SyntaxBomb - Indie Coders

Hi the reason for the late update is that Paul Johnston has moved on from TGC. 
It has been assured that AppGameKit is not going anywhere soon. 

My "We're all doomed!" alarm bells are ringing 

TheGameCreators are terrible communicators and adopt silence over letting the community know what's happening. Weeks and weeks of minimal news and then a quick hammer blow that Paul (the main developer) has left and a political "restructuring" sentence as to why even more delays are to be expected.

If AGK is gonna be just bug fixes and API updates once, twice a year then just say that and actually keep to that promise. It's not like AGK is suddenly going to stop working on Windows, Mac and Linux although iOS and Android are different as those are always shifting shite around.

I wonder if they'll start dropping support for platforms in the future as 5 OS's to contend with is not easy task. 

Wasn't he around when the original Dark Basic came out? or was that entirely Bamber and Paul came in for dbPro? Anways, sad to see him leave I guess, I hope TGC survives.

Now all we got to do is get Paul and Mark to join up and creating the next landmark in game engines.

This is bad news for AGK. Paul said he wanted to end of life classic in January as it was difficult to compile the updates for all of the platforms so I wonder if this had any bearing on his decision to leave.

I also had the feeling that he wasn't that keen on going back to working on AGK after spending several months working on GGM. I found the last 3 updates were quite buggy so there were definitely issues with the quality and testing of the updates.

TGC say they are 100% committed to Appgamekit but they pump virtually all of their resource in to gameguru, and only release small buggy updates to Appgamekit 3 or 4 times a year and there is no roadmap that we know of, GitHub is largely ignored as well by TGC. I hope things improve as it's not looking that great at the moment

Does anyone know where Paul has gone to?

..not good, thats for sure..

I personally think its the way it is unfortunatly, there's only really us relics that still enjoy old-skool tippy typy development, and for bread and butterer developers, tools like GameGuru and more powerful ones like Unity are the go-to ones.

I'll be honest, I've never tried GameGuru, but, on Steam, bare bones... £15... I imagine a price like that, 3D artists will be all over it like cheese on a pizza, using it commercially to showcasing their models in an interactive way... Blitz3D used to be used for that purpose too.

All in all, coding, we are all but relics, and the path the human race is on, even pointy clicky tools will have their day, AI will probably take over, and basically, it'll be making games for us, exactly how we want a game... Because it is now being heavily researched in pretty much every aspect of in terms of what makes a game, someone somewhere will just take this research and knit it all together, and voila:-

CreateMMORPG()

^Remember back in the day we used to jest about that, I think the time is coming up it will be a reality, or damn close!

Dabz

Aoz Studio have spent the last 3 or 4 developing a new basic language based on Amps Pro and are charging quite a lot for it (subscription model) so they must think there is still a market for a basic language.

Appgamekit isn't really pushed anymore by TGC and they are constantly offering it at a reduced price, they don't appear to have any passion for Appgamekit and don't actively engage with the community (this is what I miss the most). There's no excitement about new features or new versions.

It's still a great language though and one of the most enjoyable I have used.