Village Gamer

Congratulations to the team at Relic Entertainment for cracking the Top Ten of 2010 sales list on Steam with almost $11 million dollars US with Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising, published by THQ, who yesterday announced that they have put the brakes on releasing Company of Heroes Online, citing a “reevaluation of its strategy of adapting certain Western content for free-to-play online games in Asian markets.”

There’s a new installment of the Dr. Mike tutorial video series about dealing with Swarmites. Watch closely and listen carefully as Dr. Mike teaches you how to score with a Swarmite in this upcoming action platformer from Hothead Games.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y33cr0Mw94]

For those unfamiliar with the game’s premise, you will take control of 50 utterly fearless Swarmites and drive them through an intense, entertaining and often suicidal battle of survival. Run, bash, huddle, boost, stack, jump, push and throw your way through gauntlets of death and destruction in an attempt to collect valuable DNA and ensure that at least one Swarmite survives.

Transgaming Studios has announced that the first update to the recently launched Garage Inc. is now live on the iPhone app store. This update includes Game Centre integration, Achievements and the ability to replay any completed day via a handy calendar. A second update is already in progress, which will include an Endless Day mode, which has been the most requested feature by both the press and gamers. The planned timeframe for the release of the second update is within the next 30 days.

Psychic Parrot Games has released a new title on Kongregate. Built with Unity, MudFire is a 4×4 racing game that you can control with either your keyboard or USB Xbox gamepad. The game features options for setting the graphics and audio to your liking (or your computer’s specs) and starts you off in the 4×4 Wander vehicle. Once you get into the winner’s circle, you can unlock the 4×4 Wander Paws, 4×4 Fire, the green Team Parrot 4×4, the Pink 4×4, Red Leader 4×4 and the Super Pickup 4×4. Recent improvements to MudFire include better in-vehicle cams and better vehicle handling.

Speaking of Unity, the Unity team has announced the continued expansion of its Asset Store. Announced at Unite 2010, the Unity Asset Store is a digital marketplace where developers can share and sell assets to each other to accelerate their workflows. It’s immediately accessible in the Unity editor under the Window > Asset Store menu so assets are at developers’ fingertips when they most need them.

Over the last two months, the Unity Asset Store catalogue has grown to more than 200 new items including a variety of assets such as free tutorials, open-source libraries, art packs and advanced script libraries. The majority of these assets have been produced by the Unity development community – who individually are bringing in revenues of thousands of dollars each month monetizing their assets. January’s top seller brought in more than $4,000. Top selling assets include:

· Unisky by Six Times Nothing
· GUIKit001 by Blackish
· EZ GUI by AB Software
· Sprite Manager by AB Software
· Shader Fusion by Kurt Loeffler

The Unity Asset Store features free assets that range from sophisticated terrain road and river tools to complete packages with learning materials. A popular release, C# Game Examples by Mark Hergaarden, includes five simple, but essential game examples to learn from and modify. Developers can spend hours programming obstacles to animate, swing, thump, follow paths and generally move around or accomplish the same thing in a matter of minutes with one of the top-downloaded free items, iTween, which brings intuitive and easy-to-use tweening animation to Unity.

“We’re getting great feedback from developers and it’s exciting to see content creators monetizing their assets and making thousands of dollars every month,” said Caitlyn Meeks, Asset Store Content Manager. “Our Asset Store user base has grown to more than 10,000 users in less than three months, and it’s quickly becoming the #1 marketplace of choice for Unity developers.”

Meeks continued, “An exciting growth area of the Asset Store can be found in the Editor Extensions category. The Unity editor is surprisingly extensible with editor classes so that the actual development environment itself can be customised to a degree that one would think only possible with source-level modification, including vehicle wizards, procedural sky systems, UI toolbars and added functionality to the workspace.”

Absolute® Software Corporation has launched a closed beta of Computrace® Mobile for the Android platform. This new solution will deliver asset administration, data protection and geolocation tracking for the popular Android line of devices, which generally includes tablets and smartphones.

Computrace Mobile for the Android platform will deliver:

* Reduced operational costs associated with managing mobile devices by leveraging the Computrace platform’s integrated Customer Center reporting for hardware, software and user information.
* An additional layer of data protection and increased compliance with government data breach laws through remote Data Delete capabilities.
* The ability to geolocate a device and display it on an internet map including current and historical locations (only performed with the prior consent of the device owner on corporate liable devices).

During the beta testing period, some of Absolute’s current commercial customers have privileged, pre-release access to Computrace Mobile for Android at no additional cost. Interested journalists and product reviewers may also request a demonstration of the solution prior to its general availability.

Computrace Mobile is supported on the following platforms: Windows Mobile® 5, 6, 6.1, 6.2, and 6.5 handheld devices; Symbian – S60 Third Edition and later releases; and BlackBerry® Mobile Versions 4.5 and later. Absolute Manage Mobile Device Management allows organizations to manage the Apple® iOS devices (iPad™, iPhone®, iPod touch®) in their deployment.