Core is a new game creation platform built upon Unreal Engine that recently went into open alpha release.  Core is a game creation platform in a similar vein as Dreams, Roblox and Second Life.  It comes packed out of the box with models, audio and materials and can be coded using the Lua programming language.

Core is described as:

Core is an endless universe of games and worlds designed by a global community of creators. It’s a radically accessible game construction kit, content exchange, and game-playing platform, all in one. With Core, you can create multiplayer games, using the power of Unreal Engine, with no coding or art skills required. When you’re ready to share your creations, publish them to the Core platform where they’ll be instantly available to play.

Core is in Open Alpha which means anyone can start building, sharing, and playing games. However, Core is not complete, and we will be adding several features and making improvements over time.

Plans exist to add monetization, enabling creators to make money with their Core creations.  There is also the possibility that Core games will be publishable to other platforms, but for now Core games are published on the core website.  Core is well documented for developers, with that documentation available here.  Words do a poor job of describing Core, watch out the video below to see Core in action.

GameDev News Engine Lua

Aquiris Game Studio has laid out its 2020 roadmap for Horizon Chase – World Tour, which includes a totally new user interface, more free-to-play content, weekly challenges, and more. If you’ve fallen out of playing the retro-inspired racer for whatever reason, now’s as good a time as ever to get back into it.

Some of the roadmap has already been fulfilled, too. If you download the game right now, you’ll find a completely redesigned UI that Aquiris describes as “for modern gadgets”. That also includes improved support for different screen ratios and a higher native resolution, so it should look a lot better overall.

There’s also a lot more free-to-play content, including three whole cups to play before you have to fork out for more. That consists of 30 tracks and seven cars to check out without spending a penny. There’s more to come as well, with May introducing a new weekly challenges feature, which is available to all. Weekly challenges bring you a new selection of tracks each week, each of which have new rules and conditions, spicing up the experience.

If you do own the premium version of Horizon Chase, you’ll receive additional challenges and rewards though, so don’t make the mistake of thinking this is all for free-to-play gamers. You’ll also find a new store, which Aquiris hasn’t announced the details of just yet. All we know is that it will provide “additional content”.

Aquiris plans to release even more new features during 2020, and will announce these at a later date. If you’d like to give Horizon Chase – World Tour a try, you can grab it right now for free from the App Store or Google Play.

By William Gallagher
Thursday, April 30, 2020, 02:09 pm PT (05:09 pm ET)

While the coronavirus has affected Apple’s earnings, its overall second quarter results are better than predicted because of the company’s increasing reliance on wearables and services.

Services like Apple Music, and Wearables like Apple Watch, have become significant earners for Apple

During its legally required second quarter financial earnings call, Apple announced better than expected results across most areas, but especially in its newest businesses. Wearables achieved a quarterly record, while services reached an all-time high of $13.3 billion.

“In this difficult environment, our users are depending on Apple products in renewed ways to stay connected, informed, creative, and productive,” said Tim Cook. “Despite COVID-19’s unprecedented impact, we’re proud to report that Apple grew for the quarter.”

Apple’s Wearables, Home and Accessories net sales were $6.284 million, compared to $5.129 million for the same quarter in 2019. Services’s record high of $13.348 million comes after last year’s $11.450 million for the quarter.

The company has been transitioning away from its dependence on iPhones, iPads, and Macs in hardware, chiefly since the Apple Watch launched in 2015, and the AirPods, which first came out in 2016.

Its services have been expanding considerably since its first ventures into iCloud and then in 2015 with Apple Music. Last year saw the launch of major new ventures in Apple TV+, Apple News+, Apple Arcade, and Apple Card.

It’s not the Build we thought it would be, but it’s gonna be special. Today, we’re excited to share that registration for an all-new virtual Build experience is now open. We can’t wait to bring together our community of developers to learn, connect and code together.

While things will look a little different this year as we all absorb and adjust to new realities brought on  COVID-19, we’re excited about Microsoft Build 2020, a 48-hour virtual event starting May 19 at 8 a.m. PT that will kick off with welcome remarks from Satya Nadella. This will be followed by a session with and for Developers hosted by me (read more on my blog).

