| The hub for the promotion and advancement of african game development in South Africa and Africa. | |  |
| | rAge 2009 Confirmed For Early October! | Submit News! | | Posted by: Oliver at 05:33:22 PM | Thursday, July 02, 2009 |
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| | Dave Perry Demonstrates Gaikai! | Submit News! | | Posted by: Oliver at 04:50:49 PM | Wednesday, July 01, 2009 |
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Dave Perry has released a few more bits of information regarding his cloud-based game streaming service, Gaikai, which is mostly comparable to Onlive, although Perry probably wouldn't enjoy such comparisons.
Watch Perry's homemade Gaikai showcase video over here.
Elsewhere:
- Firefox 3.5 has been officially released
- Infamous file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay, has been purchased and is going legit
- The Xbox 360 game creator, Kodu Game Lab, has been released
- Brian Reynolds has left Big Huge Games
- Blue Omega, the team who created a third-person shooter called Damnation, has been laid off
- Doom: Resurrection has been released on the iPhone - find out how it works over here
- And have a peak inside the book and software library of Blizzard
| | Manifesto Games Closes Shop! | Submit News! | | Posted by: Oliver at 04:29:50 PM | Monday, June 29, 2009 |
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While this news is a week old, it's no less poignant - Manifesto Games, founded in 2005 by Greg Costikyan, has ceased operations.
With an original charter (or... manifesto) to help nurture, champion and distribute innovative independent games that push boundaries, Manifesto Games helped a good number of indies gain recognition in the industry, not least of which is Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games who has authored three titles through Manifesto.
Read Costikyan's farewell blog entry over here.
In other news:
- Epic has opened an Unreal Engine 3 licensing and support subsidiary in South Korea
- EA's Bioware and Mythic studios are set for closer cooperation...
- ... and seemingly as a result, Mythic co-founder Mark Jacobs has left the company he helped start in 1995
- Warner Bros. are one step closer to purchasing lucrative assets from Midway
- Play the top indie game picks of last week over here
- Read about John Carmack- and id Software's reasons for selling to ZeniMax
- And be sure to read a highly interesting and entertaining chain developer interview conducted by Kotaku's Stephen Totilo | | ZeniMax Acquires id Software! | | Posted by: Oliver at 06:13:30 PM | Wednesday, June 24, 2009 |
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| | Casual Game Design: A Year in Review! | | Posted by: Oliver at 04:28:22 PM | Monday, June 22, 2009 |
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Gamasutra (who else?) has put up a great feature regarding the trends of casual game design, as the authors pick their way through highlights from this arena, and choose their favourites in a variety of genres.
Also:
- Be sure to play through a bunch of the top indie games released last week
- Read a relatively short, lesson-filled development postmortem on the Xbox LIVE Indie Game, Trino
- The development studio responsible for America's Army has been shut down
- The winners of the latest 'Dr. Dobbs Challenge' development contest have been announced
- Solve the mystery of the secret Duke Nukem game
- And read through a developer thesis that strings together both 'Game Design' and architecture | | Tell Us What You're Up To! | | Posted by: Oliver at 04:38:25 PM | Friday, June 19, 2009 |
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Hello to all the South African (and non) game developers out there, what're you up to?
The SAGameDev.com community is passionate about discussing everything to do with game development, local or foreign, and in order to promote discussion within the community, we need to inform each other about the latest happenings in game development, as well talk about what we're working on, what we're learning, ask questions and provide feedback and answers.
To facilitate discussion, SAGameDev has a great feature called Developer Journals, where you can easily post up any thoughts (big or small, deep or shallow) to discuss with the community. Heard about a new programming technique? Want to share your thoughts on something a developer said? Do you want to share a small (or large) snippet of your latest work? Then the Developer Journals are a great place to post whatever you're thinking about and want to discuss.
After signing up here on SAGameDev.com, you can easily access your Developer Journal page by heading to the Control Panel at the top of the site, then going to the Developer Journals option, and then clicking 'New Entry.'
Here, you can fill in the necessary information (such as the name of your Developer Journal, your entry topic and headline) and then tell us what you're up to and what's floating around in your brain at the moment. Your latest journal will show up on the left side of the site, where others can easily view and comment on your entry.
