Community update (July)

Here's a quick run down of what's been happening at Pixeland ($5 patrons get a special rank!) recently.

Game assets

Work on all assets has been postponed in favor of getting Asset Forge ready for release. There are plenty of packs and updates planned and work on those shall resume once the first version of Asset Forge is out.

Resources

The following resources have been shared by the community members in the past month and may be useful to other game developers;

Bengsfort shared his excellent Unity project .gitignore. If you're using Git to access your Unity projects you'll want this to save upload/download time and bandwidth every time you save or get your project.

Bananaprotocol shared a link to a tool he uses, gitignore.io, which is a tool for creating .gitignore files based on systems, IDE, or language.

Admin and Pixeland San Diego founder Extrokold shared a link to Startup School, a 10 week massively open online course (MOOC) for helping new startups.

Community projects

Haddicus has released his project, Zombie Retro D as an early alpha on GameJolt. In this game you defend a building from a zombie invasion by switching between and controlling tenants. Zombie Retro D has lively pixel art and matching retro music. 

Fred has released his mobile friendly puzzle platformer "Super Jumpy Ball" to the Windows store making it available on Windows 10 and Windows phones in addition to the already supported Android platform.

he has also released early images and concept information for a new 2D Tower Zombie Defense (MP4 video) game.

Bengsfort has produced a prototype utilizing Unity's 3D touch mechanic where screen pressure is used as a game input. In his example the goal is to get a player alien sprite to a goal using 3D touch as thrust input.

And now for the big one:

Asset Forge

A lot of work has gone into Asset Forge over the past four months (the first tweet about Asset Forge was March 4th) with a lot coming together in the past month.

There is only one known bug preventing Asset Forge from being complete with beta testing ongoing. At this point the focus is on ensuring all the features in Asset Forge work as expected with any additional functionality being planned for future releases.

The base blocks available in the Standard version are complete with additional blocks for the Deluxe version being planned and designed.

In a happy bit of news for Linux users Asset Forge will release for Linux on launch as well as the already planned platforms of Windows and Mac OS, making the tool accessible on all three major operating systems from day one.

Discord admin Matt and Patreon supporter Any Key have been beta testing Asset Forge to help check stability and features as well as provide input on ease of use and future expansions. This testing is resulted in fixing some bugs before they get released into the wild as well as models of odd vehicle hybrids, a windmill or two, and some derelict housing as well as a variety of other houses. Any Key's (5 year old) son got in on the fun building houses, castles and aircraft with questionable aerodynamics while showing that will a little guidance a child could pick up Asset Forge and have fun just making things. 

Pixeland founder, Asset Forge developer, and Asset Jesus Kenney has produced a number of models showing the use of basic and deluxe blocks as well as an impressive 3D model of an old mine building in his hometown using only the basic blocks available in Asset Forge.

The current status of Asset Forge can be viewed on Trello with frequent updates on Discord.

As a reminder all patrons at the Megabyte ($5) or higher level have access to an exclusive #supporters channel on Discord, so if you qualify be sure to check that out!

(This community update has been written by Any Key)