Here’s a little more of what you can expect at Build this year:

• Two days of continuous learning in your time zone: Attend sessions, talks and demos carefully chosen to help developers be productive wherever you work, and drive innovation and transformation. You will hear from the engineers behind the products you use every day and connect with your peers in a digital event experience.
• Build community connections: Expand your network and your perspective on what’s possible. Connect and collaborate with your peers from around the world and with the Microsoft engineers behind the tools and services you rely on.
• Level up your coding: Discover new ways to take your code and application architecture to the next level with as we help you troubleshoot, optimize and secure your projects.
• Helping developers today: We’re committed to support developers with cost-effective, efficient innovations that make people’s lives easier and better, especially in uncertain times. Today, we announced new lower pricing for Visual Studio Codespaces (formerly Visual Studio Online) so you can create cloud-hosted dev environments that are accessible from anywhere, from any device. Earlier this month, GitHub announced that all of its core features are now available for free to all users. You can expect more such announcements as we journey through Microsoft Build.

Register for the event here. I’m really proud of what we’re working on and I’m looking forward to sharing it with you all.

Tags: Build 2020, developers, Visual Studio Codespaces

This week, CEO Satya Nadella delivered Microsoft’s quarterly earnings report to Wall Street—our first in the era of COVID-19. On the call, Satya shared some new numbers: In April, we saw more than 200 million Microsoft Teams meeting participants in a single day, generating more than 4.1 billion meeting minutes. Also, Teams now has more than 75 million daily active users, and two-thirds of them have shared, collaborated, or interacted with files on Teams as well. As Satya put it, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. From remote teamwork and learning, to sales and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security—we are working alongside customers every day to help them adapt and stay open for business in a world of remote everything.”

To keep their teams connected in this world of remote everything, our customers need more than meetings or chat alone. Teams combines meetings, calls, chat, and collaboration into a single tool that preserves context and keeps everyone up to speed. Below, I dig into the role that Teams is playing to keep the world working and share customer stories about how Teams enables their work. But first, a bit more about those numbers.

About the numbers

Satya shared three important types of numbers in his call: daily meeting participants, daily meeting minutes, and daily active users. We see different vendors use these metrics in different ways, but we’re the only one on the market that can release all three. The reason for that is simple: Teams is the only solution that offers chat, calls, meetings, and collaboration in one.

So how do we define each? Our daily meeting participants number is the aggregate number of people joining a meeting in a day—so if someone participates in five meetings in a day, they would be counted five times. Meanwhile, we measure daily meeting minutes by adding together the total time people spend in Teams meetings within a 24-hour period. For example, if two people are in the same 10-minute meeting, we count that as 20 meeting minutes. Finally, we define daily active users (DAU) as the count of unique users performing an intentional action in a 24-hour period in any of the Teams clients—desktop, mobile, or web. Intentional actions include sending or replying to a chat, joining a meeting, or opening a file in Teams. We don’t count passive actions like auto boot, minimizing a screen, or closing the app. We also don’t count Skype Consumer or Skype for Business usage, since that’s a completely different app. Our DAU numbers are de-duped, meaning we only count each user once.

Powering the world’s work

Across education, government, healthcare, and business, Teams is powering collaboration for organizations of all sizes while meeting the highest standards of security and privacy. Around the world, more than 183,000 educational institutions use Teams. In the United Arab Emirates alone, over 350,000 students are relying on Teams for remote learning. On the business side, 20 organizations have more than 100,000 active users on Teams, including Continental AG, Ernst & Young, Pfizer, and SAP. Just last week, Accenture became the first organization to surpass half a million users, and we expanded our partnership with the NFL. We even collaborated with the League to help bring the first-ever virtual NFL Draft to life with Teams!

And after weeks of learning, working and living this way, we’re all developing new habits. Some COVID-19-era habits will prove temporal—I know many parents who can’t wait for the return of in-person play dates, for instance. But we believe the habits we see in Teams are more durable and will persist well beyond the current crisis. Data from regions like China and South Korea, where many people have returned to the office, but continue Teams habits they developed while working apart, backs this up. For example, a report out this month showed more than two times the number of new Teams users each day in China compared to end of January. And the number of daily active Teams users in China also continued to grow week over week.

Helping our customers

We are so inspired by the ingenuity and agility of our customers as they navigate the shift to remote work. Here are a few of their stories.

