ASMR LIGHTness - Light painting đź’ˇ
A great little puzzler to stimulate your mind. If you’re a fan of Hidden Object Games you may have come across this type of puzzle before as you try to untangle a series of nodes connected by stretchy bands with no crossovers allowed.
Gentle music and soothing lightning make for a nice peaceful game. I enjoyed solving a puzzle or three at the end of the day to unwind. You’re rated one to three stars on completion based on, finishing the puzzle, the fewest number of moves, and then on the smoothest execution/speed.
– Real player with 4.9 hrs in game
loved it nice to do when ya dont wanna really play anything to strenuous loved the music and sounds to it to :)
– Real player with 1.3 hrs in game
Sprite Lamp
Great program for creating depth maps, ao maps, etc. I am using this to develop a game with Unity. Very easy to integrate. The concept for creating the artwork takes a little while to get used to, But i find it only takes a little more time for me to make my game assets. My simple artwork looks very cool with dynamic light applied!
– Real player with 149.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Design & Illustration Animation & Modeling Games.
A neat program that generates normal maps (and other maps too) for 2d sprites from lighting maps. If you have a lot of time and patience this program can produce some incredible results. I would not recommend this software to those who are just beginners, but for users with some experience this program can be a game changer.
– Real player with 92.7 hrs in game
GameGuru
Gameguru is a rough-around-the edges, cheap, underpowered game engine. It is a spiritual successor to TGC’s previos successful endeavor: FPS Creator. FPS creator was a dream come true for wanna-be mappers and newbie game designers wanting to create their own simple little first person experiences. It worked well enough for what it was, had a super active community, and lots of mods, an easy-to-learn custom scripting language, and many successful games were made with it.
FPS Creator reloaded promised to be the upgrade everyone wanted from FPS Creator. It was gonna feature all next gen graphical features, a bigger map editor, and in general more freedom and ability. This was proposed on kickstarter where it didn’t meet it’s exorbitant asking donation, so it later was rebranded and came out as GameGuru.
– Real player with 650.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Design & Illustration Utilities Games.
Yeah, okay, GameGuru doesn’t have the best graphics around, but they have a specific look to it, so there’s that. Making the graphics look as good as UE4 and Unity however, is practically impossible. But that’s not my point, my point is GameGuru’s graphics are good enough for making games for the hecc of it.
The engine is editable to certain extents, but not really enough for hardcore coders and developers. Again, this is an engine made more for the fun of it. Making some nice $$$ is possible, but not too easy.
– Real player with 387.7 hrs in game
Qubicle Voxel Editor
(disclaimer: i was a beta tester for the tool, but this does not change my views on the tool, simply justifies the hours logged)
Qubicle is without a doubt the most flexible and well equiped voxel editor available online. On steam i have around 200 hours (at the time of this review) but i’ve put in about 10k offline (been using the tool for 3 years now).
The best feature is being able to make multiple models in a single scene, or divide parts of a model to later animate in external tools like Blender or Maya. (this is a must for game developers such as myself)
– Real player with 18174.6 hrs in game
This review is based on the Basic Edition of Qubicle with the Mesh and Utility modules.
PROS
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A great set of drawing and matrix manipulation tools. I don’t believe it’s missing anything of importance.
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Supports the definition of pivot points on per-matrix basis, which is really helpful when exporting large scenes and tends to be missing from most similar software.
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Probably the most comprehensive export options on the market for both meshes and textures.
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As far as development software goes, it’s a relatively cheap one.
– Real player with 4178.9 hrs in game
Black Ink
TLDR; An exciting platform capable of producing HUGE resolution paintings with highly customizable brushes. I have never used a painting application and been inspired BY the painting application itself before Black Ink.
To get a good impression of this product and its developers visit the Black ink forum: http://forum.bleank.com/viewforum.php?f=3
The following is based on my personal experience and user feedback I’ve read in the discussion boards.
Be aware that this software is:
- In development. Updates roll out on a regular basis, and u2 (developer) is highly responsive to suggestions and issues. Some tools you might depend on may not be included in the current version. For example, at the time of writing this review there is no smudge tool but it is slated for inclusion.
– Real player with 1251.7 hrs in game
Great Computer Art Program
Black in is an abstract conceptual art program that uses certain brush settings inorder to convey concepts from the artist.
Preface
[olist]
- For those looking to get the most out of this program: I would recommend using a graphics tablet; as it helps simulate using traditional mediums such as drawing or painting. If you can draw fairly well without looking at your drawing hand, a cheap wacom or Huion tablet will do. If you’re having problems with hand-eye coordination, you could try for a higher end graphics tablet with a digital displey (such as the Wacom Cintiq 13HD), or practice a lot more with the current tablet you own; However, graphics tablets aren’t required to use Black Ink.
