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*Offer ends Thursday at 10AM Pacific Time

Newsbrief: The Copenhagen-based developer Ultra Ultra has closed its doors less than two years after releasing its atmospheric sci-fi game Echo.

The team shared the news in a tweet, noting that, while the studio has shut down, the movie based on Echo is still in the works and the game itself will remain up for sale.

“We’re terribly sad to report that Ultra Ultra has ceased to exist,” reads a tweet from the team. “We are grateful to have had the chance to crystallize something truly from the heart.”

Ultra Ultra released Echo for PC and PlayStation 4 in late 2017 and just this January announced that the game would be adapted into a film at the hands of John Wick creator and writer Derek Kolstad. Between development and studio setup, the team spent around three years working on the game, something discussed by Ultra Ultra’s Martin Emborg in an interview following their IGF nomination last year.

In today’s episode of ‘here’s another RPG from Kemco’, we present to you Frane: Dragon’s Odyssey. The game launches on Nintendo Switch tomorrow.

The story follows Kunah, a boy from the fire dragon tribe, as he gets summoned by the god that reigns over the world above. His mission is to bring Escude, a lost girl from the angel clan, back to Vanneth. With his childhood friend, Riel, the daughter of the ice dragon chief, he follows after the missing girl and sets out for the vast world below the clouds.

Featuring all the RPG elements you’ve come to expect, Frane: Dragon’s Odyssey has you facing combat against enemies, gathering items, creating dishes, and giving gifts to your friends to increase their likeability gauges. The press release even hints at some potential romance, should your gifts be particularly liked.

As we mentioned above, the game launches tomorrow and is available from the Switch eShop for $12.99 / £11.69. If you’re quick, you can take advantage of a pre-launch sale giving you 10% off that price.

Do you like the look of this one? Ready for another RPG adventure? Tell us below.

Nintendo has revealed the theme for the next Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Spirit event, and this time it’s doubling up as a celebration for Mother’s Day.

Called ‘Mum’s the Word!’, the event will kick off this Friday and lasts for three days as always. The Spirit board will be littered with motherly characters for you to win, and you’ll earn triple the usual SP for adding one to your collection.

If, like us, you happen to live in the UK and are confused about the event being Mother’s Day-themed, worry not. In most places, Mother’s Day is taking place on 12th May (consider this your reminder to pick up a last-minute gift if you celebrate the day).

Are you missing any of these Spirits? Would you rather Smash received a new kind of event to enjoy? Let us know in the usual place.

If you’ve been reading the Community blog, you’ll already know: AskFedora has moved to Discourse! Read on for more information about this exciting platform.

Discourse? Why Discourse?

The new AskFedora is a Discourse instance hosted by Discourse, similar to discussion.fedoraproject.org. However, where discussion.fedoraproject.org is meant for development discussion within the community, AskFedora is meant for end-user troubleshooting.

The Discourse platform focuses on conversations. Not only can you ask questions and receive answers, you can have complete dialogues with others. This is especially fitting since troubleshooting includes lots of bits that are neither questions nor answers. Instead, there are lots of suggestions, ideas, thoughts, comments, musings, none of which necessarily are the one true answer, but all of which are required steps that together lead us to the solution.

Apart from this fresh take on discussions, Discourse comes with a full set of features that make interacting with each other very easy.

Login using your Fedora account

Users accounts on the new AskFedora are managed by the Fedora account system only. A Fedora account gives you access to all of the infrastructure used by the Fedora community. This includes:

• The Fedora wiki
• Bugzilla
• Bodhi
• The mailing lists
• Pagure: our Git forge

This decision was made mainly to combat the spam and security issues previously encountered with the various social media login services.

So, unlike the current Askbot setup where you could login using different social media services, you will need to create a Fedora Account to use the new Discourse based instance. Luckily, creating a Fedora Account is very easy!

1. Go to https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/user/new
2. Choose a username, enter your name, and a valid e-mail address, a security question.
3. Do the “captcha” to confirm that you are indeed a human, and confirm that you are older than 13 years of age.

That’s it! You now have a Fedora account.

Get started!

