Hi Everyone,
The first day back from my Christmas brain reboot and found a link to this thread in my inbox (now down to 8 emails - yay). Alas, I had to spend a good while reading through it, and as a veteran of the early forum days, it looked like this one got pretty toastie! I have missed the 'end of year address' opportunity for 2019, but I have made a note to do something along these lines in December 2020 as a sort of recap of what we are planning to do in 2020.
To answer the original proposal, there are no plans to recreate GameGuru in either Unity or Unreal. We have explored this option a few times over the years, but for various reasons, we always gravitated back to creating, maintaining and ultimately owning our own tech IP. It may not be the best decision given the amazing choice we now have at our disposal, but I dare say it relates to the old-school mentality of creating stuff from 'pretty much' scratch just to see how it works. I do think some kind of 'easy to use' add-on for Unity and Unreal are cool ideas, and no doubt you will have a massive audience to sell to, but speaking personally, I have a few more things I would like to try with GameGuru before throwing in the 'make your own game engine' towel forever.
The spin-off conversations were too many to track for me to make any reasonable contribution to, but most lines of inquiry seemed to be tied up nicely, and ultimately came back to the simple truth that GameGuru is a rather slow plodding thing and you either like it or don't like it, and either through morbid fascination or a belief in the idea, most of you are not ready to leave just yet and want to see what poor old Lee can pull out of his hat to keep the good ship GameGuru sailing in a sea now populated with game making mega-tankers and billion-dollar yachts. Our oddly-shaped craft might be an underpowered, leaky, creeky, understaffed, overworked, aging Man-of-war, but it nonetheless bobs about above the waves and has succeeded in doing so while much grander, well-funded frigates crashed, burned and sank in the two decades TGC has operated. We must be doing 'some' things right!
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the posts from Wizard Of ID were well-intentioned attempts to calm the waters without revealing information provided to him under NDA, had the opposite effect of creating more questions and concerns over the future of GameGuru, and resurrecting our annual tradition of asking the question 'is GameGuru to be abandoned'. Hopefully, this question is summarily answered from my above comments, and I hope to pre-empt further speculation with a separate forum post in January once I have a draft approved by my management team to make sure we keep my ramble as unambiguous as possible. In respect to the reference to an educational product, this is a project TGC has been in partnership with for over ten years and started its life as an early version of FPS Creator modded to run a very basic VR headset (naturally with the guns and violence removed). Just as AGK development benefits our No.1 Driving Test app (and vice versa), any product which demands development to the GameGuru engine benefits GameGuru, creating a win-win which generates more revenue for the continued development of the tech, which traditionally comes to you as free GG updates. Long may it continue! You will not have to wait much longer for the 'grand reveal' which I suspect will replace any residual speculation with a fresh new slew of comments, criticisms, concerns and a general cacophony of confusion which I will be happy to answer as needed.
It's a pity this message comes to you as the terminator to such a turbulent thread, but we must use the soapboxes as given to us, and in a way, it's fitting that my post attempts to provide specifics within the restrictions currently placed on me, while at the same time offering some encouragement and hope for the year ahead.
PC SPECS: Windows 10 64-bit, Intel Core i7-8700K, NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1080 GPU, 16GB SYSTEM RAM