– Real player with 249.2 hrs in game
Home Design 3D
It is hard to not recommend this, due to the low price and therefore low expectations. However, there are issues with the program that make things difficult sometimes and can even delete hours of work. The snap function for walls and items can be turned off, but does not seem to really turn off. Even if it is off, walls will want to snap to some nearby wall and you have play a game with creating walls in certain orders to make it work. There is also an issue where a wall, or other item seems to be associated with another item and when you delete one, the other is also deleted. This becomes a much larger issue if a wall is associated with the entire floor to the level you are on. Move a wall to see what a space looks like in a given area, but don’t like it and delete it…..and your entire first floor loses it’s floor. I have not been able to find a trick around this and it forces you to redo the entire floor plan, which it took several hours to get right. The program is fairly easy to learn and has a fair selection of items (though it has a heavy Asian influence for some reason). For the price I would normally recommend this, but given the bug that undoes hours of work I cannot.
– Real player with 181.9 hrs in game
TL;DR 5/10 a useful conceptualization “game.” Not a real design tool.
As others have mentioned, the very basics of home design are missing from this “game.” Roofing is absent as well as any multi-story possibility 2nd floor? NO! OK, HD3D gives only 1 floor 2D layouts–with a 3D visualizer for ideas. Well, look at the screenshots–there is some value to what the dev has given.
The MOST EGREGIOUS FLAW of this “game” is its most critical job–the ruler. The devs had no idea how to create a ruler. I know 6th grade programmers who would handle this basic job better. The dev just lets you draw a line of any length, then falsely labels it with a measurement rounded to the nearest inch, and pretends that it is good enough. So, with rounding error, you can fit 3+4+6 inches into a foot, because the dev is just playing around too. DEV Hint: create a line-length snap to nearest measurement selection. Nearest Inch. Nearest 1/8 inch. Oh, right. Your menus are tablet garbage. There are no real options anywhere.
– Real player with 67.8 hrs in game
Gestaltor
How do I end my subscription? Please end my subscription
– Real player with 4.4 hrs in game
Fuse
NOTE: This is a review for version 1.0 of FUSE (though I’ve been toying with it since its initial release)
TO POTENTIAL BUYERS:
In truth this product is a mixed bag of nuts. Mixamo is trying to do something truly great here and if they adjust their approach to customer management and marketing with this product they just might build a very powerful indie-focussed tool to quickly build out a cast of characters on a fairly reasonable budget. There is certainly a market for this, and with enough customer buy-in they could become an industry staple in this regard. With that said, the tool isn’t there just yet.
– Real player with 248.2 hrs in game
First of all - almost all the negative reviews I see here are wildly misinformed! You should know what you’re getting with this software (unlimited free character models with textures - and 2 free rigs a week) - and it is an ENORMOUS time and money saver for those who need custom character models on a budget.
Let me clear a couple things up:
1. You can ABSOLUTELY export your characters as OBJ files and load them in anywhere
2. If you want to rig/skin your characters for animation you upload them to Mixamo - and get 2 free per week.
– Real player with 236.8 hrs in game
PixelOver
This is a tool for pixel art that I wasn’t expecting I’d get in love with so much! ^^
Even in early access, PixelOver is a pretty solid and unique software. Also, it’s constantly & actively improved by the developer (and it kinda amazes me how fast he’s working with this project).
Here’s a (non exahustive) list of features from PixelOver that I like a lot :)
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It converts normal 2D art to pixel art (you can use bitmap files and vector files!)
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Customizable palettes, shaders and dithering for pixel art conversions
– Real player with 39.2 hrs in game
it’s Early Access, but it gives you enough tools for it to be worth a buy! Quick and easy bone animation, but it’s not just that, you have other options, like transform, deform and skew! A warp transform tool would be so amazing if added!
You can manipulate these tools on every individual frame on your animation if you want!
PixelOver is pretty useful! I love it!
– Real player with 33.4 hrs in game
FlowScape
My favorite purchase all year.
If you’re wondering what I’ve been able to do with FlowScape that led to my review, you can take a look at all of my projects here .
I knew the moment I laid eyes on this, I would most likely love it. It exceeded my expectations as a casual design & illustration tool that just about anyone can use. I have spent many hours putting together village & macro background scenes. The Sculpting tool allow you to create mountains, hills, lakes, rivers, as I see fit. The Painting tool allows you to create walkways. I can construct anything from realistic waterfalls to lost ruins with the Transformation tool to manipulate just about any object.
– Real player with 2803.3 hrs in game
Wow, it’s difficult to say in words how impressive and relatively deep this instant gratification “game” is! Marketed as a game, but used by many as a 3D design tool. Oh, it’s not Maya, or Lightwave, or even Bryce or Blender, which is cool because we already have those. This is something different, and special, and FAST, and easy! And for all its limitations, what IS here is a lot deeper and impressive than you might imagine!
I’ve made a nice living from building scenes in 3D software for many decades, and I’ve spent countless hours working with wire-frames and pallets of textures and bump maps and lighting devices, and scratching my head over each new entries' exploration into the 3D modeling' procedures. It doesn’t replace those high-end spreads for many projects, but this WILL be replacing the high-rollers on a few projects and making my life so much easier!
– Real player with 2204.8 hrs in game