Humble are running another Bundle of interest to game developers, this one is the Developing Your Own Games by Springer bundle. A massive collection of e-books by APress covering a huge number of game engines and technologies. As always it is broken into tiers, if you buy a higher value tier you get all of the lower value tiers below it as well.
The tiers of this bundle consist of:
1$
Java Game Development with LibGDX
Beginning Swift Games Development for iOS
Learn Unity for Android Game Development
Practical Video Game Bots
Developing Games on The Raspberry Pi
Developing Turn-Based Multiplayer Games
Python, PyGame and Raspberry Pi Game Development
8$
Mostly Codeless Game Development
Learn Unity for Windows 10 Game Development
The Advanced Game Developer’s Toolkit
Pro Java 9 Games Development
Building Games with Ethereum Smart Contracts
Essential TypeScript
Practical GameMaker Studio
Physically Based Shader Development for Unity 2017
15$
Developing 2D Games with Unity
Program Arcade Games
Beginning Android Games
Let’s Build a Multiplayer Phaser Game
Beginning iOS AR Game Development
Game Development with Construct 2
Understanding Game Application Development
Pro HTML5 Games
Introducing JavaScript Game Development
GameMaker Studio 100 Programming Challenges
As always with Humble you can decide how your money is allocated, between the publisher, Humble, charity or if you so choose (and thanks if you do!) to support GameFromScratch by using this link. Learn more about the bundle in the video below.
Another day, another deck-builder, but does Aeon’s End have a sufficient number of tricks up its wizard-y sleeves to stand out in a crowded market? The first attention-grabbing feature is that Aeon’s End is a cooperative game that can be played in pass and play mode with up to three other players, but also works equally well with a solo player controlling a maximum of four mages. These mages have learned mastery over energy breaches, allowing them to cast powerful spells. One small problem; the breaches have also permitted the Nemesis to come a-calling. This guy wants nothing more than to destroy your home of Gravehold, and to slaughter a few mages along the way.
There are three types of cards in Aeon’s End; gems are the game’s currency, spells are used to inflict damage and relics have a range of special powers. At the start of each game, a supply of nine available cards is determined. You are free to either choose at will, select from a particular theme, or even go for a completely random set-up. This supply is selected from a range of 27 different options and, much like Dominion, this market will contain the same set of cards for the entire game.
Whilst in many similar games, currency is only used for buying cards, in Aeon’s End it has other uses too. The currency, a resource known as aether, can be used to open additional breaches, thus allowing the mage to prepare more spells. Or, it can be used to charge a mage’s unique power. These extra choices really add to the decision-making process, making players think carefully about the best way to distribute their limited resources.
Deck-builders are usually characterised by more shuffling than a Post Office queue on pension day. The physical chore of shuffling doesn’t affect us lazy digital gamers, but the resultant randomness certainly does. In Aeon’s End, when your deck is exhausted, you simply flip your discard deck and continue playing. It doesn’t sound like a big change, but it does provide the opportunity to plan future turns and prepare some killer combos. It also means that extra thought is needed when deciding on the order to discard your spent cards. If this isn’t enough to think about, there is also the option to keep unused cards in your hand for use in future turns.
Another area in which Aeon’s End excels is in the wide variety of set up options. Each game will pit the mages against one of four different nemeses. My personal favourite is the Prince of Gluttons who gobbles up the supply of cards faster than Pacman can munch dots. Or, maybe, Crooked Mask, who has a nasty habit of shuffling your deck whilst adding a few nasty corruption cards for you to deal with. All four fiends are not averse to playing a barrage of nasty cards, whilst also throwing a few henchmen into the fray. To up the tension even further, the power of each nemesis increases as the game progresses. Much thought has been spent on the design of all four nemeses, they are distinctly different and offer their own challenges. At times, their powers can feel a little harsh, but never unfair.
Another twist that adds to player anxiety is the way that turn order is decided. Aeon’s End does away with predictability by randomising the order at the end of each round. The turn order deck is always composed of four player cards and two nemesis cards. So, if you only play with one mage you will be getting four turns each round. This can impact on how you coordinate the actions of your mages. Especially since mages first have to prepare spells by allocating them to an open energy breach. Only on the following turn is the spell energised and ready.
There is a roster of eight mages, each with their own set of ten starting cards. These will be a mix of aether crystal cards, weedy spark spells and, more interestingly, one unique card.