If you are using the platform for the first time, you should start with the “New users! Start here!” category. Here, we’ve put short summaries on how to use the platform effectively. This includes information on how to use Discourse, its many features that make it a great platform, notes on how to ask and respond to queries, subscribing and unsubscribing from categories, and lots more.

For the convenience of the global Fedora community, these summaries are available in all the languages that the community supports. So, please do take a minute to go over these introductory posts.

Discuss, learn, teach, have fun!

Please login, ask and discuss your queries and help each other out. As always, suggestions and feedback are always welcome. You can post these in the “Site feedback” category.

As a last note, please do remember to “be excellent to each other.” The Fedora Code of Conduct applies to all of us!

Acknowledgements

The Fedora community does everything together, so many volunteers joined forces and gave their resources to make this possible. We are most grateful to the Askbot developers who have hosted AskFedora till now, the Discourse team for hosting it now, and all the community members who helped set it up, and everyone that helps keep the Fedora community ticking along!

The 17^th annual Imagine Cup brought together thousands of students from across the globe over eight months of coding, collaboration, and competition. Through hackathons, online semifinals, and in-person Regional Final events, the 2019 competition season all built up to one moment—the World Championship stage live from Microsoft Build. For the first time, our finalist teams pitched their projects to kick off Microsoft’s premier developer conference.

Congratulations to team EasyGlucose from the United States, who took home the 2019 Imagine Cup trophy for his deep learning, low-cost, and non-invasive blood glucose level monitor for diabetics. He won USD100,000, a mentoring session with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, USD50,000 in Azure grants, and ongoing mentoring from M12.

Imagine Cup aims to empower future innovators with the tools and resources to bring their technology solutions to life with Azure. This year’s competition saw many teams developing inspiring and game-changing projects focused on solving key business and societal issues. Teams Caeli from Asia, Finderr from the UK, and EasyGlucose from the USA each won their Regional Final round to advance to the final stage of the competition. They gave a live pitch of their original Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Machine projects encompassing solutions in healthcare and accessibility to a panel of three expert judges at Microsoft Build, who selected the most comprehensive idea.

Watch the show and relive the moment of Team EasyGlucose winning the trophy:

Meet the top 3 teams and recap their journey to the World Championship:

2019 Imagine Cup World Champion: Team EasyGlucose, United States

EasyGlucose is a cloud-powered, non-invasive, and cost-effective method of blood glucose monitoring for diabetic patients. A deep learning computer vision framework using convolutional neural networks developed with Azure Virtual Machines analyzes iris morphological variation in an eye image to predict a patient’s blood glucose level. Recap their journey through the Americas Regional Final.

“I want to make cost-effective and painless blood glucose monitoring to all diabetic patients around the globe, and Imagine Cup enables me not only to share my idea and get invaluable public feedback, but also to obtain funding and keep validating and improving EasyGlucose.” – Bryan, EasyGlucose 

2^nd place: Team Caeli, India

Caeli is a smart automated anti-pollution and drug delivery mask specifically designed for asthmatic and chronic respiratory patients.  It implements breakthrough features and Azure Machine Learning in a portable format to improve the quality of life for respiratory patients living in polluted areas. Recap their journey through the Asia Regional Final.

“Caeli wanted to build something that could help our society in surviving…here in Imagine Cup we found it suitable to showcase the possibilities and draw industry attention towards this global issue.” – Team Caeli

3^rd place: Team Finderr, United Kingdom

The team won the Azure Champ Challenge at OxfordHack, which inspired them to submit their project to Imagine Cup. They created an app solution which uses Cognitive Services and Virtual Machines to help make finding lost objects accessible to visually impaired individuals through their phones. Recap their journey through the EMEA Regional Final.

“We’re  really, really excited to have the chance to be able to bring our project to fruition to help the visually impaired users.” – Team Finderr

Registration for the 2020 competition is now open. Join over two million student competitors worldwide in creating purpose from your passion and sign up for Imagine Cup today!

By Mikey Campbell
Wednesday, May 08, 2019, 04:56 pm PT (07:56 pm ET)

Apple this week appears to have halted sales of the LG UltraFine 5K display, potentially signaling a near future launch for a branded high-resolution monitor expected to launch alongside a new modular Mac Pro.