Accenture:
“Accenture is one of the largest users of Microsoft Teams in the world, and during this unprecedented crisis, it is proving to be invaluable—both for us and for helping our clients maintain business continuity and stay connected to their people and customers.”
—Julie Sweet, Chief Executive Officer, Accenture

Goodyear Tire Company:
“Our work from home experience has been nothing short of phenomenal. We were able to transition 25,000 associates to working from home in a matter of just a few days, and Teams played a vital role in that. This is evidenced by a tremendous increase in Teams usage, which includes a 410 percent increase in Teams meetings compared to a normal week. We have continued to work in the Goodyear way taking care of our customers and associates with integrity and conscientiousness, with Teams helping our associates stay connected to their work and each other.”
—Sherri Neubert, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Goodyear Tire Company

Guildford Technical Community College:
“We found ourselves faced with implementing a collaboration tool in a couple of days versus the original 90-120 days we had originally planned. Fortunately, we had begun testing and building out some of the basic functionality in Teams, but not to the extent to complete an enterprise rollout. COVID-19 entered the picture and we had no choice other than to roll out Teams to all faculty and staff at the college and to include classroom instruction among other things. Thanks to the MS “team,” pun intended, we were able to pull it off successfully and we are now working to enable additional functionality to the faculty, staff and students. Thank you so much for your responsiveness and willingness to help us during a very trying time, MS team! You folks rock!”
—Ron G Horn, Chief Information Officer, Guildford Technical Community College

Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust:
Consultant Medical Oncologist Jo Dent runs several clinics for cancer patients at the trust—many of them young women with busy lives, jobs, and children to look after. Previously, patients could choose from appointments at fixed times of the week and often travelled with their families for up to an hour for a five-minute check-up. Now, Dr. Dent can contact a patient using Teams at a time that suits them both. Dent says, “We can have a quick chat over video just so I can check that the treatment that I’ve prescribed is working how I would expect. It gives them the chance to drop the kids off at school and lets the appointment happen on their time, not our time. With Teams, we offer the patient the choice, and it’s less stressful for them.”
—Jo Dent, Consultant Medical Oncologist, Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust

In this era of remote everything, we have seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. Teams is enabling this accelerated transformation by giving people a single tool to chat, call, meet, and collaborate. With Teams as their hub for teamwork, our customers are discovering new collaboration habits that we believe will persist well beyond this crisis. We are committed to continuing to build the tools that keep them connected and productive—through COVID-19 and beyond.

Fedora 32 Workstation is the latest release of our free, leading-edge operating system. You can download it from the official website here right now. There are several new and noteworthy changes in Fedora 32 Workstation. Read more details below.

GNOME 3.36

Fedora 32 Workstation includes the latest release of GNOME Desktop Environment for users of all types. GNOME 3.36 in Fedora 32 Workstation includes many updates and improvements, including:

Redesigned Lock Screen

The lock screen in Fedora 32 is a totally new experience. The new design removes the “window shade” metaphor used in previous releases, and focuses on ease and speed of use.

New Extensions Application

Fedora 32 features the new Extensions application, to easily manage your GNOME Extensions. In the past, extensions were installed, configured, and enabled using either the Software application and / or the Tweak Tool.

Note that the Extensions application is not installed by default on Fedora 32. To either use the Software application to search and install, or use the following command in the terminal:

sudo dnf install gnome-extensions-app

Reorganized Settings

Eagle-eyed Fedora users will notice that the Settings application has been re-organized. The structure of the settings categories is a lot flatter, resulting in more settings being visible at a glance.

Additionally, the About category now has a more information about your system, including which windowing system you are running (e.g. Wayland)

Redesigned Notifications / Calendar popover

The Notifications / Calendar popover — toggled by clicking on the Date and Time at the top of your desktop — has had numerous small style tweaks. Additionally, the popover now has a Do Not Disturb switch to quickly disable all notifications. This quick access is useful when presenting your screen, and not wanting your personal notifications appearing.

Redesigned Clocks Application

The Clocks application is totally redesigned in Fedora 32. It features a design that works better on smaller windows.

GNOME 3.36 also provides many additional features and enhancements. Check out the GNOME 3.36 Release Notes for further information

Improved Out of Memory handling

Previously, if a system encountered a low-memory situation, it may have encountered heavy swap usage (aka swap thrashing)– sometimes resulting in the Workstation UI slowing down, or becoming unresponsive for periods of time. Fedora 32 Workstation now ships and enables EarlyOOM by default. EarlyOOM enables users to more quickly recover and regain control over their system in low-memory situations with heavy swap usage.