Jian’s moonstone provides her with an extra aether which can only be used for purchasing gems. A specified set of five of these cards will make up the mage’s first hand. Xaos, for instance, begins with four crystals allowing him to buy a decent card from the supply on the very first turn. Mages also have a special ability that needs to be fully charged before use. Returning to our friend, Jian, she can use her black mirror ability to enable any mage to cast a prepared spell twice.
Aeon’s End has a lot of on screen information to keep track of which means that the game is a tablet exclusive. Even on larger tablets, the artwork is often sacrificed to squeeze everything onto the screen. There are also a large range of tiny icons to decipher which is a barrier to learning. Thankfully, a tap and hold will bring up a card in full detail, also giving you a chance to admire the illustrations. There is certainly more going on here than in many other card games, but it doesn’t reach Twilight Struggle realms of complexity. Developers Handelabra are a safe pair of hands, as their work on Sentinels of the Multiverse and One Deck Dungeon testifies. The lack of online options is a tad disappointing, but this is still a top-notch conversion.
Aeons End is a wonderful game, the control that it offers over deck management is especially worthy of merit. The cards seem to be very well balanced with no absolute stinkers or overpowered abilities. Variety is also a big plus, each mage feels distinct and each nemesis requires a different approach. There is a generous amount of content, with challenging difficulty levels, a choice of 27 different types of market cards, four nemeses and eight mages.
Today we are thrilled to announce the release of .NET Core 3.0! .NET Core 3.0 is ready for production use, and is loaded with lots of great new features for building amazing web apps with ASP.NET Core and Blazor.
Some of the big new features in this release of ASP.NET Core include:
Build rich interactive client-side web apps using C# instead of JavaScript using Blazor).
Create high-performance backend services with gRPC.
SignalR now has support for automatic reconnection and client-to-server streaming.
Generate strongly typed client code for Web APIs with OpenAPI documents.
Endpoint routing integrated through the framework.
HTTP/2 now enabled by default in Kestrel.
Authentication support for Web APIs and single-page apps integrated with IdentityServer
Support for certificate and Kerberos authentication.
Integrates with the new System.Text.Json serializer.
New generic host sets up common hosting services like dependency injection (DI), configuration, and logging.
New Worker Service template for building long-running services.
New EventCounters created for requests per second, total requests, current requests, and failed requests.
Startup errors now reported to the Windows Event Log when hosted in IIS.
Request pipeline integrated with with System.IO.Pipelines.
Performance improvements across the entire stack.
You can find all the details about what’s new in ASP.NET Core in .NET Core 3.0 in the What’s new in ASP.NET Core 3.0 topic.
Note: .NET Core 3.0 requires Visual Studio 2019 16.3 or later.
There is also a Blazor WebAssembly preview update available with this release. This update to Blazor WebAssembly still has a Preview 9 version, but carries an updated build number. Blazor WebAssembly is still in preview and is not part of the .NET Core 3.0 release.
To install the latest Blazor WebAssembly template run the following command:
dotnet new -i Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.Templates::3.0.0-preview9.19465.2
To upgrade an existing ASP.NET Core 3.0 RC1 project to 3.0:
Update all Microsoft.AspNetCore.* and Microsoft.Extensions.* package references to 3.0.0
Update all Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.* package references to 3.0.0-preview9.19465.2
That’s it! You should now be all set to use .NET Core 3.0!
Join us at .NET Conf!
Please join us at .NET Conf to learn all about the new features in .NET Core 3.0 and to celebrate the release with us! .NET Conf is a live streaming event open to everyone, and features talks from many talented speakers from the .NET team and the .NET community. Check out the schedule and attend a local event near you. Or join the Virtual Attendee Party for the chance to win prizes!
Give feedback
We hope you enjoy the new features in this release of ASP.NET Core and Blazor in .NET Core 3.0! We are eager to hear about your experiences with this latest .NET Core release. Let us know what you think by filing issues on GitHub.
Apple website, Apple Music, developer services suffering from outage
By Malcolm Owen Wednesday, October 16, 2019, 10:35 am PT (01:35 pm ET)
A number of Apple’s online services have suddenly gone offline, with websites and online tools no longer accessible and services like Apple Music encountering errors when trying to stream songs.
At around 1:24pm eastern, AppleInsider noticed the official Apple newsroom was inaccessible, displaying a message advising the page “cannot be found.” Shortly after, other areas of Apple’s online existence stopped working or were unavailable.
In further checks by AppleInsider staff, Apple’s developer site also became unavailable, and the official System Status page that usually displays issues with servers is also offline. Other services are also undergoing issues, including some outages of iCloud itself.
Apple Music was also affected by the outage, with attempts to play music not downloaded to a device displaying errors. One error advised that “A server with the specified hostname could not be found.”
