Posted on February 5th, 2010 by Carlos Camacho
RunRev announced that it will bring its Revolution product line to mobile platforms in 2010. revMobile is a brand new product that will support iPhone, iPad, Windows Mobile and Maemo platforms initially. revMobile will be compatible with other members of the Rev product family and uses the company’s revTalk programming language. A modern descendant of natural-language technologies such as Apple’s HyperCard, Rev enables software construction for everyone. With revMobile, developers will be able to develop and deploy to mobile platforms using a single code base, while being able to take advantage of native features on each device. Additionally it will be possible to reuse code across Windows, Mac OS and Linux desktops, popular Web browsers and on Web servers.
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Posted on February 3rd, 2010 by Carlos Camacho
Bukisa has an interesting tutorial series that steps you through the process of creating a 3D shoot’em’up game using the popular and powerful Ogre 3D engine.
Ogre is arguably one of the top free 3D engines available. It has been used as the basis of a number of successful commercial games, has a huge and active community, and includes a number of cutting edge features. In this tutorial series we will see how to create a simple shoot’em’up using the Ogre 3D engine. But before we can start making the game, we need to get some of the basics done, like initialise the Ogre engine and open a window on the screen.
Topics include, adding a player, populating a level, adding weapons, collision detection and more.
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Posted on February 1st, 2010 by Carlos Camacho
Cheetah3D 5.2 is now using WebKit-JavaScriptCore JavaScript engine which is also used by Safari. Due to the JIT compiler the execution of custom scripts should be considerably faster now. Cheetah3D will be ready for 64 bit in the near future (the 64bit version will be a free update for all 5.x users). Cheetah3D 5.2 also adds many work flow enhancements. From a texture preview in the properties editor over a file selector in the render manager to copy and paste support of animation keys in the timeline. Cheetah3D 5.2 will require at least Mac OS X 10.5.
Related Link: Download Cheetah3D
Posted on January 7th, 2010 by Carlos Camacho
We spotlight two articles that give insight into working in the game development industry today. Brian Green’s “Game development according to Cypress Hill” attempts to dispel some myths about game development.
The first reality is that there are a lot of people out there who want to do what you do. On a basic level, there are a lot of people eager to make games and most of them don’t realize that making games isn’t the same as playing games. For every burnout case in the industry, there are a number of fresh-faced kids wanting to get their chance at what they think is their dream job.
The post “The Life of a Washed-out Game Developer: The Good & The Bad” on MMO News features a former game developer. He speaks about the highs and lows of creating games.
Life as a game developer is great as long as you know what you’re getting into and are absolutely certain that this is what you want to do with your life.
The article is great reading for any student wishing to make games. The author writes…
Working on something that starts from very little or nothing, and watching it grow into a good game is just a fantastic experience. But, I also think that the game industry has, historically, never paid close attention to veterans and deserved proceeds. People leaving the industry after 5 years or so is relatively common.
Over the years, a few of our community members have moved from Indie development, or student development, into the industry — we’ve loved to hear your take on working fulltime as a game developer.
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Posted on December 30th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Game Developer Magazine has named the finalists for the 2009 Front Line Awards, their 12th annual evaluation of the year’s best game-making tools in the categories of programming, art, audio, game engine, middleware, and books. The following books have been nominated:
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Posted on December 16th, 2009 by James Dessart
An Alternative for Casual Hobbyists
When porting a game of mine to the iPhone, I found I needed a device to test out multi-touch. I didn’t want to spend the $99 a year for the developer program, and I wasn’t willing to jailbreak my brand-new iPod. When I discovered iSimulate, it looked like there was finally an alternative for us casual hobbyists.
For those who do have access to the developer program, iSimulate lets you spend more time in the simulator before deploying, letting you use XCode’s debugging features without hassle. The displays of device input give you an extra level of debugging data that just isn’t available otherwise.
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Posted on December 15th, 2009 by Seth Willits
Gamasutra has posted a postmortem for Freeverse’s game Top Gun. The game was created by uDevGames’ alumni Justin Ficarrotta.
Freeverse designer and programmer Justin Ficarrotta recounts what went right and what went wrong with the development of the iPhone game Top Gun — particularly focusing on how fans should always be in mind when working on a licensed game.
Justin Ficarrotta is a longtime iDevGames member who has created spectacular winning iDevGames contest entries such as Laserface Jones, ARACHNOID: Predator of Worlds, and Kill Dr. Cote.
Related Link: Gamasutra: Top Gun Postmortem
Posted on December 14th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
‘iPhone Game Development’ by Paul Zirkle, Lead Mobile Programmer at Konami Digital Entertainment and Joe Hogue, a mobile programmer with Electronic Arts. Together, provides an experienced iPhone developer with the knowledge needed to make games for the Apple iPhone. Starting with a basic overview of game and technical design particular to the new device, the book moves on to detail the development process with examples. You will find everything from game development basics and an introduction to iPhone programming to tips on using APIs to develop in-game physics and strategies for AppStore publication. Topics include:
- Learn how to develop iPhone games that provide engaging user experiences
- Become familiar with Objective-C and the Xcode suite of tools
- Learn what it takes to adapt the iPhone interface to games
- Create a robust, scalable framework for a game app
- Understand the requirements for implementing 2D and 3D graphics
- Learn how to add music and audio effects, as well as menus and controls
- Get instructions for publishing your game to the App Store
This book promises you everything from game development basics and iPhone programming fundamentals to guidelines for dealing with special graphics and audio needs, creating in-game physics, and much more.
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Posted on December 12th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
The Bork3D Game Engine was built for mobile platforms. It actually has its roots in Rude Engine, a high-performance graphics library for Pocket PC, Symbian and N-Gage. Performance and scalability is considered in every corner of the Bork3D Game Engine. If performance is a criteria for you, seriously consider this engine. Features include: all the source code, OpenGL ES abstraction layer, Debug-rendering API, Component-oriented game object system, High-performance static and boned mesh rendering system w/ tool pipeline for 3dsmax, Maya and Collada, Integration with the Bullet Physics SDK and more. f you or your business earns less than $100,000 per year you qualify for the $49 per developer Indy License. The Professional License is $199. (See the license agreement for exact details). Don’t let the price fool you. We’re just undercutting the competitors to get your attention.
Posted on December 10th, 2009 by Andy Korth
Howling Moon Software announced a new version of the popular Chipmunk Physics engine. Chipmunk is a simple, lightweight and fast 2D rigid body physics library written in C. It’s licensed under the unrestrictive, OSI approved MIT license, meaning it’s free to use even in closed source, commercial games.
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