September Auckland Game Developers Meetup
Yesterday it was the September Auckland Game Developers Meetup, this time with an iPhone theme. The topics were:
-
Ryan Thatcher from Star Kiwi discussed his new iPhone game, Space Hawk. It's essentially an old-school top-down shooter, rendered in the 3D Unity engine but played on a 2D plane. Looks quite interesting actually, and it sounds like the engine that they've crafted can easily be expanded for a much broader sequel. (Random bit of trivia - The music was made by Thinkt Studios, who also donated the music for WitchBlaster)
- Danushka Abeysuriya from Rush Digital Interactive gave an extremely technical description of the various iPhone GPUs. I found certain parts of the talk interesting, such as the suggestion that 3D performance on the iPhone 3GS is superior to the iPhone 4 and the iPad (Due to similar GPU's but the fact that the iOS4 devices need to render 5 times as many pixels!), and the fact that the iPhone renders tile-by-tile rather than line-by-line, but much of the talk was way way over my head!
- Trevor Gamon from Auckland's new Gameloft Studio gave a talk on the history of Gameloft, his personal experience in the games industry (Such as working on Sudeki) and the cornerstones of his game development philosophy (Which I can't remember! Sorry!). Something I found interesting was Trevor's very very early history involved Anirog, who made the most difficult flight sim I have ever played, Flight Path 737!
Also, even though it wasn't officially part of the line up, we got a peak at a new video of the upcoming Primal Carnage (Basically Left4Dinos) coutesy of team member Hamish Bode.
Open Atrium
Open Atrium is an open source intranet and team portal application built on Drupal. I thought it looked quite interesting and so I set up my own install of it.
Open Atrium allows the site administrator to create and configure private 'Groups', each with their own section of the site and can be set up with the following features:
- Blog. Posting news for the team.
- Calendar. For scheduling team events.
- Case tracker for projects (Bugs, feature requests etc). It's a highly simplified one, but that's a good thing.
- Notebook. A simple hierarchical wiki, could be used for a knowledge base.
- Shoutbox. Basically a mini Twitter clone. Kind of pointless I think.
I'm trialing it out for managing my hobby and collaborative projects. If you want access to my Open Atrium site, even just to have a tinker in it, please let me know.
An apology and an explanation.
A few of you would have received a rather dubious email from my Gmail account a few days ago, something along the lines of:
yHello:
Last week, I have ordered china product Apple iPad 64GB
this w e bsite:[redacted]
I've received the item today
It's amazing! The item is original, brand new and has high quality,
but it's much cheap I'm pleased to share this good news with you!
I believe you will find what you want there and have an good experience
on shopping from them
Regards!
My account was hacked from a Chinese IP address (115.49.90.219) and used to send such spam to virtually my entire contact list.
I strongly suspect that this relates to the Hell Pizza hacking debacle I've heard whispers from colleagues that a few other New Zealand based Gmail accounts have also been used to send spam recently which appears to confirm my suspicions.
It was stupid and reckless for Hell Pizza not to hash their passwords. However I admit that this hack was only made possible because I was also stupid and reckless using the same password for more than one Internet account. Lesson learned, my bad, sorry guys.
I feel rather humiliated by the experience, enough to never buy from Hell again and leave this post on my site for the rest of it's existence. That said, my decision could be swayed by copious amounts of free Pizza..
August Auckland Game Developers meetup
I thought I might start posting a brief overview of the Auckland Game Developer meetups we have every month.
Mike Porter, formerly of Terminal Reality, Sierra, FASA, Microsoft Aces et al, now an art tutor at the Media Design School, gave a facinating talk on his long career in the industry. Highlight for me was his talk about his experiences with working on Microsoft Train Simulator 2 and Microsoft ESP (Hybrid Train/Plane/Vehicle simulator for professional training), unfortunately both of those were cancelled and the studio shut down.
Stephen Knightly of game design consultancy ingame gave a lecture his findings about Gamification, applying game like mechanics (Such as giving points, achievements, tradable items etc) to websites. He intends to post some of the lecture on Playmaker so I'll link through to it when he does.
Edit - Stephen has now posted Gamification links on Playmaker - http://playmaker.org.nz/forum/community/game-development/gamification-links
Also, as a humorous coda I did a brief show and tell about the TV3/Kevin Butler saga. Basically, New Zealand's TV3 ran an ad that was a blatant ripoff of a Kevin Butler Playstation 3 ad. Fortunately Sony took it in good humour, and Kevin let them off the hook in exchange for some Kiwi goods.
How Iron Man should have ended
Thought I might start humour videos from YouTube on Fridays. Here's how Iron Man should have ended:
How not to make a fighting game, part 2
If you thought Rise of the Robots was bad, wait till you get a load of this:
At least ROTR had cool looking designs, great (for the time) 3D graphics and Brian May riffs. I can't think of a single thing Dangerous Streets had going for it. Art, animation, sound, characterisation, music, gameplay.. all of it awful.
And Commodore bundled it with their Amiga CD32 console, apparently on the same CD as a Rise of the Robots demo. What were they thinking?
Games Show Reel
Last night on a whim I whipped together a few videos of my games (recorded in FRAPS) and made a Show Reel for YouTube.
Guess who's back, back again?
Hi all,
It's August so I'm back from my self imposed exile from the world of social media.
- Congratulations to Joshua of Tiny Frog Software, for joining Gameloft's Auckland team. I don't know what this means for the future of his indie game brand nonetheless but I wish him all the best.
- Justin has begun working on a PC Zelda clone called Dungeon DEMOlisher. I'm real happy for him and I am going to let him finish, but Heart of Ice is one of the greatest PC Zelda clones of all time. Actually that may be true as there aren't many. In any case, I wish Justin all the best for his project.
- Wing Commander 1 + Expansions and Hydorah have been my favorite games of the month.
- Doujin Overload was on. It's basically a grass-roots Auckland manga art expo. I spent a crap load of money on quality A3 prints from there, also Kirsty bought me a collection of 33 mostly Klik N Play games on CD.
- Inception was released, probably the movie with the most game-like mechanics ever. See it ASAP if you haven't already. Will post my thoughts on that later.
- I put up a new theme on Playmaker, again it's only supposed to be temporary until we get a professional themer on board.
Going off the radar again
Since the start of May I have been maintaining a monday-wednesday-friday blog post schedule. I know that's not particularly impressive in the blogosphere but I've been happy with that regardless.
However there's not much left that I want to post about and I am planning to do a rather ambitious (But possibly futile) game development project over the next month, so except for comments the blog is going silent until August.
New Zealand film festival wish list
The New Zealand film festival is again upon us, and although there is no new Neon Genesis Evangelion movie this year there are plenty of other great looking movies. Here's the ten that most interest me, with trailers where available:
Allegedly a documentary about the graffiti artist Bansky. Which reminds me, "Wall and Piece" is a great addition to any Coffee table.
A comedy with Jonah Hill and John C Riley, need I say more?
An hilarious inept melodrama with a dedicated cult following.
The other 'So-Bad-It's-Good' film at the festival is an amazingly low rent ripoff of The Birds. Featuring special effects that resemble 90s gif animations.
Epic drama following the life of Carlos the Jackal, one of the world's most notorious terrorists.
8. A film unfinished
Documentary examining an unfinished Nazi propaganda film.
9. Salam Rugby
Documentary about a Iranian woman's rugby team(?!).
Documentary about four babies. Not the kind of film I would normally be interested in, but taking Kirsty should earn me some brownie points.
I can't really speak for Cobra but as I understand it the software he uses (Power Games...
Why MAC? Maybe if you developed for WINDOWS you would get more people buying....