Industry Software development Headquarters Macclesfield Type of business Private | Website TheGameCreators.com Founded 1999 | |
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Founder Lee Bamber, Richard Vanner Key people Lee Bamber (Managing Director)
Richard Vanner (Financial Director) Products Video game development software, modelling software Profiles | ||
The Game Creators, Ltd. (often stylised "tgc") is a British game development software company formed through a partnership between programmer Lee Bamber and Rick Vanner in 1999, located in Macclesfield, Cheshire, United Kingdom. The company was formerly known as Dark Basic Software Limited. The company primarily develops and markets game development tools for Windows. Among others, it has developed DarkBASIC Professional, its predecessor DarkBASIC, App Game Kit, FPS Creator (and its successors FPS Creator X10 and GameGuru) and The 3D Gamemaker.
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The company also electronically publishes a number of other game development tools and utilities made by other parties, such as 3d modeling tools and media. In the past, they published a small number of computer games.
Game Guru
In November 2012, the company launched a campaign aiming to raise funds for the development of a new version of FPS Creator called "Reloaded", using crowd funding site Kickstarter. Despite the eventual failure to secure funding, a private investor agreed to fund development and The Game Creators began to accept funding using an internal system. As of October 2013, a beta version was in development with a limited release scheduled for 31 October 2013. It was later renamed Game Guru and widened its focus beyond the first-person shooter genre. Since 27 February 2015 it is available as a Steam early access title. The company hopes the engine can make game creation more accessible.
The 3D Gamemaker
The 3D Gamemaker is a computer application developed by The Game Creators, that allows users to make various genres of 3D games for Microsoft Windows. The tool is marketed as allowing users to create 3D games without programming and art skills. Games developed with 3D Gamemaker require at least 400 MHz Pentium processor, 64 MB of RAM and DirectX 7.0b to run. Alongside the full boxed release, The 3D Gamemaker was also released in a Lite edition, with less categories of assets available and a reduced feature set.
The software has a simple point-and-click interface which guides the user through the process of creating the game. The user chooses a scene from one of several different genres ("shooter", "horror", "war", "space", "driving", "jungle", "cartoon", or "silly"), and then chooses different characters, weapons, items, enemies and so on. The software includes hundreds of pre-made scenes and 3D objects. The software can also automatically generate a game by choosing random elements. The resulting game can be exported as a standalone Windows executable. The 3D Gamemaker has a built in placement editor that allows the user to indicate where enemies, items, and obstacles go. This is not available in beginner mode or the lite edition. There is also, amongst other things, a simple level creator. It also includes the ability to import your own media.
Reviewing The 3D Gamemaker for GameSpy, Tricia Harris praised the software's ease-of-use, but criticised the animation and "placement editor" systems.
App Game Kit
App Game Kit offers a high level programming language called AGK BASIC, which aims to be easy for beginners to learn. In July 2016, AppGameKit Education Pack was released. App Game Kit was featured in Develop-Online's top 16 game engines of 2014.
FPS Creator Classic
In February 2016 The Game Creators decided to release "FPS Creator" as "FPS Creator Classic" source available (no defined license) with many model packs on github.com.