The Mailowl Scrolls

The NAG Game.Dev community has hit the double digits with its local game development competition and to mark this special occasion NAG magazine is sponsoring R10,000 in prizes! The competition is also double its duration (now 2 months) and the prize giving will be at rAge.

The community is taking the opportunity to advertise itself to want-to-be game developers and they’ve picked a theme (build a management game) which can be easily implemented in any language and isn’t as reliant on graphics as it is on solid game play. They’ve seen a good influx of entries and now the challenge for the leaders of the community is to help the members get their game to the finish line and handed in because feeling like they should bail out would just demotivate the new members.

Secondly, the NAG Game.Dev community is also running a mini game developers conference at rAge like they did last year but this time I think we’ll see better organisation and better awareness of what’s happening. There are going to be various topics from “where to start” to advanced technical implementation talks as well as some workshops and other fun activities. The community has built themselves a website (http://www.gamedotdev.co.za) to keep everyone informed of what’s happening, so make sure you get yourself to the show.

Thirdly (and this just shows how active this little community is) plans are underway to get Danny (the leader of the Game.Dev community and local guru on game dev) down to Durban to run a devLAN in conjunction with IT Intellect and maybe also to run a Hot Lab or 2.

In other news, a design company has entered the ranks of the local game development world. Luma has built a demo of racing game using Blender and Bullet Physics Library and its won a Bullet Physics competition and was supposed to have been shown at SIGGRAPH 2006 (an acclaimed computer graphics and interactive techniques conference). After that the mere 10,000+ download of a demo (!) shouldn’t raise any eyebrows.

Luma also has a unique view on how they plan to fund their game development. Being in the design and advertising space they plan on selling advertising by carefully and seamlessly implementing the customers product into the game so that the product is logical and relevant to the gameplay (i.e. not just a character collecting the product logo to win points). This is evident in their ClubSilo demo which features the Cooper Mini as the vehicles which the player drives. The game will then be given out for free as a player playing for 5 minutes and seeing the logo is more time than a 10 second ad on TV.

You can get the latest version of ClubSilo from their website.

Prehysteria is coming round to the final days of its “age” and the end of Beta testing. There have been many changes made because of the sheer mountain of feedback from the players and while there are still grumbles about the objectivity in the game I think it still serves as the exemplary possibility of building a game in South Africa.

On my small front, I’m straining to keep myself focused on my competition entry and I’d much rather be playing with my new found understanding of surfaces and alpha blending. I’ve introduced a friend to the self-satisfaction of rapid game development using Game Maker and since he’s big on strategy games I’d like to see how I can implement fog-of-war using my new knowledge.

The big push now is for rAge and then one last piece of activity before the end of the year. I’m really excited (but will hold out from bugging people) about what the plans are for 2007 since it’ll definitely have to include the XNA Express Studio for building games on the Xbox 360 (the beta coming out at the end of August).