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[jonaz.dk]

West of Dead open beta on steam. It's pretty cool! Dungeon crawling, cover based, top-down shooter with a bit of loot on a limited inventory.
Give it a play! (with a controller)

[jonaz.dk]

Dordogne trailer. Looks beautiful and cute! Probaly not my type of game. But hats of for the aesthetics. Damn frenchies!

Update: Probably nitpicking here. I was watching it on mobile (kiddo had captured my big screen). So I missed some glaring issues. Long thin edge bleeding from textures and poor handling of alpha in a few places. And very visible aliasing that doesn't fit the aesthetics. The frenchies needs to step up their game. But the overall impression is still nice.

[jonaz.dk]

Now it's about damn time for some (mostly upcoming) mecha scifi shooty shooty pew pew!
Gotta love militarily unfeasible war-machines fulfilling your deepest power fantasies.

Metal Mind.. cute little rougelite mecha shooter. Didn't make their KS finding goal. Let's see if it lands.



The Riftbreaker



Hardcore Mecha (It's out.. haven't gotten around to it yet. Should be great!)



Starmancer
Not so mecha and shooty shooty. But it looks cute with retro aestheics.




Twin Ruin



BE-A Walker



Uragun

[jonaz.dk]

Anatomy of a DOOM Eternal Fight | Game Maker's Toolkit

[jonaz.dk]

Forgot this.. no store fronts yet.

Tungsten: Armored Outlaw


There is also an active FB page
https://www.facebook.com/TungstenAO/

[jonaz.dk]

The Outer Worlds: From concept to creation documentary

[jonaz.dk]

Nordisk Film Games invests SEK 45 million into Nitro Games and becomes the largest shareholder

The board of directors of Nitro Games Oyj (publ) (“Nitro Games” or the “Company”) has resolved, subject to approval by shareholders at the Annual General Meeting (the “AGM”), on a funding package consisting of a directed new issue of 3,333,333 shares at a subscription price of SEK 7.5 per share, which is expected to raise proceeds of SEK 25.0 million to the Company before issue costs, and a convertible loan agreement, which is expected to raise proceeds of SEK 20.0 million to the Company before issue costs. The proceeds will primarily be used for the further development of the Company’s game portfolio of shooter games.

https://www.nordiskfilm.com/nordisk-fil ... hareholder

[jonaz.dk]

Startup Company from Hovgaard Games is now fully released!

Seems like it's going really well. Already having sold an roughly estimated 170.000+ copies on Steam. Pretty damn good!

[jonaz.dk]

Damn Blender is moving so fast! Awesome stuff!

BLENDER 2.83 - SCULPTING TOOLS UPDATE


Extrude dissolve and intersect and more in Blender 2.90a

[jonaz.dk]

Nordic Game Conference is being scheduled to be held at Slagthuset the 27-29 May AND 25-27 November in Malmö, Sweden.

update. There will be plenty of live streaming in May. Read more here:
https://nordicgame.com/new-speakers-ses ... -for-ng20/


Anyways the Nordic Game Awards nominations are. Including a few of usual DK suspects.
https://nordicgame.com/nordic-game-awar ... -revealed/



Spilprisen will be hosting a live stream on Facebook and Twitch.
Well.. I guess it's better than nothing in these times. But nothing will really replace the good company and free burgers.

Wednesday, 22 April 2020 from 20:00-21:00

Spilprisen nominations are the following:
https://spilprisen.dk/se-de-nominerede-2020/

[jonaz.dk]

Crysis Remastered announced

[jonaz.dk]

9 Tips To Help You Finish Your Indie Game

[jonaz.dk]

Nordic Game Jam Online 2020 submissions are online!

The theme was 'everyday magic'
Did some snooping around on the Discord server. Didn't play any of the games yet. Voting for entries will happen over the next week and winners will be decided.

https://itch.io/jam/ngjonline/entries

Twitch Stream of the games being played here

[jonaz.dk]

UNIGINE 2.xx engine released with free community edition.
I have never worked with it. It has been around for quite a while (since 2005). Recent updates looks really nice! It probably won't be enough to persuade large amounts of devs already invested in the likes of Unity and Unreal Engine 4. But more competition in the engine market keeps everyone on their toes.
As far as I can see one engine limitation, in it's current form, is targeted that it is only able to build to Windows/Linux/(MacOSX?) platforms. The older version had mobile and console supported.
But it does come with a whole lot of cool stuff right out of the bag.





Download for free here
https://unigine.com/products/community/ ... =community

[jonaz.dk]

How Stealth Game Guards See and Hear | School of Stealth Part 1


The Five Types of Stealth Game Gadget | School of Stealth Part 2

[jonaz.dk]

The live stream from SpilPrisen. Grats to the winners and nominees!

[jonaz.dk]

The Winners of Nordic Game Jam Online 2020.

Together Alone: Yogalicious
Most Peaceful: Beleaf
Most Intense: Fairy Hair Rescue
New Perceptions: TV Magic
WTF! Is This Art!?: Disassembled
Most Emotional: A Tree in Memory

https://itch.io/jam/ngjonline/results

Did a small play round of the winners and a few more. Didn't find any Super Hots or Baba Is You this year. But there were a few highlights.

Yogalicious in multiplayer with voice chat is a cute concept that could be expanded upon. And should be given a proper treatment.
Also TV Magic is cute in concept. But lacking in excecution. Obvisously all perfectly fair under gamejam constraints.

