Hello everyone,
After a relatively long period of silence, we come with great news! In this announcement, we will talk about the public trial testing date, what to expect in it, some new features and our plans for the next few days.
What to Expect In the Trial TestingThe trial will have most of the features active, however they are still considered to be in the testing stage. This is quite important because although EGM will be released publicly, it won’t be version 1.0.0, but instead version 0.9.0. This means it is likely that you will encounter bugs and missing features which you should report as soon as you find, but bear in mind the primary testing will be done beforehand so we hope the problems will be minimal! We will do our best to fix and update EGM as fast as possible.
Xbox and Silverlight are also not 100% completed. For instance, saving does not yet work for the Xbox. Silverlight, although tested, won’t be in the trial and will have its own specific testing period sometime later.
We also did not have enough time to write enough tutorials. We’ve written tutorials covering the basics of EGM as well as videos but not much covering advanced features or specific guides. Once bug fixing slows down, we plan to write and record many more detailed tutorials. If you get stuck or can’t figure out how to do something just post in the forums so we and the community can help you. It will also help us see what tutorials may be necessary in the future.
We will talk more in future announcements about what you can do to have a great experience using EGM and what you can do to help us make it the best.
New FeaturesWe won’t lie; EGM has been delayed further than we anticipated. The delay was the result of all the new features we added and changes we made. The older testers can attest to how much EGM changed since it started private testing.
The latest feature we’ve added is a completely recreated particles system, which utilizes both the CPU and GPU for calculations. On our development PC, with low specs and no dedicated graphics card, we were able to create amazing effects within minutes. We have also stress tested the system and it is able to handle at least 10,000 particles at a time with no issues on this low specification development computer.
Another feature we added is to be able to manage your Xbox game/source code from within EGM. Originally, you needed to open Visual Studio and update your project manually with changes to the main EGM project. But now, you will only need to open up Visual Studio just to test your game on your Xbox*.
Recently, we have got EGM games to function with Silverlight, but this is not yet a fully implemented feature and so it will be a few more weeks until it is ready for public release.
Our PlansWe will begin uploading tutorial videos soon so you can get familiar with some features right away. We will also start tweeting regularly to keep you guys up to date with development progress and updates. So if you haven’t already followed our twitter account,
do it now.
We are also planning contests and ways to get discounts during the trial period, more info on those soon.
Trial DateAnd the moment you’ve been waiting for! We want to release a public version of EGM on October 1st, 2010. From then on, we will continually fix and update EGM.
Make sure to check our youtube page regularly (
subscribe!). We will be uploading new videos shortly and all this week.
Don’t forget to tell others about us,
Express Game Maker Team
* You will need an XNA Creators Club subscription which you can buy via Xbox Live.