FUZE NEWS! The Year So Far & The Road Ahead
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Hi FUZE Folks! It has been a long time since we gave you a good solid update as to what the team are focusing on and our plans for the future. We thought it best to touch base properly and keep you in the loop. It has been an interesting and challenging time for sure!
In short, things have been tough for FUZE over these last couple of years. The situation presented by Covid meant that we couldn't perform our main goal as a business - providing our awesome workshops to schools and events across the country. We couldn't do a single workshop over the entire time, and this put a huge strain on us.
We powered through, and while it was going on we finalised and released the latest 3.1.0 patch which brought a whole host of awesome features to F4NS. Without going into unecessary details, our staff line-up changed at FUZE around this time, leaving us with an absolutely tiny team for a time.
Things are changing now, and there are many reasons to be excited.
The FUZE Centre
Over the last year we have been working hard on establishing our new centre of operations: The FUZE Centre as the place to go for coding clubs and local schools looking to dive into the world of coding. It's looking so very cool now - take a look at the pictures below!
We have a growing relationship with local schools and more and more people are starting to gravitate towards us - it's extremely exciting to see it develop and makes us all very proud indeed! It has been a long standing dream of ours to have our own place for workshops and to see it all in action... It's a bit cool!
FUZE Content
We are desperate to improve FUZE's presence online, and so we are making a big push toward regular content uploads on more platforms. You may have seen that the YouTube channel is now regularly uploading coding shorts (which, trust me, take a lot more work than it might seem 😅), and we have had some exciting things pop up such as a series collaboration streams with the very awesome VideoDojo channel! These have been incredibly positive and I look forward to making many more of these. If you haven't seen them, check them out! They're great resources for new FUZErs!
You can find the most recent stream we did here:
I have also been busy with the creation of new FUZE Worksheet projects, including a few much larger and more complicated ones. These will be released as downloadable PDFs just like the beginner booklets. Expect to see another booklet uploaded too!
Made With FUZE
This one is of course far more fresh in everyone's memory since it is our most recent announcement, but it's worth writing about here.
It was always a question we would receive when talking about our plans for F4NS... "Can I release a game on the eShop with this?" It pained us to say "Unfortunately not..." - so this is no longer the case!
Made With FUZE is a hyper accessible path to market for developers who want their game on the Nintendo eShop. We handle publishing, you handle the writing of the game. For reference, check out the breakout Made With FUZE release: SUPER FUNKY BOWLING! This awesome game is now on sale the world over.
Made With FUZE is something we're very proud of, and we are incredibly excited to see what the community brings forward. We are talking with community member regularly about their ideas and what it would take to get a Made With FUZE game to a ready state.
This is no easy task - we are talking about the absolute top level here! The Showcase Gallery is and should always remain something to aim for, but Made With FUZE is a step above even that, of course! We sincerely hope it inspires everybody to push themselves to new creative heights, and we are honoured if you choose to embark on that journey with us.
Expect more in the near future in terms of Made With FUZE announcements!
FUZE4... WINDOWS?
We have known for a long time that the next logical step for FUZE in terms of platform is of course Windows. A release on Steam would be obviously awesome, we would be able to further our reach especially as an educational product - all schools have Windows machines. A slightly stripped-back version which could run in the browser would also be incredibly powerful for us in this regard.
With this in mind, we've been spending time exploring different options of how we want to approach this. We have a few explicit goals:
- Accessiblity. FUZE must always be an accessible language.
- We want to retain as much compatibility as we possibly can.
- We want to gain the power and performance necessary to be able to push FUZE to its limit, making it a true contender as a game engine and language.
With this said, we also want to revamp a few things, to breathe a lot of life into the product and image, and to give it more potential than ever. We are also looking into ways to make the asset creation and sharing aspect of FUZE far more exciting and have greater reach. We want the user to have more control than ever, and for the creative tools to reach a whole new level..
We won't be giving explicit details yet, as our small but passionate team is working out exactly how we want to do this. We want to get it right, and it has been a difficult road to get here. We simply do not have the team size or resources to make the R&D happen quickly. We are always learning, and now things are looking exciting for the future. It really will be something, folks 😊
A Thank You
We cannot thank you enough for being here with us, supporting us, sharing our content, being in the Gamejams, watching the videos, commenting, encouraging each other, making incredible things... Just being awesome. This community is very special indeed, I'm sure many of you will agree that the environment and atmosphere we have here is truly a wonderful thing!
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I've been really hoping for some info for a good time now, this is superb. Thank you so much Dave! :)
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I’m always excited to see Fuze News :D thanks for the update! It must be quite frustrating in the Fuze team - one because it’s not nearly as well-known as it should be (yet!) and two because there’s so little time to actually play with this awesome thing you’ve made. I think Dave was working on a card game (and maybe a pirate ships game?) and that was ages ago. Unless I’ve missed an update. Anyway, huge thanks for all your hard work. My best Switch purchase for sure!
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Very exciting! 😀 Fuze is so good !
Windows Fuze would be amazing bring it on 🤘. -
Amazing thanks for the Fuze News 👍. I have for a few months now had my Steam Deck (after a years wait🙄). A steam release of Fuze would be fantastic because Fuze is what keeps me coming back to the switch. Been able to play Fuze on the Steam Deck on the go would be great. Thanks again and keep on doing what you are doing, can't wait to see where Fuze goes next. 👍
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Thanks a lot for that post, it makes me happy to see and read about what the FUZE team has achieved. Congratulations! By the way this looks like a very comfortable place to learn on the photos (I love the vitrines too).
Just as a feedback about things that happened over here and maybe for others too: because of the fun I had with FUZE and the things I saw people doing with it, I got interested and motivated in doing more with digital music and trying out new things for me like pixel art (even part of my family started to do pixel art). So, just to say, you cause cool things to happen. Keep it up 😁 and thank you. -
Those are all great news items! I'll definitely try out FUZE4 Windows when it comes out!
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@dave gracias Dave
Soy de Costa Rica y he usado el programa para realizar cosas menos complicadas sin tanta animación como tareas de la U la verdad he disfrutado mucho programando, quiero saber cómo llevar el Fuze a escuelas y colegios cual sería la estrategia para hacer de forma oficial con ustedes -
Does fuze planning on being on windows imply we'll be able to make a .exe file and maybe sell the game/app online (or with permission required from fuze)?