The teams behind new Switch JRPG Revenge of Justice have both issued statements to their official websites today, apologising over content found within the game.

Both Kemco, the game’s publisher, and developer City Connection have acknowledged reports that said the new game has a number of similarities to PC game, Harusuberiya Jojishi 2. After an investigation into the situation, it was found that the latter was used as a reference for certain scenarios, settings, character settings, and dialogue in the new game.

Yashioji, the creator of the Harusuberiya series, has made it clear that he is not involved with this new, unrelated project from Kemco and City Connection. Despite all of this, all three parties have noted that, after some discussion, sales of Revenge of Justice will continue as planned and that Yashioji has no issue with the continued distribution of the game.

Revenge of Justice is available now on Switch and PS4, exclusively in Japan. It’s a new strategy RPG with multiple endings to discover.

Techland is taking cues from a currently stalled game project by bringing maps and enemies from the unreleased dungeon crawler Hellraid into its parkour driven zombie game Dying Light.

Dying Light – Hellraid, due out this summer, builds a new mode into the original Dying Light based on Hellraid, a project the team was working on around the same time. It’s an interesting way for a studio to make use of ideas and concepts that, for the time being, have been shelved due to an ongoing freeze on Hellraid’s development.

Hellraid itself is billed as a first-person action dungeon crawler, pitting players against a slew of fantasy-flavored hellspawn. While originally planned for a 2013 launch, engine swaps and other issues led Techland to put development on an indefinite pause back in 2015, shortly after the release of Dying Light.

While the upcoming DLC drop brings Hellraid back into the spotlight, Game Informer reports that Techland currently has no plans to resume development of the standalone game itself at the current time.

The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!

Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Location: Espoo​, Finland​

Remedy Entertainment, the creator of Control, Quantum Break, Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Death Rally and one of the leading independent game studios in the world is looking for an Audio Designer for a key role working on Remedy’s projects.

Join the team behind action-packed and story-driven gaming experiences that have acclaimed several best audio nominations in DICE, Develop and G.A.N.G. awards. As an Audio Designer, you will be creating compelling and immersive content for all our projects together with rest of the audio team and creative stakeholders.

Responsibilities

•  Design, edit and implement high quality in-game sound effects (cinematics, gameplay, environment and level ambience, UI, foley etc.) for our projects and marketing purposes.
• Participate in outsourcing development for cinematics, levels and music.
• Assist with polishing and bug fixing efforts.
• Work in systematic and problem-solving manner under tight schedules.
• Work as an active member of the audio team and participate in planning and meetings.

Requirements and qualifications

• Proven track record on quality audio design and implementation skills.
• Experience on studio-based and outsourced sound effects production work.
• Experience with standard audio creation software – REAPER, Izotope RX etc.
• Positive and solution-oriented approach to work.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills (in English).

The ideal candidate will also have

• Experience in AAA game development.
• Experience in cinematic storytelling and FPS games.
• Experience in shipping AAA projects.
• Demonstrated passion for entertainment products.
• Knowledge of scripting or programming.
• Formal education in a relevant field, e.g. audio engineering, game design etc.

What’s in it for you?

• Yes, you get to move to Finland where the quality of life is exceptional and cost of living is affordable.
• Moving to a new country can be intimidating, but our relocation service is there every step of the way to take care of you. You can concentrate on work, while we’ll take care of everything else.
• You will be offered competitive compensation with a bonus system.
• We work hard, but at Remedy we believe in a great work life balance. Happy people work better. In Finland you get up to 5 weeks of paid vacation every year. This is on top of public holidays and other special occasions.
• Above all, you get to work on awesome, unique video games that the global audience is interested in at a studio where your input is valued. We try our hardest to keep our team sizes and the work load sensible, so your contributions feel valuable.

To apply, please fill in the application form with your portfolio, CV and other information relevant to the position. Please note that for us to be able to evaluate your application a portfolio (or link to your portfolio) needs to be attached to the application.

The position will be filled as soon as a suitable applicant is found.

Interested? Apply now.

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.

Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.

Looking for a new job? Get started here. Are you a recruiter looking for talent? Post jobs here.