Many of us dream to develop our own game. We have a great idea, the necessary knowledge and know exactly how to start. However, depending on how ambitious is our project, we may need some funding, and the amount really depends of how much we want to invest.
To help you particularly in this part of any game project, we’ll show you many options on how to get the funds you need to fulfill your dream.
Every now and then we heard of new game genres showing up on the market and suddenly dozens and dozens of games show up following the trend, since that’s what people look for. But there is a genre that never gets old, and there’s always a market for: casino games.
Be it with real money or fictitious coins, casino games very popular, doesn’t matter which platform we’re talking about, there is always people looking for them. Inside this games category we can find card games like Poker or Blackjack, roulettes, slot machines, etc.
Nowadays we don’t need to go to a casino in order to play such games, even if you want to bet real money. There are several websites that offer such games, or even through your Android or Apple device you can find on their respective stores so many casino games, which really shows how popular these games really are.
For example, on StarGames you can find several casino games, being one of them their famous slots game, Book of Ra. Playing these slots games on the internet is no different as playing video slots on any casino. And just like this game, you can find so many more games that try to take a slice of the casino games market.
As it’s not always possible for everyone to go to a casino, playing casino games through your computer, tablet or phone is a great way to have fun and actually have a chance to make some real money while at home, work or anywhere else really. Even the ones that simply use fake money are very popular since while you don’t win or lose real money, you can still have fun while playing them. The big amount of variety of casino games makes it easy to reach almost any kind of player of any age.
Being a developer, a gamer or just a casual user that wants to access the Internet, sometimes we have the necessity to connect to a non-private Wi-Fi connection. Everyone has already heard about the dangers of surfing on public Wi-Fi networks, but sometimes it’s just impossible to avoid it.
To help you increasing your odds of being safe while using such networks, we’re going to show you some quick tips that will surely help you and might just save your life.
If you really need to use personal / sensitive credentials, you should look forward to only connect to websites that are HTTPS encrypted. They can be identified by having this prefix on the URL bar. These sites usually do a great job protecting your from any hackers that could be connected to the same network.
Our phones, tablets and PCs have this nifty option to automatically connect to certain networks when they are available. If you’re not currently using a public Wi-Fi, you shouldn’t allow your device to automatically connect to it.
You have several security tools that protect your against hackers even when you are connected on a public network. Another related suggestion is to use a VPN network, especially if you really need to connect frequently, as some of these can almost 100% protect you from any kind of attacks.
A open Wi-Fi network can be accessed by anyone in the area, which increases the chance of having bad intentioned people connecting to such network as well. If you connect to a password protected Wi-Fi, that means not everyone will have the credentials to connect, lowering the chances of being hacked.
If the public Wi-Fi owner also changes the password regularly, that makes this network even safer. Remember that if people know how to hack wifi, they will still be able to use that network anyway.
The two-steps login is basically a very safe mechanism to protect your accounts. Everyday more and more services include such security measures (such as Facebook and Google, for example). When you put your credentials (first step), the second step is that if the app / site you’re not using the same site / app / IP as usual, it will send you a code to your phone. This makes it so even if someone knows your password, they need to have physical access to your phone in order to use your accounts.
Oculus Rift was already available to the public as a developers kit, however there’s finally a release date for the official product. It will be launched finally on the first trimester of 2016, a little less than a year from now. An official release is different than the development kit in many ways, as the design of the product and its specifications may change accordingly.
Rumors also say that there’s a possibility that the Oculus Rift may also be compatible with Playstation 4 and Xbox One, however it seems unlikely that it happens, with Sony’s Project Morpheus and Microsoft’s HoloLens, it doesn’t make sense that neither company support a direct competition product on their own consoles when both are also developing VR products.
There will be more news about the Oculus Rift on the following weeks and we’re hoping to see the official specifications very soon.
Last week on Steam the whole community got shocked because of Steam’s decision of allowing modders to sell their mods for Bethesda’s Skyrim, a game still with its huge legion of players trying to find every single secret. The only problem is that neither modders and players saw this decision with good eyes and immediately showed their disapproval towards Steam.
Players started to make fake mods in order to protest against this new business model, and there’s already a petition online to remove all paid content from Steam Workshop, a petition that already has more than 120.000 supporters at the time of this article.
While selling mods could be a great way for modders to be rewarded for their hard work (since some mods take several months to finish), the lack of moderation on the content uploaded and the huge tax that Steam applies (the modder only sees 25% of all sales) is more than enough reason for everyone to be this angry.