The LG display is now listed as sold out on Apple.com, while in-store supply is exhausted at many U.S. brick-and-mortar locations.

A similar situation occurred late last year when domestic Apple stores, as well as a few international locales, showed wide unavailability of the 5K display. At the time, however, the monitor could still be ordered for delivery.

The UltraFine 5K stockout follows Apple’s discontinuation of the LG UltraFine 4K display in April. With both LG UltraFine models no longer available from Apple, it can be speculated that the tech giant is readying a successor device for launch.

LG’s UltraFine 4K and 5K displays were introduced in October 2016, designed as part of a collaborative effort with Apple to complement then-new MacBook Pro models.

Apple announced work on a professional-grade standalone monitor in 2017, initially promising release alongside an all-new Mac Pro in 2018. The company later pushed back the Mac debut into 2019, but failed to offer a release timeline for its new monitor, leaving some to believe it would see unveiling at an earlier date.

While Apple has yet to detail hardware specifications, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo in February said the device will measure 31.6 inches on the diagonal and house a 6K3K panel boasting “outstanding picture quality thanks to its adoption of the Mini LED-like backlight design.” Kuo in a separate note to investors issued in April predicted Apple to launch the display in the next few months.

Most recently, a report this week claims Apple might preview both the Mac Pro and display at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June. AppleInsider will be covering the event live.

Though the LG UltraFine 5K is no longer available from Apple’s online store, those in the market can still find the display at various retailers like B&H Photo.

Roguelikes and card battlers have been having a ‘moment’ for years now. Early classics like Hoplite and Dream Quest were ground-breaking in their canny mix of challenge and simplicity. Anything halfway decent becomes common, and these sort of games were something truly special. Lose sight of the lineage, forget the forefathers, though, and you’ll be pleasantly shocked by the quality of recent roguelikes.

Chief among these is the recently-released Dimension of Dreams, standing apart like a very good fusion of the aforementioned games. It takes some familiar mechanics while totally inventing its own card pool and class system, and while the progression is slow and the difficulty perhaps slightly over-tuned, it is great and by all signs will only get better.

Don’t let the 3D art style fool you; this game’s action unfolds within turn-based battles interspersed with overland travel on a 2D grid. Three levels filled with shops, mystery events, treasure chests and monsters. After every battle, you gain experience, gold and most crucially, the chance to add a new card to your deck. That’s the big picture, macro-level strategy of managing health and coins as long-term resources, but the game’s chief challenge lay within those battles. Each turn, the player draws two (or sometimes more) cards and has a few actions to spend playing those cards. There are four color-coded categories of cards: red for offense, blue for defense, green for utility and purple for status effects.

The game’s combos and effects largely revolve around these colorful card types. For now the game has three classes, roughly corresponding to that holy trinity of warrior, rogue and mage. (With the ‘mage’ being more of a ‘holy cleric’ sort). As an example, the rogue-type Demon Samurai has plenty of dodge, critical and poison-based keyword effects.

If all this sounds curiously parallel to Slay the Spire, that is quite accurate and, moreover, quite deliberate. But the variety and detail of both class mechanics and enemy traits are unique to this game and reminiscent of Dream Quest’s utter ex nihilo creativity. In lieu of attributes or spells, player characters have equipment and relics, the former selected from a fixed pool of options every third level, the latter purchased from shops or awarded after boss battles. The synergy between these relics and the deck’s own archetypes becomes a delicate chance for the player to apply their wits. So it possesses the requisite opportunity for a first-rate mind to distinguish itself.

The game’s not a dreamy playpen, though, and has plenty of practical constraints to limit theoretical min-maxing. This tension is necessary because roguelikes are also about building the most elegant, efficient machine out of whatever scraps are available. On this front, the game is a wee bit scanty with its options, I’d say, a little bit beyond the norm of what’s ‘fair’ to make the average run winnable through wise decisions alone. There are so many different viable deck archetypes, but only a few of them thrive in the early stages of the game where it is most crucial to build momentum. So there’s a bit of false richness here, insofar as things like a Parry-based warrior archetype simply isn’t going to cut it at max difficulty, barring some exceptional events.

