We were rather taken by retro-racer Horizon Chase Turbo when it power-slid onto the Switch in November last year. Brazillian developer Aquiris really brought the classic arcade racing games of yesteryear bang up to date, making this an essential purchase.

The lovely folks over at Aquiris still have unfinished business with Horizon Chase Turbo, however, and have revealed their ambitious roadmap for the game. Lots of new exciting features are planned for the second half of 2019.

Let’s take a look at what they’re cooking up:

PLAYGROUND MODE 2.0

In addition to be the fastest, win and lead the ranking, now players have another good reason to check into our Playground Mode: get exclusive prizes. Collecting coins in a new scoring system they will gain access to new skins in special seasons.

NEW DLCs

Horizon Chase Turbo already brings hours and hours of fun and speed, but for the hardcore retroracers it’s never enough. Thinking of them, we are working on new DLCs with new cars, new campaigns and more.

NEW GAME MODES

When it comes to designing upgrades, granting fun for the gamer always gets the pole position. Our team analyzes players behavior within the game and their thoughts on social media. Thus we get insights for new ideas and upgrades. There are surprises right ahead, you can count on it!

We love it when developers continue to update their games to make them the very best they can be, even a year or so after release. Let us know if you’re excited about these future updates with a comment below.

Microsoft Build 2019 is here, and thousands of developers are learning about the latest technologies, sharing best practices with colleagues, and writing lots of code. Last week I wrote about business applications sessions to see at Build, and on Monday I discussed updates for helping ISVs (independent software vendors) and developers be successful from both a business and a code perspective.

A few years ago, Microsoft introduced an IP co-sell program to help our digitally transforming enterprise customers get the software they needed from our Azure ISV partners. Many of these customers were moving to the cloud, so we started by focusing on Azure. During this time roughly 3,000 ISVs have generated over $5 billion in partner revenue from the collaboration between Azure sellers and ISVs. Following up on last month’s announcement about an upcoming program for business applications ISVs, Scott Guthrie announced the expansion of the IP co-sell program to include Dynamics 365 and Power Platform partners. Including these products and Azure in the program will make it easier for ISVs and Microsoft sellers to collaborate in serving our joint enterprise customers.

Enterprise customers are increasingly seeing software at the core of their business and are developing a deeper understanding of their software needs. Beyond person to person sales engagements, there will be times when they want to buy the app directly while having confidence in the quality of what they’re receiving. Like consumers, enterprises are familiar with getting their software through marketplaces and the ability for ISVs to transact through marketplaces lowers the barrier for reaching their enterprise customers. On Monday, we announced that SaaS transaction capabilities have been added to AppSource and the Azure Marketplace. As part of this, we will enable transactability support for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform partner apps over the coming months. This is just a start to what we are doing with the marketplace, and now is the perfect time to get familiar with our partner program that launches in July to learn more about the benefits that come with being a Dynamics 365 and Power Platform partner.

The Power Platform provides great general tooling for creating business apps while the Common Data Model (CDM) creates a standard representation of that data. There are times when an industry’s focused solution and data model are better than starting from scratch. For this case Dynamics 365 Industry Accelerators provide industry specific implementations, and we’re announcing private previews in automotive and financial services. The accelerator for the automotive industry enables you to build connected customer experiences based on a proven common data model designed to transform consumer experiences and enable smart mobility services. In financial services, we have built accelerators to help you develop banking solutions in the retail and commercial space with enhanced ways to engage customers and provide an improved customer banking experience. Automotive and financial services accelerators join previously announced accelerators including healthcare, higher education, and nonprofit. Sign up to learn more about how you can participate or help us build the next set of industry accelerators.

During my talk at Build, I showed how all of this fits together through three phases: data at the core, empowering domain experts to be citizen developers, and showing how developers and ISVs can build depth solutions. We used healthcare as an end to end scenario that we can relate to and showcased how we’re infusing AI into all three phases in a way that every industry can start to take advantage of, moving from BI to AI. Lastly, I was delighted to welcome two customers on stage that are delivering innovative solutions. HandsFree Health™ is a new startup founded by senior executives in healthcare including the former President of Aetna. They built an innovative new home healthcare device using Microsoft AI technologies spanning speech, bots, vision, and a companion Xamarin mobile app that we showed on stage. We also took a deeper look at what ISVs can do with Indegene, a global healthcare solutions provider who is building the next generation of cloud applications for life sciences with the Dynamics 365 Healthcare Accelerator.

If you are at Build or following along at home, I have created a list of some Dynamics 365 and Power Platform sessions that you might be interested in. Enjoy your Build 2019 experience and we look forward to seeing how you build, extend, or connect Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform.

Cheers,

Guggs

By Mikey Campbell
Tuesday, May 07, 2019, 06:00 pm PT (09:00 pm ET)

While in Florida for SAP’s annual Sapphire user conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook took time out of his schedule to visit meet Worldwide Developers Conference scholarship winner Liam Rosenfeld at an Orlando Apple store.

