Leadwerks Gaming SDK Arrives on Steam

Leadwerks Game Engine: Indie Edition is a powerful and easy-to-use game engine for building any kind of 3D game. With a rapid development pipeline, Lua script integration, and available learning materials, Leadwerks is the perfect way to make 3D games that look and feel amazing. Read more for the full scoop.

Key Features

Learn to Make Your Own Royalty-Free Games
Leadwerks provide tons of documentation and video tutorials walking you through the steps to build your own 3D games. Leadwerks is the perfect pathway to go from total noob to pro game developer. And when you do publish your commercial game, there's no royalties to pay, ever.

Advanced Graphics
Leadwerks brings AAA graphics to the masses, with hardware tessellation, geometry shaders, and a deferred renderer with up to 32x MSAA. The renderer redefines realtime with image quality more like a cg render than real-time games of the past. The use of OpenGL 4.0 provides equivalent graphics to DirectX 11, with cross-platform support across operating systems, for future expansion.

Built-in Level Design Tools
Build game levels from scratch right in Leadwerks editor with constructive solid geometry. The tools make it easy to sketch out your design and bring your ideas to life. Anyone can build their own game worlds in Leadwerks, without having to be an expert artist.

Integrated Lua Script Editor
Lua is integrated right into Leadwerks because of its proven track records in hundreds of commercial games including Crysis, World of Warcraft, and Garry's Mod. Lua integrates seamlessly with native code for rapid prototyping and instant control. The built-in debugger lets you pause your game, step through code, and inspect every variable in the program in real-time. Lua is perfect for beginners, and the integrated Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler ensures your games will keep running fast as they grow.

Visual Flowgraph for Advanced Game Mechanics
Leadwerks unique visual flowgraph enables designers to set up game mechanics, build interactions, and design advanced scripted sequences, without touching a line of code. The flowgraph system integrates seamlessly with Lua script, allowing script programmers to expose their own functions and add new possibilities for gameplay.

Royalty-Free License
Your games you make are yours. Yours to play, yours to sell, yours to give away, and do as you please. You will never be charged royalties for any game you make in Leadwerks.

Graphics
OpenGL 4.0 deferred renderer with uniform lighting model supports any number of lights, all casting soft dynamic shadows. Up to 32x hardware MSAA makes rendered images incredibly sharp and detailed. Full support for vertex, fragment, geometry, and tessellation shaders. Dynamic megatexture terrain provides fast rendering of terrains with many layers. Hierarchical hardware occlusion queries provides fast visibility testing.

Want more? How about hardware tessellation for dynamic real surface displacement on the GPU. Normal mapping with specular and cubemap reflections. Instanced rendering allows fast drawing of large volumes of objects. Hardware skinning provides fast skinned animation. Deferred transparency with multiple overlapping layers of shading. Real-time mesh modification. Trilinear and up to 16x anisotropic filtering. Blend and transition animation sequences. Extract animation sequences in the editor.

Editor
Automatic asset management reloads models and textures when they are modified from another application. Drag and drop import of FBX, DDS, BMP, JPG, PNG, TGA, and PSD files. Visual interface controls every aspect of the art pipeline. Constructive solid geometry modeling tools.

Want more? How about brush primitives include box, wedge, cylinder, sphere, arch, tube, and torus. Automatic UV mapping. Brush smooth groups. GPU-accelerated terrain editor makes sculpting silky smooth and fast. Built-in shader editor with instant visualization and error highlighting. Native user interface is used on each supported platform.

Programming
Built-in Lua script editor with debugger, code stepping, and syntax highlighting. Visual flowgraph lets you connect objects to control game interactions and set up scripted sequences. Launch your game and debug the Lua virtual machine as it runs. API design with an object-oriented command set lets you code any type of game. Entity scripts provide a per-object hook interface. Direct programming gives you control over your game's loop and program structure. Script variables are displayed in a visual interface and reloaded in real-time.

AI
Navmesh pathfinding provides automatic AI navigation that works everywhere. Navigation paths are displayed in the editor in real-time as you build your game level. Character controller movement seamlessly integrated with physics and pathfinding systems. Set entities to automatically chase another object or navigate to a position.

Physics
Fast and accurate rigid body physics. Constraints including hinge, ball, and sliding joints. Joint actuators provide fast and stable motorized constraints for doors, robotic arms, and other motion. Automatic physics shape calculation. Generate physics shapes in the editor from models or brushes. Swept collision. Raycasting with lines or spheres.

Particles
Real-time particle editor with instant visualization. Emission volumes include box, sphere, cylinder, tube, and cone. Adjustable curve graph for alpha and scale. Particle animation sheets with adjustable frame counts and layout. Velocity-based rotation for directional particles like sparks.

Sound
3D sound spatialization. Emit a sound from any entity. Automatic channel management frees up unneeded channels. Skip to any time in sound.

Enhanced for Steam
Automatically adds rendered images to your Steam screenshots library.

Minimum System Requirements
OS - Windows Vista, 7, 8, or 8.1; Processor - 2.0 ghz dual core; Memory - 2 GB RAM; Graphics - OpenGL 4.0 / DirectX 11 capable graphics card or integrated graphics chip; DirectX - Version 11; Hard Drive - 2 GB available space (note - ATI cards with recent drivers may experience some flickering objects. Intel HD Graphics with DX11 support are supported).

So what are you waiting for, at only $99 you can create your own spectacular 3D games, even if you are just starting out. Click on the link below to find out more.