In the time since the discovery of issues, some services are slowly being restored, with the newsroom and iCloud back up and running, followed by the System Status page and Apple Music.
AppleInsider has contacted Apple to query about the server issues.
This story is breaking, refresh for the latest updates
IceWM is a very lightweight desktop. It’s been around for over 20 years, and its goals today are still the same as back then: speed, simplicity, and getting out of the users way.
I used to add IceWM to Scientific Linux, for a lightweight desktop. At the time, it was only a .5 Meg rpm. When running, it used only 5 Meg of memory. Over the years, IceWM has grown a little bit. The rpm package is now 1 Meg. When running, IceWM now uses 10 Meg of memory. Even though it literally doubled in size in the past 10 years, it is still extremely small.
What do you get in such a small package? Exactly what it says, a Window Manager. Not much else. You have a toolbar with a menu or icons to launch programs. You have speed. And finally you have themes and options. Besides the few goodies in the toolbar, that’s about it.
Installation
Because IceWM is so small, you just install the main package.
$ sudo dnf install icewm
If you want to save disk space, many of the dependencies are soft options. IceWM works just fine without them.
The defaults for IceWM are set so that your average windows user feels comfortable. This is a good thing, because options are done manually, through configuration files.
I hope I didn’t loose you there, because it’s not as bad as it sounds. There are only 8 configuration files, and most people only use a couple. The main three config files are keys (keybinding), preferences (overall preferences), and toolbar (what is shown on the toolbar). The default config files are found in /usr/share/icewm/
To make a change, you copy the default config to you home icewm directory (~/.icewm), edit the file, and then restart IceWM. The first time you do this might be a little scary because “Restart Icewm” is found under the “Logout” menu entry. But when you restart IceWM, you just see a single flicker, and your changes are there. Any open programs are unaffected and stay as they were.
Themes
IceWM in the NanoBlue theme
If you install the icewm-themes package, you get quite a few themes. Unlike regular options, you do not need to restart IceWM to change into a new theme. Usually I wouldn’t talk much about themes, but since there are so few other features, I figured I’m mention them.
Toolbar
The toolbar is the one place where a few extra features have been added to IceWM. You will see that you can switch between workplaces. Workspaces are sometimes called Virtual Desktops. Click on the workspace to move to it. Right clicking on a windows taskbar entry allows you to move it between workspaces. If you like workspaces, this has all the functionality you will like. If you don’t like workspaces, it’s an option and can be turned off.
The toolbar also has Network/Memory/CPU monitoring graphs. Hover your mouse over the graph to get details. Click on the graph to get a window with full monitoring. These little graphs used to be on every window manager. But as those desktops matured, they have all taken the graphs out. I’m very glad that IceWM has left this nice feature alone.
Summary
If you want something lightweight, but functional, IceWM is the desktop for you. It is setup so that new linux users can use it out of the box. It is flexible so that unix users can tweak it to their liking. Most importantly, IceWM lets your programs run without getting in the way.
Video: Let’s Take A Tour Of London’s Pop Up Pokémon Center, Shall We?
As you’ve probably already heard by now, London is currently enjoying its very own pop-up Pokémon Center. With exclusive merch items and even some new Pokémon Sword and Shield related goodies up for grabs, it’s certainly worth having a look for serious Poké-fans.
As it happens, our very own video wizard Alex did just that. Feel free to join him in the video above as he wanders around, messes up store displays, has his photo taken with his starter Pokémon of choice, throws Pikachus and far too many Switch Lites into a basket, and more. Oh, and actually shows you around the place, of course.
If you are planning on attending, it’s worth noting that the store has been experiencing ridiculous levels of demand during its opening few days. Queues have been closing hours ahead of the store’s closing time with many being left disappointed – you’ll want to keep an eye on Westfield London’s account for updates.
Are you wanting to go? Already been? Tell us which products you’d love to buy in the comments below.
MoviePass Reportedly Charging Bank Accounts Despite Closing Shop
After shutting down on September 14, the troubled movie subscription service MoviePass has allegedly risen from the grave to charge former subscribers unexpectedly.
The New York Post compiled various reports of users getting charged despite the MoviePass app canceling operation. A few users, subscribers up to the very day the service ended, reported charges from MoviePass on their cards. Some saw the $10 membership fee, while others experienced this plus additional charges.
CEO Mitch Lowe told the Post that reports of subscribers getting charged following Movie Pass's shuttering were false and misread. “One single subscriber, out of the many thousands of MoviePass subscribers, was charged $9.95 on September 15 and has been refunded that amount,” Lowe said. “We are aware that some of our subscribers have mistaken refunds appearing on their credit card statements for charges.”
