrents, so if you are interested in grabbing the entire archive of video tutorials, be sure to check out that thread.  Otherwise you can download each video one by one in zip format.

Thank you for your generous gift 3DBuzz and our condolences on your loss.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF0XX0La4JM&w=853&h=480]

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NeoAxis 2019.4 Released

The free NeoAxis game engine, previously covered in-depth in this hands-on video, have just released NeoAxis 2019.4.  The 2019.4 release brings an impressive number of new features to the engine including the beginnings of a new 2D game engine, a game framework for handling common game development tasks, improvements to the 3D Builder tools and more.

Details from the 2019.4 change log:

  • Game framework. Managing characters, various types of cameras, a set of more specialized game objects. The ability to configure game mode, camera type in the editor. First person camera, third person camera, free camera are supported.
  • 2D game engine. 2D physics, sprites, tools, demo scenes. 2D game engine is implemented as extension for NeoAxis.
  • Character component. The set of classes and tools for creation characters.
  • Particles.
  • Terrain paint layers.
  • Primitives have been added: Arch, Door, Pipe, Prism, Stairs, Torus.
  • Builder 3D has been improved.
  • Optimization: GPU instancing for transparent objects.
  • NeoAxis Baking: The ability to disable compression of archive. That makes loading baked resources faster.
  • The ability to set color multiplier for decals in the scene.
  • Add Collision: Convex mode has been added.
  • Surface Area has been added. The object represents an area that filled by surface. An object is used to automatically fill with a large number of objects in a given area.
  • Bug fix: Invalid management of Color property of meshes and billboards with enabled GPU instancing.

You can learn more about the future of the NeoAxis engine by checking the roadmap available here, and learn more about the 2019.4 release in their more in-depth blog post or by watching the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aYUBA3a0nY&w=853&h=480]

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Last chance to apply to be the new Editor of Pocket Tactics!

By Admin 06 Jan 2020

It’s my birthday today, so what better way to spend it than by reminding you there’s only a couple of days left to apply for my job! That’s right – Pocket Tactics has got a bright and glorious future ahead of it, but it needs a dedicated Editor to carry it forward. Sadly, that can’t be me anymore, but could it be you?

Why not apply to find out! As a reminder; this is an office based role located at Network N’s headquarters in Bath, United Kingdom. You can read the full job spec on the job listing, but here’s a reminder of the key requirements:

Responsibilities include:

  • Content creation, including writing, sub-editing, and commissioning
  • Content planning: overseeing all editorial output, and deciding what the site should cover and when
  • Managing an in-house editorial team plus a pool of freelancers
  • Helping to develop and deliver on the editorial strategy for the brand
  • Identifying and implementing growth strategies for the website
  • Ensuring all output meets Network N’s high editorial standards, and is delivered on-time and on-budget
  • Attendance at events, trade shows, etc.

Required skills and experience:

  • Previous experience in a senior role on a gaming or entertainment website
  • Experience managing staff members
  • Exceptional knowledge of and a passion for mobile gaming
  • Ability to identify and capitalise on emerging trends
  • Excellent writing and copy editing skills
  • Proactivity and a strong work ethic
  • SEO knowledge

If you want to apply, you need to email your CV and a covering letter to careers@network-n.com. This job listing will close on January 8th, 2020.

Pocket Tactics has had an interesting journey since Owen founded it back in 2012 – we’ve fought hard to ride the changing waves of mobile gaming, but the site is in a very healthy place right now and I’m convinced it will take 2020 by storm. It needs someone with more focus than I’m able to give to help it realise its’ potential. If you think that could be you, then step up and tell us why.

Those boots won’t fill themselves!

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A Decade Of Godot

With the 2010’s coming to a close, it’s a time to look back at the decade that was.  This is exactly what Godot founder and lead developer Juan Linietsky just did over on the Godot Engine blog.  Here on GameFromScratch.com we’ve been tracking the progress of the Godot game engine from the very beginning.

A quick recap of major events in the Godot game engine’s development history:

Godot 3.2 should release any day now, currently in late beta.  If you are interested in experiencing the history of Godot first hand, you can download all the previous versions (except 1.0) right here.

For as long as Godot has been available, we have been creating Godot tutorials here on GameFromScratch, as well as over on DevGa.me.  The original Godot 1/2 tutorial series is available here while a more up to date Godot 3.x tutorial series is available here.

Learn more about the history and development of the Godot engine in the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLm7-w8sh8M&w=853&h=480]

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