About a year ago, before I even had my cool hat, I wrote a blog post called What's the Big Idea? that talked about some big-picture ideas about where Leadwerks is going:

We're going to build Leadwerks into a series of educational materials and services that is capable of taking any person of reasonable intelligence and commitment from total noob to professional game developer. I want to have a well-defined series of lessons that once completed, tell you everything you need to know to program games, design artwork, or manage a team of developers working on a title. Leadwerks can help with promotion and distribution. You'll see a lot more of this idea with the Leadwerks Workshop on Steam.

Well, a year later, this idea is coming to fruition. I previously broke down the user journey into Education, Collaboration, Promotion, and Distribution. This has now been distilled down to the new Leadwerks tagline: Learn, Build, Play. I had our logo reworked and I am very proud to present to you this beautiful design:

 

 

The logo also makes for some gorgeous wallpaper.

Learn, Build, Play

What does Learn, Build, Play mean? Learn means that our tutorials should teach a complete beginner everything they need to make their own games. Our educational material should not simply teach how to use Leadwerks, it should teach how to make games with no previous knowledge required. That's why our lessons go into such detail to explain basic concepts. It also means we will continue to teach how to make different games, and add features that support that. For example, an RPG game template is a popular request, and a built-in GUI system with some kind of inventory control would make this teachable.

 

Build simply means Leadwerks Game Engine as a game development tool. What used to be the entire focus of the company is now just one-third of Leadwerks. (Although this part still takes 90% of my time!) For more information about the specifics of continued development, see my blog post here.

 

Play, as you might have guessed, means free self-publishing to Steam with Leadwerks Game Launcher. This is about connecting game developers with an audience and delving into the consumer side of games.

 

This makes Leadwerks more than just a game engine. Leadwerks is a platform for building and playing games.

Building a Vision

Why is this important? Having a distinct direction gives us a criteria to weigh decisions against. For example, when the new tutorials were being designed I specified they had to describe everything, down to the level of explaining what a mipmap is. That would not have happened with a different vision for Leadwerks, or with no vision.

 

This also puts us all on the same page so we all share a view of where the community is going. I am happy to be able to explain this to you now, and look forward to a very big rest of the year. Here is the new Leadwerks trailer, which has been updated to reflect the values we want to promote:

 

And here's the new showreel showcasing your games made with Leadwerks:

 

If you would like to play around with the logo image, you can download the complete artwork files below.