Game Development Winter Update

Sorry about the lack of news. I will be publishing separate updates for Unity, Unreal, and CryEngine, but there has been a lot of things that have come out this Winter that I’ve been remiss to post on.

Source 2 Announced

Valve announced at GDC 2015 that Source 2 would be “available for free to content developers”. The stipulation, apparently, will be that the game must be made available on Steam, but can also be made available in other markets. There is no current release date for Source 2.

Valve has just revealed Source 2, a next-gen game engine. And it's free for developers: http://t.co/mZALp5DEhu pic.twitter.com/YGhDCqBGFB

— Polygon (@Polygon) March 4, 2015

GameMaker

Last fall, YoYo Games announced a partnership with Microsoft that will expand support for GameMaker: Studio to all Windows platforms, as well as the Xbox One. Xbox One support started near the end of the year, allowing licensed Microsoft Xbox developers with an Xbox One dev kit to use the GameMaker: Studio export for Xbox One. This follows on the heels of the Sony partnership with YoYo Games to create PlayStation content early last year.

YoYo Games has also officially opened its GameMaker Marketplace, when allows users to purchase assets like sprites, scripts and projects. GameMaker Studio: Professional developers can sell their assets through the store, although YoYo Games takes a cut of all sales, similar to the way the Unity Store works.

Sony LevelEditor

An announcement from Gamasutra announced a new “global” level editor, care of Sony:

Sony just released a standalone open source level editor http://t.co/9M4oMr5quO

— Game Developer (@gamedevdotcom) September 2, 2014

The Authoring Tools Framework (ATF) LevelEditor purports to be “a powerful tool for constructing and assembling game levels. It provides a WYSIWYG interface and allows you to place objects, edit properties, edit terrain, and build game levels.” It seems to have grown out of other studio’s custom ATF projects, such as Naughty Dog’s level editor for Last Of Us.

The LevelEditor, and the required Authoring Tools Framework, is available on GitHub.

RenderDoc

RenderDoc, the stand-alone graphics debugging tool, celebrated its first birthday last month, and celebrated by adding OpenGL support!

RenderDoc was released 1 year ago today! Let's celebrate with a new stable build, now including OpenGL support!https://t.co/M0cKNuSRL3

— RenderDoc (@RenderDoc) February 27, 2015

RenderDoc is available on GitHub.

Razer Chroma

A recent tweet from the computer accessory developer Razer showed off how easy it is for developers to take advantage of the Chroma lighting effects. Richard Garriott replied that Shroud of the Avatar was already taking advantage of this, apparently in addition to their support of the Alienware AlienFX lighting.

CEO @minliangtan shows you how easy it is to create advanced Razer Chroma lighting effects – http://t.co/bsidKt6sY0 pic.twitter.com/iouKLEMRuF

— R Λ Z Ξ R (@Razer) March 5, 2015

Developers interested in using the Razer Chroma SDK should check out the Razer Developer Portal.