Still, some users continue to report MoviePass charges appearing on their bank accounts. Many have taken to Twitter to voice frustration with an inoperable service that's still reportedly siphoning their money.
@MoviePass thanks for continuing to charge me for this month and no way to unsubscribe! #ScamAlert
A big middle finger to #moviepass, which despite having closed on 9/14, is still charging my card ($4.64 for no service). Canceling my card, but there's a reason why this company failed. #cancelled
Teaching People to Share Technology: Adafruit Founder Limor Fried
This story is based on our interview with Adafruit founder Limor Fried
When Adafruit founder Limor Fried was studying electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, she realized she was less interested in the electrical engineering part.
“What I really liked to do was build stuff,” she said.
Instead of working on her homework or thesis, Fried spent her time designing hardware projects in her dorm. She built an MP3 player way before Apple made iPods popular.
“With electronics, you could build anything from an MP3 player to a GPS tracker,” she said.
Fried started building different gadgets, including LED light toys for the annual Burning Man creative festival. She published these projects on her website at MIT, including the CAD schematics, firmware and instructions on how to build them.
“It was kind of open source hardware, but at the time it wasn’t a thing yet. People would say, ‘Oh, no, you just published everything and gave it away,’” she recalled.
She started getting queries from around the world from people interested in building the devices she posted about, but they were having trouble sourcing the components.
“They needed actual hardware that I used in my projects. It was really difficult to get different components from different places,” Fried said. “You would have to order PCB [printed circuit board] from one place, resistors and chips from another place. It was really complicated for most people.”
Soon she started getting emails asking if she could sell a whole kit. Initially, she wasn’t interested, but she relented and began a small side business.
“I started selling a couple of kits, which I would ship from the local post office,” Fried said.
That small business eventually became her full-time job: Adafruit. In the last 13 years, the venture has grown from a few kits to over 4,000 products.
Adafruit offers what it calls “open source hardware,” designing and manufacturing innovative yet affordable electronics products, components, tools and accessories. When this hardware gets into the hands of creative people, they build some incredible things with it.
What Fried loves about hardware is that you can actually touch it, pick it up and show it off.
“You can take it out and wear it at Burning Man or cosplay conventions,” she said.
In addition to being fun and creative, Adafruit’s hardware also helps people. In the last couple of years, Adafruit has been working on assistive technologies, developing adaptive and rehabilitative devices to assist people with disabilities.
“It changes their lives,” Fried said.
These types of devices are a great option for people because you can do only so much with proprietary technologies. Off-the-shelf devices are difficult to customize, and hiring someone to build just what you need could be very expensive and out of reach for most people.
“Open source hardware is a perfect middle ground. It’s inexpensive and allows you to customize the way you need it,” Fried said. “The code is there. Instructions are there. Anyone can do it. Since it’s open source, people can iterate, tweak, fine-tune to their needs. We are seeing a lot of interest in open source hardware for assistive technologies.”
Adafruit’s hardware is working for everyone from creative hobbyists to people interested in building things for their smartphones to developers inventing products for the next industrial revolution. Adafruit also worked with computer game company Nvidia to help build its Jetson Nano Developer Kit, which lets users run multiple neural networks for artificial intelligence, machine learning and edge computing.
Adafruit also sends its kits to schools to facilitate STEM programs, as kids tend to respond well to learning with physical objects. A project that started as just a fun activity for Fried now has a real purpose.
“I think the mission is to teach people to share technology and show people how much fun and exciting and creative it can be,” she said.
The Diligent Engine just released version 2.4. The Diligent Engine is an open source cross platform rendering library that abstracts away the details of working with underlying technologies such as Direct3D, OpenGL and Vulkan. The Diligent Engine is open source under the Apache 2.0 license and is available on GitHub.
You can get more details of the release in the release notes available here. We recently did a hands-on video of the Diligent Engine in action available below.
It’s been a bit of a mixed week – I’ve been trying to go back and look at some historically performing content and see what I can do with it, as well as testing the waters with things like the CoD Mobile guide, and skimming some stuff off reddit. The Mario Kart Tour Challenges article is still proving quite popular at the moment, so you may see that float to the top of the article list quite regularly.
Happy to say though that with most of that out of the way, I can start refocusing on some of our favoured topics. Quite a few games have been released recently that are more relevant to the core readership, so will be getting reviews sorted for them pronto.
