There is a new Humble Bundle of interest to game developers, this one is the Ultimate Fantasy Game Development bundle. It’s a collection of fantasy themed models, full rigged, textured and animated with tons of modularity and different texture packs. Even more impressive, the package is available as keys for both Unity and Unreal Engine asset stores and the models and textures are in a format that can be used in any 3D game engine with ease. As with all Humble Bundles, this one is organized into tiers:
1$ Tier
Plant Monster
Rock Monster
Mushroom Monster
15$ Tier
Giant Worm
Minotaur
Mimics & Chests
Medusa
Locks and Lockpicks
25$ Tier
Spiders
Dragons
Humans
Armor Pack 1
Weapons & Armor 1
Character Accessories
Trolls
Demons
Magic & Melee Sounds Library
Devils
As with all Humble Bundles, you get to decide how your money is allocated between Humble, Charity, the publisher and if you so choose (and thanks if you do!) to support GFS purchasing through this link. You can get additional asset packs in the same art style created by Infinity PBR on the Unity Asset Store. You can learn more about the asset pack in the video below.
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Unity Asset Store, Unity are running the Mega Bundle X sale. This is a collection of assets organised into tiers, very similar to a traditional Humble bundle. If you buy a higher dollar value tier you get all of the assets in the lower tiers as well. The tiers of this bundle consist of:
10$ Tier
25$ Tier
36$ Tier
Be sure to use the bundle link and not the individual links above, as the sale pricing is only on the bundle itself, individual assets are all still full price. You can learn more about the bundle in the video below. Links to the bundle, including this one, contain an affiliate code that pay a small commission to GFS if used (and thanks if you do!).
There is a new e-book bundle of interest to game developers, the STEM Productivity Library by Mercury. This is a collection of books around the theme of STEM, or Science/Technology/Engineering/Math. Of particular interest to game developers are the following titles:
3D Character Development Workshop
Python An Introduction to Programming
Quantum Mechanics
Artificial Intelligence Basics
Mathematics For Computer Graphics and Game Programming
Solid State Physics
Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems
Data Structures and Program Design Using Python
Newtonian Mechanics
There are a dozen other books in the collection with topics ranging from AutoCAD to Radar Systems and Tensor analytics. Several of the books in this bundle have been featured in previous bundles, so be sure to check your library before purchasing. As with all Humble Bundles, you can decide how your money is allocated between Humble, Charity, the publisher and if you so choose (and thanks if you do!) to support GFS using this link. You can learn more about the bundle in the video below.
Pixelorama and Material Maker are two very different programs that have an exceptional amount in common. One direct commonality is, they both received updates this week. In addition to new updates, Material Maker and Pixelorama are both open source game development related applications released under the MIT license and created using the Godot game engine.
Material Maker is a graph or node based procedural texture generation tool, perhaps the closest thing that exists to a free and open source Substance Designer alternative. Material Maker just released version 0.93 with new features including several new nodes and node improvements, support for custom meshes, an all new dynamic reference panel and more. The source code for Material Maker is available here.
Pixelorama is a pixel based art application with animation support. Pixelorama just released version 0.8.1 adding new tools for moving animation frames, a new purple theme, sprite generation improvements and more. The source code for Pixelorama is available here.
You can learn more about both releases in the video below or watch here on Odysee.
Previously expected in Unreal Engine 4.26 Preview 1, the new experimental water simulation system from Fortnite has finally shipped in Unreal Engine 4.26 preview 3. The new water simulation system enables you to quick create realistic and highly configurable water simulations, including oceans, lakes and rivers. Of course the key word is experimental, this is a feature that is nowhere near ready for prime time.
You can see a quick preview of the water system in action in the video below. Given the fact that there currently exists no documentation and it seems several of the features are currently broken, the video by no means showcases all of the new fluid simulation systems capabilities. Currently the only information available on how to use the new system come in the 2 1/2 Epic Games livestream available here. While early on, the new system does seem incredibly promising. For now however, the UIWS, or Unified Interactive Water System from the September monthly UE4 giveaway is most likely a better choice.
October 13th is the official launch date of the Oculus Quest 2, and with millions of Quests now in gamer’s hands, some are no doubt going to want to figure you how to develop games for them. This is a quick overview of the various different technical options and tools for developing games on the Oculus Quest 2.
The very first thing you are going to want to do is visit the Oculus Quest Developer Portal, the central repository and jumping off point for Oculus VR development. You are also eventually going to have to register to get your developer keys, which are required to deploy your completed game onto a headset. We will cover this in a later tutorial. For now let’s look at some of the options available for Quest 2 game development.
Native Development
Oculus release a set of low level C++ development tools for creating your own game or application basically from scratch. Native development is ultimately Android NDK development and requires Android Studio to be installed, as well as the Oculus Mobile SDK. There are a number of C++ code samples to get you started. Only take this option if you are an experienced coder and want to work at a very low level.
Unity Game Engine
The Unity game engine is perhaps the most commonly used game engine for VR development today. The Quest 2 is fully supported and you get a huge amount of starter content and tutorials to get you going. Oculus have getting started with Unity guides available here.