Apple CEO Tim Cook meets WWDC scholarship winner Liam Rosenfeld. | Source: Tim Cook via Twitter

At the SAP conference, Cook was on hand to introduce an expansion to an existing partnership that will see the German software corporation roll out new enterprise apps infused with Apple technology.

Following the conference, Cook stopped by Apple Store Millenia for a brief sit-down with Rosenfeld, one of 350 U.S. students selected to receive a scholarship to attend WWDC 2019 in June, reports the Orlando Sentinel.

“I was not expecting that at all,” Rosenfeld said. “It was such an amazing surprise.”

Along with coding his own iOS apps, Rosenfeld, 16, started a coding club at Lyman High School that has grown to 16 members. The sophomore has one app in the App Store, Image to ASCII Art, and is developing two more projects including a game that teaches musicians how to tune their instruments.

Rosenfeld was able to show Cook his work in a short meeting held in the Apple store’s conference room. The CEO was impressed with what he saw.

“He has a quality that I think is on a short list of characteristics that drive success, and that is curiosity,” Cook said of Rosenfeld.

Speaking to the Sentinel, Cook took the opportunity to push Apple’s coding in education agenda, noting WWDC scholarships are doled out in an effort to fill the need for tech savvy workers. The awards are handed out to students and members of STEM organizations and include free access to the event and lodging.

“You need public, private, non-governmental organizations working together because this is not a trivial transformation that needs to happen here,” Cook said. “We have an obligation. We are fortunate to have had some success.”

Rosenfeld agrees with Apple’s take on the importance of learning to code in school, a skill set that could prove particularly beneficial to K-12 students.

“There aren’t many things you can get into in high school and use it to move toward a career path,” Rosendfeld said. “Computer science is what is driving change.”

Cook tweeted about his meeting with Rosenfeld on Tuesday and included a link to the Sentinel’s report.

Studio des Ténèbres made Frost, a deckbuilding solitaire survival card game that was very well-received, especially on this site. That’s why I was excited to look at their latest: Mini Gal4xy. In addition to its clever interpolation of “4X” into the title, the core idea of a simplified space 4X game for mobile is a great one. With isolated star systems there’s no need for a complicated map, and sci-fi fluff gives you lots of flexibility in terms of making techs and units that work well but make sense in the universe. What’s more, the game appears really polished, with a great Saturday-morning cartoon look. Unfortunately, a lot of the other parts don’t show nearly as much polish.

In my first game, the decision points I was presented with in the parts of the game I was able to play were pretty dull. Unlock certain technologies and you can unlock certain exploitation slots on planets that let you get more resources. The planets are randomly generated and connected and the tech tree is procedurally generated too, not consistent from game to game. Since everything is random, it’s simply a matter of pattern recognition. The nearest planets require such and such tech unlocks. Those techs are behind these other techs. Save your resources, colonize those planets, rinse, repeat. If you somehow end up with a pile of the wrong resource, just swap it at 3:1 with any other resource. Playing a whole turn takes seconds because there are so few decisions to make.

It’s a game of optimizing your response to a procedurally-generated puzzle. What’s more, there’s no AI to speak of. You get to choose the “barbarians” (in Civ terms) that you’ll steamroll over to unlock new planets, but you don’t actually fight any other empires. Instead, the name of the game is maximizing your point totals through careful development. Score high enough, and you can unlock new techs, rules, and alien races for your next go round.

With such a significant reliance on random chance, you get situations that feel unfair pretty frequently, and even your greatest accomplishments can feel unearned when the map was laid out in your favor. In one game, the procedural map locked me into a corner where the only planet I could colonize was locked behind a technology at the end of the tree, and the tech to colonize from my ships wasn’t much closer. Cue turn after turn of slowly accumulating science points one by one. Obviously, that game was one of my lower-scoring ones.

Luckily, Mini Gal4xy starts to become more interesting once you’ve unlocked a few more technologies and a few more alien races. The races, in particular, take a page from the playbooks of Cosmic Encounter and Endless Legend by being dramatically different in their abilities and play styles. The Nomads don’t have a home base and their ships are built unarmed but with colonizing capabilities. The Fermulons start without a ship but can explore neighboring planets by building an Observatory. It’s an interesting challenge figuring out how to adapt to the limitations and take advantage of the strengths of each race, especially when they seem to break what you understand to be the basic rules of the game.

Understanding the basic rules was another problem, though. Despite the simplified gameplay, a lot of things are not explained and I often had questions that the game’s icons could not answer. There’s a tutorial, but it doesn’t explain that the dots above each planet will light up when you can afford an improvement there, or why enemy ships sometimes attack your ships in system and sometimes wait for you to make the first move.