Just as an FYI – I’m going to be at PDXCon next week from Thursday, so end of week posts might be a bit sporadic. It’s also unlikely that they’ll be a Weekender update next week, but if anything mobile focused comes out of the event I’ll be sure to write it up.
Out Now
There’s actually been a couple of new Apple Arcade games releases over the past week or so. We’ve updated our master list and added a ‘new’ tag to the newcomers, so check them out if you’re still looking for new games to try. We’re a little bit behind on our reviews, but we’re sticking with the batch-approach for now.
You know what? I’m really, really glad this game exists. I noticed the other day we’d only reviewed four games between August/September, but after some digging I realised that’s about right, because there’s been nothing in the premium space worth covering lately. Xenowerk reads like it was made for us, and from what we’ve tested so far it’s a pretty decent real-time tactics game. It’s single-player only, but you control a squad of mercenaries who work for a corporation, and it’s basically your job to clean up their messes. It involves squad development and base management and all that XCOM-like goodness.
It’s free to try on Android – you get to play the first part before paying the full price as an IAP to unlock the rest of the game. On iOS it’s premium up-front. We’re going to try and get a full review on the table ASAP for you.
Versus: Unfriendly Frenzy (iOS) – $3.99 – Review In Progress
It’s been a strangely good week for strategy gaming on mobile, with Versus: Unfriendly Friendly also releasing this week. We’ve already got Michael working on a review so hopefully that will drop next week. Versus is a real-time strategy game that boats outlandish factions and units and ‘fast-paced’ action. There’s a 29 level solo campaign, and you can play head-to-head against someone on the same device, which sounds interesting.
And yeah, there’s another free-to-play gacha battler game, this time based on the Digimon franchise. It’s called Digimon ReArise (iOS | Android) I’ll be honest guys, I’m kinda burned out on this stuff at the moment so we’re going to wait and see with this one. If it proves popular maybe we’ll look into it in more detail but I’m not in any rush. Here’s a trailer anyway:
Updates
A few things to update you one, some of which we accidentally forgot about:
MMO’s are an odd prospect on mobile – for the longest time, the term was appropriated by developers who made trashy F2P games, but as mobile tech improved it’s now quite possibly to put actual, ‘legit’ MMOs onto mobile devices. Black Desert Online is a fairly popular Free-to-Play MMO that’s been around for quite a few years now. It’s managed to walk that line between given players worthwhile content to engage in, and offering a business model that sustains them. Their freemium stuff is mainly cosmetics, although you can buy some shortcuts. I played it on PC for a spell and I actually had quite a lot of fun with it. The only thing was I didn’t think it facilitated party-play that well, but it may have improved since then.
We’ve known it was coming to mobile since E3, but what I forgot to mention a couple of weeks ago is that pre-registration is now available on iOS and Android. The mobile version is due to land in December 2019.
Playstation recently updated their core PS4 Firmware to Version 7.0 this week, and with that came an update to their Remote Play app. The nuts and bolts of this latest update means that Android users beyond Sony Xperia phones can now get in on the action, and iOS users can now use their Dualshock 4 controllers with the app.
For Android, you just need to be running Android 5.0 or higher although if you have Android 10 installed, you can also get in on the Dualshock action by connecting your controller to your phone via Bluetooth.
You’ll need to have iOS 13 to be able to use your controller on that end of things. You’ll also be able to choose whether or not the on-screen controls remain visible as well as choose whether or not to lock the orientation.
Ticket to Earth isn’t the only game to seemingly get a fourth episode update this week. The Trese Brothers have taken a break from constantly updating Star Traders: Frontiers to release the “final” episode for their Heroes of Steel RPG, the Siege of Sur-Relliar Glacier.
Here’s the full change-log, if you’re still interested in playing this game:
Epic end-game conclusion to the tale of the 4 Harbingers
Battle across 7 new brutally challenging dungeons and maps
Lock blades and magic with multiple major bosses across the climactic siege
Face 15+ new monster types — Ice & Fire Drakes, Orcin Ravagers, Thorn Shamans, Unrequited Blades and more
Loot 100+ new amazingly powerful weapons, armor and magical gear across the final dungeons
Once beaten, you may invoke a New Game+ mode to replay the final dungeon and bosses again! (and again!)
Fixed all issues with late-game bows named “FIX ME” and crafting out of Fierhold
Fixed crash with “Great Flats” level loading in some situations
Kingdom: New Lands is an intriguing side-scrolling management/strategy game where you must try to survive against hordes of enemies that only attack at night. It’s half price on iOS and Android.
Seen anything else you liked? Played any of the above? Let us know in the comments!