[jonaz.dk]

SYBO Games soft launches 'Train Riders' officially in Belgium, Netherlands, Canada and the Philippines.
https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/73209/ ... in-riders/

I'm not really sure why they are launching a near 1:1 version of Subways Surfers with a difference only in name and AppIcon (not as strong and visually appealing as the original imho).
Update: The UI seems to be a different iteration. Visually it seems a bit more messy though.
Did they somehow buy back some rights. But not the title from KILOO. To finally have 100% control?
Or is it some sort of hacky way of expanding the game? (Shouldn't be needed).

One theory that could make a whole lot of sense. Is that Train Riders is an experimental branch of Subway Surfers. Where they test out new things. Like larger new features they are just too sensitive to test in the real game. That could eventually make it's way into the main game if performing well enough.

But let's see if more official information surfaces on what the purpose of Train Riders really is.

Also didn't KILOO earlier publish Subway Surfers from their Store front accounts? Now most things (Apple AppStore and GooglePlay) resides with SYBO Games. I may suspect a sort of deal was made if that was the case. But this is pure speculation.
Amazon still has KILOO listed as publisher. And a web version on their website.

Another thing on the two. Neither KILOO or SYBO has yet managed to pull off a real success after their massive global Subway Surfers success.
Only a single direct release from SYBO has seen the light of day, Blades of Brim. It was fairly quickly put in hibernation (or minimal support is a better word). It has done quite well judging on downloads alone. 5M+ on Android alone (probably closer to 10M end?). That's more than most developers can dream of. But even at that it didn't seem to live up to expectations.
Also doing runners is an especially hard category to master. It is among the least monetizing categories out there. Subway Surfers is among the exceptions to the rule. But mostly due to the massive scale of their user base.
Development of new titles seems to be still very active within the SYBO walls. But never really launching anything.

KILOO has gone down a different route. With a rapid expansion of development resources. And quite quickly launching a handful of games. Internally developed and co-productions. But nothing that suck around for long. Also they didn't seem to do too well at crafting a meta-game and going down the whole F2P route in general.
The conclusion was that all internal development has been completely shut down years ago.
And now (in games) they seem to be focused on building their html5 web game portfolio (www.kiloo.com) from a host of different sources. Including Funday Factory's Bullet League. As their new, potential, main thing besides (not super actively promoting on SoMe) Subway Surfers. But perhaps still doing some back-end support business-as-usual I guess.
I would say it's probably a good idea business wise for KILOO to tap into that new web portal area also. Even though their existing Subway Surfers community on eg. Facebook is not super happy about it. With hashtags of #bringkilooback with every SoMe update. They are far from the only company providing web portals for games. But I suspect it might work pretty well for them with proper analytics and user acquisition tactics. At least they stand a fair chance.

Though with the amount of money (like hundred$$ and hundred$$ of million$$$) both companies has made. I'm not 'super impressed' by their ability to turn it into something valuable (in mobile games development specifically) beyond Subway Surfers support for almost 8 years. Which is great and all and should be a core focus. Both companies has also been investing time and effort in other areas. It's unclear how things has turned out there.

So I guess... Even with all the money in the world. Doing games is still hard!
A lesson worth remembering.

I know things hasn't always been easy between them. But things seems to indicate an age where they are drifting more apart as companies.

The fat lady hasn't sung yet. And it will be interesting to compare strategy for the two companies in the years to come.

[jonaz.dk]

Broken Lines from PortaPlay made it to the Nintendo Switch!

(Personally recommending the desktop version)



https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/b ... es-switch/

[jonaz.dk]

Free stuffs! For a limited time on Steam

Total War: SHOGUN 2

[Christoffer]

I'm not really sure why they are launching a near 1:1 version of Subways Surfers with a difference only in name and AppIcon (not as strong and visually appealing as the original imho).
Did they somehow buy back some rights. But not the title from KILOO. To finally have 100% control?
Or is it some sort of hacky way of expanding the game? (Shouldn't be needed).

One theory that could make a whole lot of sense. Is that Train Riders is an experimental branch of Subway Surfers. Where they test out new things. Like larger new features they are just too sensitive to test in the real game. That could eventually make it's way into the main game if performing well enough.

But let's see if more official information surfaces on what the purpose of Train Riders really is.

Also didn't KILOO earlier publish Subway Surfers from their Store front accounts? Now most things (Apple AppStore and GooglePlay) resides with SYBO Games. I may suspect a sort of deal was made if that was the case. But this is pure speculation.
Amazon still has KILOO listed as publisher. And a web version on their website.

I believe that the contract of Subway Surfer recently ended between Kiloo and SYBO, which meant that Kiloo had to transfer the app to SYBO's accounts. However, I'm not quite sure how it works out in their business cooperation. Kiloo might still have a stake in the game (hopefully for them) and work as the publisher still.

[jonaz.dk]

Ahhh! Thanks for the update @Christoffer

I might assume they still have a stake in it. Loosing the golden goose completely would be less fortunate.

With Subway Surfers still on Amazon and a web version with KILOO as publisher. It sounds very likely there is still some formal business connection. But maybe more down to the individual platforms now?

But clearly developments in SYBO's favor.

[jonaz.dk]

Darkest Dungeon Documentary | Gameumentary

[jonaz.dk]

Just discovered a free public domain site for high quality PBR textures. Substance Designer files and 3D scanned models.

Feel very welcome to support them! Really cool stuff!
https://cc0textures.com/categories

[jonaz.dk]

In a similar vein. The Smithsonian has med a large and growing collection of free to download 3D scans available to the public.

For game usage you would have to check up on the usage terms. And probably a lot of decimation or retopolgy as well for real-time usage.

https://3d.si.edu/explore