With improvements to the interface and more carefully-crafted procedural generation, Mini Gal4xy would definitely be worth your time just for the fun of figuring out how to make the limitations of each race bend to your favor. Unfortunately the game takes a third strike from persistent and occasionally game-breaking bugs.

Mini Gal4xy has a hard time with changes of focus, often being dumped from memory and reloading after the app has been closed for only a short time.  Beyond that, sometimes just fighting a battle or ordering a ship to move will freeze the game, requiring a forced app closure. When I first started playing, these crashes would also erase my save game, rendering the game functionally unplayable, but a recent patch has corrected this particular bug (while significantly delaying the completion of this review!) Entering battles is still risky, not because my ships are outgunned or my enemies tenacious, but because battles still frequently cause freezes. Force quitting from these freezes sets you back to the beginning of your turn. This is particularly annoying when the only way forward is to fight, and that is literally impossible.

There’s good ideas here. The basic systems are solid enough to handle alien races with dramatically different starting points, and a score-attack mini space 4X game is a great concept for mobile. This one’s just not quite ready to launch.

Epic Games have just launched a preview of their upcoming Unreal Engine Academy.  This is a one stop location for Unreal Engine courses in video format which is completely free, although it requires you to log in with your Epic credentials.  The Unreal Academy will track your current progress through a course and even has motivational achievements that can be attained.  Currently the pickings are fairly slim, with 3 official courses and just over a dozen other courses available.  The new portal will most likely replace the existing Unreal Academy, with much of the content being shared.

This move comes in response to a similar portal launched by Unity just last week, Unity Learn.  It offers very similar content, although Unity Learn also offers some text based tutorials in addition to video.

Regardless to which game engine you use, never has it been easier to get access to excellent courses to get you up and running.  Check out the new Unreal Engine Academy in action in the video below.

GameDev News Unreal

As you might have noticed, Ryan Reynolds is currently doing the press rounds to help promote Detective Pikachu. In a lot of these interviews, he’s revealed how he tested out different voices and even channelled the foul-mouthed Marvel character Deadpool.

During a recent interview with Megan Peters from Comicbook.com, Reynolds elaborated on the recording process for Detective Pikachu, explaining how he was in the recording booth for about a year with tracking dots all over his body, “throwing 800 versions” of a line or joke up against a wall. While some of the language was a bit “PG-13” other times it was closer to an R-rating. Obviously, maintaining the family-friendly image of Pokémon was the priority, so these lines didn’t make the cut during the editing process.

If Reynolds was able to make a more mature movie with Pikachu, he’d likely continue on with the film noir theme, recreating classics such Mean Streets or Goodfellas. Take a look at the full interview below:

Do you plan to see Detective Pikachu in cinema? Are you a fan of Ryan Reynolds? Tell us down in the comments.

We where still uncertain about the announcement of R-Type Final 2 due to the peculiar date of the announcement (April 1st) but fortunately for shmup fans it turned out to be real.

While the game was always an obvious certainty on PlayStation 4, developer Granzella came today on Twitter to ask on both Japanese and Western accounts on which platform would you’d ideally like to fight the Bydo Empire on.

At the time of writing, the Japanese poll favours the PS4 with Switch following in close second place, while in the Western account the Switch option is well ahead of the rest of the pack.

While this poll obviously doesn’t confirm if the game will be released on Switch, it is enough to kindle a glimmer of hope; could the developer take the results to heart and make a Switch version?

Did you vote Switch on that poll? Would you like to blast away even more of the Bydo Rmpire on your hybrid console of choice? Let us know in the comments section below.

Take a moment to reflect on the GameCube era and one series that might stand out is Sega’s Super Monkey Ball, originally developed by Amusement Vision – the team also known for F-Zero GX. Outside of the arcade release, the first two console versions were arguably the best entries in the Monkey Ball series and since then newer entries have often failed to recreate the magic. Sega hasn’t helped the situation either, with the last Monkey Ball game launching on mobile devices in 2014 and sharing no similarities to the mainline platform party games.

Now, an Indiegogo crowdfunding project is taking matters into its own hands by releasing a title heavily inspired by the Super Monkey Ball series. You could perhaps think of Rolled Out! as more of the same, with the game’s lead designer Brandon Johnson even admitting it has the “same basic mechanics” and the project page describing it as a “love letter” to the Super Monkey Ball series.

Brandon’s knowledge of the Monkey Ball series dates back to when he was much younger. Over the past year, he’s even made two major Super Monkey Ball 2 ROM hacks featuring over 200 levels, and has studied physics and level design in order to recapture the spirit of Sega’s series. Rolled Out! promises to include 310 stages, five main difficulties, online multiplayer, customisable settings and plenty of cute animals in balls. At this point in time, the title has only been funded for a PC release, but the developer has also teased a possible Nintendo Switch release in the future.

Have you been waiting for a Super Monkey Ball revival? Would you like to see Rolled Out! on the Switch? Tell us below.