The biggest example of this failing service is that one of the first paid ones was removed from the Workshop because the “owner” was selling within his mod, files from another mod without the other owner’s consent. You can visit the Steam Workshop and see for yourself.
Today we’re starting the week with some big news. Do you know what Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Devil may Cry, Bioshock and Fable have in common? They share the same base engine: Unreal Engine, developed by Epic Games.
Until yesterday to be able to develop in the Unreal Engine you had to pay a monthly subscription of about 20 euros more or less, but that’s over. According to their blog and website, Unreal Engine 4 is completely free for everyone!
Is there any tricks? No, you really don’t pay anything to work on the engine, however there’s someone you have to know. If your game gets popular, you have to pay 5% of the revenues when you manage to reach a 3000 euros profit. After that, each quarter of the year you have to pay the 5% revenues.
If you make a big AAA game, 5% of millions of euros may be a little expensive, but if you don’t manage to hit it big, you don’t have to worry about subscriptions, neither you have to worry about future updates since everything is free.
At this moment there are already quite some VR goggles announced, some already available and some others still in development. However not everyone has the possibility to buy them, since the best ones are usually expensive.
However Razer is launching their own pair of VR goggles, and they couldn’t be cheaper for what they offer. A $200 Razer OSVR (which stands for Open Source Virtual Reality) has some nice especifications, such as a 1920×1080 FullHD display and runs up to 60fps. Accelerometer, gyroscope and many other extras are included for full experience.
This headset is being released in June and it should support Unreal Engline and Unity 3D right from the launch. Another nice feature is the possibility to change parts, with all the advantages that can offer.
As more games and more headsets are released to the public, the less reasons we have to have a pair of VR goggles at home. Its very early to tell, but VR should be the new standard way of playing videogames in a few years from now.
Today we’ll talk about an issue very important for developers and companies: how to correctly publish your games. Its quite obvious which games are most successful. They have good names, a great description, some very teasing images and vídeos… and many developers forget these kind of details that may cost months of work if they simply publish their game without caring about their game page.
First, the name must be very good, and when we say “very good”, we mean short but that describes perfectly the game. A game called “The Adventure of the Knights of the Round Table” is much less appealing as “Knights Adventure”, for example.
The description is equally important, but you need to have one thing in mind: not many people read it, they tend to focus on the images instead. And even who do read, they just read the first 2 or 3 lines, so this should be the main focus. Describe the game, write something that can convince people to download your game.
The icon is one of the most important details when releasing your game. Anywhere on Google Play and App Store, the cover of your game is its name and icon. A great looking icon is appealing enough for people to open your game page.
Screenshots should be also one of the details you should focus the most. Show ingame footage, but don’t forget to add some text to your screenshots. Use it like you’d like to use the description section, however don’t add too much text or the same happens: people won’t read.
Your game’s score and ratings are also very important, especially in the beginning. It’s the first opinions that catapult the game either up or down. See it this way, if a new game is launched and has a few 5/5 reviews, it will most likely attract many more downloads than a game with 3/5 or even 2/5 reviews.
After launching the game, doing some updates is also important for several reasons: it makes people play your game for longer, makes the game more visible for newcomers and also allows you to get fame as a company / developer that supports his games even after launch. Fans will follow you and your next game will already have more reviews than the last one.
These are some tips you really should consider when launching your game. We also want to share with you a very detailed article about strategies to follow to release apps that is very worth checking out and goes more detailed on some of the points we mentioned.
About 2 months ago Corona joined Fuse Powered, and one of the concerns that most of the developers that use the Corona platform was the new direction that the brand would walk. Corona is mostly known for it’s easy learning curve and the biggest fear was that new changes could somehow ruin that concept.
Thankfully the Corona team posted an article on their blog about future updates and we couldn’t be happier about it. If all goes as expected, Corona should continue to be a great platform for both novices and experts.
So we’re already in 2015, but 2014 brought to us many great games. And behind these games there were game engines, development tools. And everyone face the same doubts when starting to develop a game project, doesn’t matter if its a mobile runner or a console AAA: “what game engine should I choose”.
Well, that pretty much depends on your knowledge level, skill and ambitions with that particular game. You can find many articles on our website talking about the most trending game development platforms, but today we’ll bring you a top 5 list of the best engines of 2014.
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