This year marks an important milestone for SoftWeir and the 001 Game Creator community: 10 years on Steam!
To celebrate the occasion, we’re kicking off one of our biggest sales of the year while also taking a look at how far 001 Game Creator has come, and where we’re headed next.
Open Dev Kit continues to evolve at an incredible pace, with support for iOS, macOS, Linux, HTML5, DirectX 12, Vulkan, Metal, raytracing, and many other major features currently in active development. Read on for a preview of what’s coming next.
10 Years on Steam!
When 001 Game Creator first arrived on Steam, our goal was to make game development more accessible. We wanted to provide creators with powerful tools that could be used by beginners taking their first steps into game development, while still remaining flexible enough for experienced developers building ambitious projects.
Over the past decade, that vision has grown beyond anything we could have imagined.
Since launching on Steam, 001 Game Creator has been used by hundreds of thousands of creators, educators, students, and hobbyists around the world. Collectively, our software has reached well over a million users throughout its history, with members of the community spanning at least 149 countries. From school classrooms and STEM programs to independent studios and solo developers, we’ve been continually inspired by the creativity, passion, and innovation of the people who use our tools.
The last ten years have been filled with tremendous growth. We expanded the engine through countless updates, introduced major new systems and capabilities, released numerous DLC kits and educational resources, partnered with organizations and educational institutions, participated in Humble Bundle campaigns that helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for charitable causes, and continued investing heavily in documentation, tutorials, and learning materials to help creators succeed.
Steam has played a major role in that journey. Through discussions, reviews, suggestions, bug reports, screenshots, and community feedback, Steam users have helped shape the direction of 001 Game Creator year after year. Many of the features available today exist because of ideas, requests, and feedback provided directly by members of our community.
The Future: Open Dev Kit
While 001 Game Creator continues to receive updates and support, Open Dev Kit represents the next major evolution of our development tools and is advancing rapidly.
One of the biggest upcoming milestones is dramatically expanded platform support. Alongside Windows, Open Dev Kit is currently being prepared for deployment to iOS, macOS, Linux, and HTML5, allowing developers to target significantly more devices from a single project.
At the same time, we’re modernizing the rendering engine with DirectX 12, Vulkan, and Metal renderers, multi-threaded rendering, raytracing, volumetric fog and clouds, reflections, custom shaders, and many additional rendering improvements currently under development.
Visual capabilities are continuing to expand as well. Current work includes raytracing support, volumetric fog and cloud systems, reflections, lens flares, and a growing collection of post-processing and cinematic effects including gamma controls, saturation adjustments, vignette effects, film grain, and other color grading and lens stylization features. Together, these systems will provide developers with significantly greater control over atmosphere, presentation, and visual fidelity.
For world-building workflows, we’re developing multi-texture tile blending systems to create smoother environmental transitions, along with a dynamic animated water level tool that will make it easier to create lakes, rivers, flooding systems, and other large-scale environmental effects.
We’re also expanding gameplay systems and engine functionality. Work is progressing on A* pathfinding support for actors, allowing them to intelligently navigate environments, follow other objects, or move toward destinations while avoiding obstacles. New Character and Vehicle Controller systems are also in development to simplify the creation of both character-driven and vehicle-based gameplay experiences.
For developers looking to push visual customization even further, custom user shader support is also being added, providing direct control over rendering behavior and opening the door for a wide variety of advanced graphical effects and rendering techniques.
Finally, audio systems are receiving attention as well, with speaker objects currently in development to provide additional control and flexibility when designing immersive soundscapes within projects.
As always, these features are works in progress and may continue evolving as development progresses. We’ll be sharing additional previews, screenshots, and demonstrations as they become available.
Thank you for supporting the continued development of Open Dev Kit. Your support helps make ambitious engine improvements like these possible, and we’re excited to share more in the weeks ahead.
Steam Summer Sale!
As a thank-you to the community for ten incredible years on Steam, we’re celebrating with this summer sale. Until July 23rd, you can get the main 001 Game Creator engine for 75% off, plus all DLCs also discounted by 20%. It’s the perfect chance to jump in if you’re new, or to expand your toolkit with a DLC or two if you’ve been creating with 001 for years.
https://001gamecreator.com/product/001-game-creator/
To everyone who has supported us over the years, whether through purchasing our software, providing feedback, reporting bugs, creating tutorials, sharing projects, or simply following our journey… thank you! The past ten years have been an incredible adventure, And we’re looking forward to the next ten!
Best regards,
The SoftWeir Team