If you had been wondering where your beloved dev blogs disappeared to, they followed Lee all the way to Stoke-On-Trent to spend the morning with an enterprising group of students who used GameGuru to create games for their Game Jam. I was treated to a brief chat with the teams followed by live presentations of the games. Given the extremely short deadline all teams produced some excellent designs and we even got a few giggles as we watched the play-throughs during the presentation part of the day.
All teams started their design on paper, refined the objectives of the level, then moved to creating it in the GameGuru level editor, producing levels that not only followed the story but gave the player a clear direction when playing. It is by no means a requirement to design your level on paper with GameGuru, but it's great to see this industry practise taught and I am looking forward to discovering more colleges and institutions using GameGuru to teach game and level design. Congratulations to all participants of Game Jam and I look forward to attending next year when I might bring some prizes to make things a little more interesting :)
In other news, the last of the 'start of the year' meetings are now out of the way, which means we can charge merrily into the first set of voted for features. The Public Preview has thrown up a few issues, so thanks to those who reported those, but nothing appears to be a critical issue, so it looks like this build will become the official version on Tuesday and work begins on the next series of tweaks (plus the save/load progress feature) for the next V1.13 update. If you feel you have posted an issue that 'urgently' needs attention in V1.12 compared to V1.11 then please email me directly at lee@thegamecreators.com. You can find the latest discussion on the preview release of the latest build here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/214773
Tuesday should be a full day of coding, so prepare yourself for a return to our normal scheduled programming with a few little insights into the daily life of a game engine coder and a fly on the wall progress report on your favourite game maker!