If you've already got a blog, you can even post a snippet of your latest blog post in the Developer Journals, and link us to your blog for future reading.
We definitely want to know what you're up to, as the only way the South African game development community can grow is if we share our knowledge, seek feedback on our projects (and even our thoughts) and collaborate together to build our local development scene into a local development industry.
Look forward to hearing from you,
- SAGD | | thatgamecompany On Risks and Emotional Games! | | Posted by: Oliver at 06:30:18 PM | Thursday, June 18, 2009 |
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First up, you should read an inspiring interview with members of thatgamecompany (flOw, Flower), as they talk about taking risks and creating games with more substance than the current crop of games available on the marketplace.
Elsewhere:
- The award nominees for 'Best of E3' have been announced
- Read about the next three engines in Develop's Top Ten engine round-up here, here and here.
- The UK has finally settled on the use of the PEGI age ratings system for future videogames in the region (as opposed to the BBFC system)
- Former Factor 5 employees are suing the company for fraudulent behaviour
- iPhone 3.0 OS has been released and brought Mother Internet to a crawl
- An industry-backed development distance learning programme, Train2Game, has been set up for the UK
- And Stardock's Brad Wardell (Sins of a Solar Empire, Demigod) has called on gamers to switch to the upcoming Windows 7 as quickly as possible | | Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.1 Released! | | Posted by: Korax at 08:34:40 AM | Wednesday, June 17, 2009 |
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Microsoft finally released XNA 3.1 which adds some more features over and above what XNA 3.0 have with the most prominent likely being video playback and avatars.
"XNA Game Studio 3.1 enables hobbyists, academics, and independent game developers to easily create video games for Windows, Xbox 360, and the Zune digital media player by using optimized cross-platform gaming libraries based on the .NET Framework in the C# programming language.
This release is incremental to XNA Game Studio 3.0 and contains many new features, including avatars, Xbox LIVE Party support, and video as well as enhancements to existing features. For the full list of improvements in this release, see the “What’s New in XNA Game Studio 3.1” section of the documentation once you have installed the product." | | Engines Under Focus! | | Posted by: Oliver at 05:51:36 PM | Monday, June 15, 2009 |
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Develop are currently running a feature with their look at game development engines of all kinds, accompanied by an investigation into the state of the business.
They kick off their two week long series of features with a closer look at the game engine industry, and the start of their top ten engine countdown, with Torque 3D at No. 10.
Also:
- Shigeru Miyamoto has been named the world's favourite game developer, according to a 9000-strong survey of game developers, with John Carmack in at second
- Impulse, Stardock's competitor to Valve's Steam online distribution service, has added Activision and Ubisoft to their list of content providers
- Xbox Live Community Games has been renamed to Xbox Live Indie Games
- There's a keen interview with id Software's Steve Nix and Peter Sokal that touches on a wide range of id-related topics
- And you can read an interesting, in-depth postmortem regarding the enormous Deus Ex total modification, The Nameless Mod. | | Carmack: "iPhone is the best platform for a small team" | | Posted by: Oliver at 06:05:44 PM | Thursday, June 11, 2009 |
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Speaking to Gamasutra, id Software's technical director, John Carmack, is fully enthused about the possibilities of game development for Apple's iPhone, stating that, "Right now the iPhone is the best platform for a small team to go and make their mark on."
Under Carmack's direction, Escalation Studios (headed up by Tom Mustaine) is finishing up work on Doom: Resurrection for the iPhone, which, according to the information in the interview and a (dated) progress report from Carmack, is sounding pretty exciting.
Elsewhere:
- Gabe Newell at Valve responds to fan criticisms over Left 4 Dead 2
- Incidentally, Gregory Weir takes an interesting look at the enemy interplay present in the original Left 4 Dead
- The Sims 3 sells through a whopping 1.4 million copies in its first week on shelves
- Learn development bravado smack talk from the senior vice president of EA Games Europe
- Crystal Dynamics suffers more layoffs
- And work on a life-sized Gundam, in Shiokaze Park in Odaiba, Japan, is wrapping up. |