Unreal Engine
After the Unity game engine, Unreal is probably the next most commonly used game engines for VR development. Like Unity, Oculus have getting started materials for Unreal Engine available as well. If you are having trouble deciding between Unreal and Unity, check out this video comparing the two.
Godot Engine
The open source Godot game engine is another option for Oculus Quest development. There is a Oculus Mobile plugin available here as well as the Quest specific Quest Toolkit for Godot, which ships with tons of examples to get you up and started.
Other Engines
CryEngine can be used for Quest 2 development, as evidence by The Climb. Unfortunately CryEngine mobile and VR support is only available in a private beta currently. Additionally the Lumberyard game engine supports VR development, but currently only desktop platforms. You can run Rift and Vive games on the Quest, but using Lumberyard you can’t currently do native development.
WebVR
One of the easiest and quickest to get up and running is creating browser based VR games that can be run on the Quest 2. Here one of the easiest options is A-Frame where you can create 3D worlds using simple HTML-esque markup. Three.JS is the technology A-Frame is built upon and is another option, while the higher level PlayCanvas game engine has VR support as well.
You can learn more about the Oculus Quest 2 and the development options available in the video below.
Unity have just launched a new interesting publishing program for indie game developers that have or are creating free to play mobile games. Essentially Unity are offering to fund the promotional costs of selected games and provide monetization, growth and ad placement support over the lifetime of the game. Of course this comes at a cost and that cost is a 50/50 revenue split, with a scenario described on the Unity blog:
We want to be clear about the terms up front so you can decide if Game Growth is the right program for you. Let’s break down the revenue sharing with an example:
1- An indie developer has a mobile game that makes $3,000/month. They apply to the Game Growth program. Unity spends $100,000/month to acquire new users to the game, retains those users with dedicated live operations support, and grows the game to $130,000/month in revenue.*
2- Unity would first recoup their $100,000 in monthly user acquisition costs, leaving $30,000 in monthly revenue. So the developer and Unity would share that $30,000 equally, giving $15,000 to the developer and $15,000 to Unity.*
*This model would continue throughout the partnership. We’re using this fictitious example to illustrate the revenue sharing model only. The exact investment/revenue amounts will not always be consistent month over month.
One major advantage to this approach over a traditional publisher agreement is you retain all control over your company and your games IP with minimal commitment requirements. If you are interested in applying you can do so in the Unity Dashboard.
In addition to the Unity Growth program, there is also an asset giveaway going on right now. You can get the POLYGON Prototype Pack for free using the code ‘SYNTYSALE2020’, available until October 20th. Additionally Synty assets are currently on sale for 50% off. Both of the above links contain an affiliate code that pays GFS a small commission if you buy anything. You can learn more about the new Unity publishing programming and the assets in the video below.
Go is an open source programming language developed and supported by Google, by a who’s who of computer language designers. It is often used in large scale server projects at companies such as Google, Dropbox, Paypal, Twitch and Netflix. Today we are going to look at the game development frameworks and libraries available for making games using Go. We have previously created similar guides for languages such as C#, C++, Python, Lua, Codeless, Haxe and JavaScript.
2D Game Frameworks in Go:
Go Bindings:
3D Game Engines:
You can learn more about these frameworks and the Go programming language in the video below (or watch on Odysee).
Yesterday PCUI, an open source UI framework for creating game tools and other web applications, was open sourced. PCUI is named as such because it is the UI layer powering the battle tested PlayCanvas game engine. It provides over a dozen controls, as well as implementing logic such as the Observer pattern for making binding your UI to your data. PCUI is open source under the liberal MIT license with the source code available on GitHub.
Details from the PlayCanvas blog:
Today, PlayCanvas is launching PCUI: a new, open source front-end framework for the web.
PCUI is designed with tools developers in mind. It is particularly well suited to building viewer and editor applications, providing a rich set of beautiful and consistent controls. It already powers the PlayCanvas Editor – the world’s most powerful WebGL production tool.
Here you can see tree controls, panels, buttons, checkboxes, toolbars, menus and more. The Editor also relies on PCUI’s observer system, that makes it easy to synchronize the state of your application’s UI with that of the underlying data. Plus, it has a built-in support for history to make implementing redo/undo a breeze.
In addition to the PlayCanvas game engine, PCUI is used to power the PlayCanvas GLTF viewer project as well, a project which is open source and shows you a real-world example of using PCUI in a TypeScript application. PCUI is also extremely well documented with several examples available. If you are interested in learning more about PlayCanvas be sure to check out two part tutorial. You can learn more about the PCUI release in the video below.
It’s the first Tuesday of the month and that means it time for Unreal Christmas in October. Every month Epic Games gives away several assets for Unreal Engine developer and this month we got more than double the normal amount of new assets!
This months “Free for October” assets include:
The “Permanently Free” collection grew a fair bit as well:
Just be sure to “buy” the free assets before the first Tuesday in November and they are yours forever. You can learn more about this months giveaway in the video below.
