News

Oculus Rift release date

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.

Steam Workshop

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.

Unreal Engine 4 free for everyone

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.

Razer OSVR to have its debut this June

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.

Tips to publish a successful game

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.

Corona 2015

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.

Top game development platforms of 2014

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.

Axis Game Factory's AGFPRO v2

If you’re looking to expand your Unity experience or make something completely independent of that engine, you will want to take advantage of this limited promotion. AGFPRO v2 is not a very well known development tool, however it is very powerful and we’d like to introduce it to you.

Axis Game Factory’s AGFPRO v2 allows you to create enviroments for your Unity based games, with access to many more options that the base possibilities that the Unity engine brings. And some of the DLC available actually make it possible to make your own game out of AGFPRO without requiring too much experience on this sector.

Some of the DLCs that you can purchase to complete this big tool allow you to develop your own FPS Zombie games, Side-Scroller RPGs, and so on, with a very easy interface that anyone could use even without any programming experience.

You can find Axis Game Factory’s AGFPRO v2 on the Steam website, and also all the extras available.

Corona

Today we’re going to talk about a developing platform more deeply than what we’ve been doing so far. We’ve talked about Corona before, but do you actually know exactly why people may choose Corona over any other development tool? If you don’t, today you will understand this choice and perhaps make it your own as well.

One thing is for sure: Corona is growing everyday, getting more and more popular as more people develop games and apps on it. Corona is very simple to use, yet it has so many tools it makes it a very complete and complex platform to use, however everything is structured so that all the features aren’t too overwhelming like what happens with other platforms for new developers.

Another good thing about Corona is that it doesn’t matter if you’re alone developing apps or that you’re on a big team trying to make the most popular smartphone game ever, as we said things are done so the huge amount of options don’t make it a very tedious experience when we’re not really professionals.

A detail that also attracts many developers is the fact that with Corona you can count on a library full of APIs that allow developers to create any kind of apps, games, ebooks, etc. for all kinds of platforms. There’s also a big community support from both Corona developers and also community managers that tend to answer all kinds of doubts.

To end our article, we’ll talk about the different licenses available on Corona. There’s atleast 4 kinds of license, being Free, Basic, Pro and Enterprise. To sum them up really quickly:

– Free: Allows you to freely develop stuff but you won’t be able to publish your projects (see it like a demo or trial version).

– Basic ($16 per month): Same features as Free, but now you’re able to publish your projects on Android, iOS and several others.

– Pro ($49 per month): Offer a huge number of new features and also allows you to have the license on a second machine, so you can work on your projects on diferente devices.

– Enterprise ($199 per month): Same as Pro, but now with the possibility of working offline. Perfect for small and big companies (prices may change according to the size of the company).

If you want to learn more about Corona, you can read this article where an analysis about Corona goes more into detail.

Chromecast

Gaming with the Chromecast device was already possible but very limited. The list of available games is very small and there’s a good reason for it: developers require to develop different apps in diferente languages in order to make them work on Chromecast.

But this nightmare will end when Marmalade launches their extension for the Chromecast device. With it, developers will only require to develop one project on Marmalade to make it work. You can start preparing yourself already if you want to reach that slice of customers, or you can go to Yeeply and hire programmers to develop games on Marmalade.

Obviosly this is also good news for any gamer that uses the Chromecast device. Now they won’t be limited to apps, vídeos and music, they will also be able to play their favorite games through their TV.