One more criticism is about those same ‘events’ and the unusually high-variance nature of the level-up rewards. When landing on an event space, a short vignette of text spells out a situation then presents the player with two possible reactions. Some of them are totally binary outcomes, with one ‘right’ choice giving a pure reward and the other pure punishment. This is titillating storytelling but bad gameplay, to present an opaque risk with zero information and no trade-off decisions. And the quality of these boons also varies wildly, from trivial passive boosts to a free level-up. Oh, and upon levelling up, your character can very rarely gain extra draws or energy, which are x10 more effective and useful than, say, three extra max HP. So the game’s not as finely tuned as it should be in these edge cases. Best fix would be to tell the player possible odds upfront for random events and lessen either the swingy wide-ranging level-up options or somehow make them more uniform.

The criticism above sounds harsh & dire, but these deficiencies only stand out because the rest of the game is so nice and polished. There are ten levels of difficulty, with each one throwing a new monkey wrench into things. The scaling here is pretty much ideal; so far, the best I’ve managed is the eighth. (The scalable challenge mode is also pretty much a direct call back to Slay the Spire). There are already three classes to start, with another three in the pipeline and two others coming later down the road. The game is only a dollar because these other classes are locked behind either ‘loot boxes’ or instant payment unlocks.

Fortunately even the ‘box’-based reward system is tastefully implemented. Each class has exactly 50 boxes available for purchase for in-game currency earned after each run, and each box will contain one of those 50 things to reveal. So what is random is the order in which things become available for the player, but everything is guaranteed to become available after the whole lot is purchased. Because the game is excruciatingly difficult right now, this might still mean a 10-hour crusade to unlock the next class without shelling out more cash, but any roguelike worth its salt ought to make 10-hours (5 runs or so) melt away in light of the player’s focus and enjoyment. Flow-state, basically.

Honestly, aside from the wonky difficulty in early stages, the wacky random events & level-ups and rather generic 3D models (which make the game a battery-chugger), the game is a treasure, and one that’s only bound to improve with further balance tweaks and content. Needs a few bugfixes, too. It’s neither wholly derivative nor original but remains a roguelike to watch and try if you’ve the slightest interest, and for this price it’s a steal.

Here is the current list of IAPS for the game:

• Hero: Samurai $2.99
• Pre-order Mage Heroes $5.99
• Hero: Paladin $2.99
• Demon Samurai Key Pack $3.99
• Gladiator Key Pack $3.99
• Gladiator Dream Pack $19.99
• Paladin Key Pack $3.99
• Paladin Dream Pack $19.99
• Demon Samurai Dream Pack $19.99
• Revival Coin x6 $2.99

Humble Bundle are running another bundle of interest to game developers… this time, for the writers among us.  The Write like a Writer bundle is a collection of e-books about all facets of writing from the publisher Adams Media.  As always, the bundle is organized into tiers.  If you buy a tier you get all the books at that price point and all tiers below it.

The tiers of this bundle include:

1$ Tier

Script Tease

The Tao of Writing

Write.  10 Days to Overcome Writer’s Block

Grammar Sucks

Screen-Writing

A Cup of Comfort for Writers

The Everything Guide to Writing a Book Proposal

The Everything Guide to Writing Nonfiction

A Writer’s Space

8$ Tier

The Call of the Writer’s Craft

The Everything Creative Writing Book

The Everything Guide To Writing Children’s Books

Write that Book Already

The Everything Improve Your Writing Book

Screenwriting in the Land of OZ

15$ Tier

Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction

Plot Whisperer

1-Minute Writer

The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need

The Plot Whisperer Book of Writing Prompts

Hire Me, Hollywood!

The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Novelists

The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screen Writers

1001 Letters for All Occasions

The Everything Guide to Comedy Writing

The Everything Guide to Writing Your First Novel

Wow… that is a lot of books on books!  Buying this bundle also helps supporting charity, NCAC and First Book are the selected charities for this bundle.  In addition you can also direct some of the proceeds to support GFS, in which case, thank you!

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