League of Legends 2016 Season Update looks exciting

So I’ve been playing League of Legends for a while, watching the championships and its easy to say that I’m a little hooked. I must admit that I am not particularly great at the game, unlike my son who is quite kick ass, but I do have a couple of champions that I do like to play that I’m not too shabby with (Sona, Veigar, Ashe, Vel,koz, Ryze and a couple of others). Anyway, the point of this blog is that I am excited about the up coming 2016 release. What am I most excited about? Lets take a look, in order of excitement

  • Well its a league update, that’s always exciting
  • New champ select, hopefully no more arguing over mid and jungle etc.. and less players rage quitting or even worse purposely feeding because they didn’t get the position they wanted! You get to choose primary and secondary positions and you are guaranteed to get one of the positions. I can’t help feel however that if you pick the two most popular positions every time then you are going to be waiting longer to be matched up with other players
  • Dynamic groups, no more penalty and no longer limited to solo / duo que
  • Baron pit early game mob to encourage more than just the enemy jungler to visit top lane
  • Mastery system revamp
  • Trinket and sight stone upgrades
  • Clubs and Parties, pity about the 100 player limit for clubs, but you can be a member of multiple clubs.
  • Hextech crafting, get skins and champions for free

Marmalade 8 is out now – New Hub, Analytics, Android Native Debugging, Asset Store

You can download the Marmalade SDK for free from the Marmalade SDK website

Looks like Marmalade have been busy beavers working on their latest release of the Marmalade SDK. There are a lot of changes, but I’m just going to focus on the highlights:

New Marmalade Hub

The Marmalade Hub has had a complete revamp. Its got a new look and feel and now feels like a proper integrated Hub including features such as:

  • Open, create and build projects for all platforms. Creation of new projects also includes a very handy and easy to use integrations section ghat allows you to easily add integrations such as analytics, game services etc.. very easily and intuitively. The project templates are also very handy, especially for new developers.
  • Handy recent projects and examples lists
  • Multiple projects can now be opened simultaneously and access to home is always available without backing out of a project
  • Centralised and direct access to asset store, documentation, community answers, blog and tools (one of my favourite new additions)
  • Platform settings are now better categorised and more easily accessible
  • Project libraries list which shows a list of all libraries used by the project
  • Proper import of different deployment configurations
  • Update from MKB feature

All in all, the new Hub is a massive improvement.

Marmalade Analytics

Marmalade Analytics for C++ and Lua, is a great new addition for developers that really want to drill down into the behaviour of their game players to help increase user retention and hopefully increase monetisation. Marmalade Analytics is powered by industry leader GameAnalytics. Marmalade Analytics is incredibly easy to use out of the box as can be seen in this IwAnalytics example.

Android Native Debugging

I’ve been waiting for this feature for a bit, its been in beta for a while, but its now officially released. To debug an Android app in Visual Studio simply open it in the hub then click the “Open in IDE for debugging” button. Note that the first time you do this Visual Studio 2015 will prompt you to install Android support for C++, go ahead and install that (this may take a while so go for a coffee or take a nap :)).. Once your app has launched in visual studio click the green start triangle to start debugging.

Asset Store

Marmalade now have their very own asset store, which includes all kinds of assets from audio and bitmaps to extensions and full game engines. Submitting assets to the store is very simple, take a look here for details.