Casual Fortunes: Getting Rich Slowly With Casual Games
“Which American designer personally made the most money last year from computer games he or she designed? Not the most money for a company, mind you, nor for a studio or licensor, but individual, take-home, taxable income. Was it a famous game god? John Carmack, Will Wright, Sid Meier, Warren Spector? Probably not. It was probably some guy you never heard of who wrote some little shareware game you never heard of. Those “casual games”—the puzzles and Mahjongg tilesets and card games and Breakout clones and match-three Bejeweled-type things—are downloaded, and sell, in numbers some game gods only dream about. Over the lengthy life of a successful casual game, the independent (“indie”) designer can make serious, serious money – high six-figures and low sevens.” Visit the link below to learn more about this interesting business topic.
Voting Begins In Unity Dashboard Widget Challenge
Thirteen 3D Dashboard Widget games created in just two weeks by as many teams are now up for public voting. At least four of those teams were comprised of iDevGames regulars. Six of the Widgets have been open-sourced under a BSD license by their creators so that others may learn from their work (and mistakes). Visit the site and vote for your favorite widget! Created by 13 individuals and small teams with many different skills and backgrounds, there are action games, puzzle games, puzzling games, polished games, cool gameplay ideas, remakes, each Widget game quite quite dazzling. The Widgets in the contest were created using Unity, a 3D game editor which happens to contain one of the most advanced game engines in the Universe.
Cross-platform Game Development Library SDL 1.2.9 Released
Version 1.2.9 of the Simple DirectMedia Layer Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL), a cross-platform game development library, has been released.
China To Limit Gamers' Time on Online Games
Due to a growing concern among officials, the Chinese government recently announced plans to adopt measures to limit the time a citizen can play an online game at a time. Most officials believe that players should not be online for more than three consecutive hours. The purpose of this action, according to officials, is to “prevent young people from becoming addicted to online games.” The preventative measures will go into place in October and greatly affect online gaming operators who receieve permission from the government in order to operate. Any players that remain online for more than three hours will have their in-game characters limited. Gamers online for over five hours will have their in-game characters severely limited.
Interview with Pac Man Creator Toru Iwatani
It was inspired by pizza and spawned an industry that generates $30 billion a year—but 25 years on, the world’s most recognisable computer icon has not made its creator a rich man.
Intel To Port Developer Tools to Mac OS X
Intel announced Tuesday that it will port its software developer tools to Mac OS X. The tools will consist of compilers and performance enhancement tools, and will function as plug-ins to the XCode IDE. While Intel will not provide an Objective-C compiler, the tools will be interoperable with the language. In addition, the tools will not initially integrate with IOKit, and Altivec support is still up in the air. However, Intel’s compilers promise better performance on Intel-based Macs.
Elpida To Begin Work on DDR-3 Memory
Elpida Memory has announced plans to begin testing a 512 megabyte DDR-3 memory chip. The new chips have been rated with clock speeds up to twice that of DDR-2 memory (approximately 1.3 gigabytes per second). DDR-3 is the new successor to the DDR-2 memory and is looking to render DDR-2 out of date by early next year, by creating higher speeds and lower voltages inside computers. Mac users can expect this to influence them by mid-2006 as Apple begins its switch from PowerPC architecture to an Intel based architecture. Soon Mac games will be able to take advantage of this new, high-speed memory in servers as well as client machines to create stunning experiences while consuming less energy than DDR-2 memory. Elpida Memory has also stated its plans to work on 1 and 2 gigabyte chips after the 512 megabyte chip is released.
Apple Reviews Game Design Tools
In a recent article, Apple reviews several popular Macintosh game development tools such as “Garage Games”:http://www.garagegames.com’/ Torque game engine and Unity. The article is targeted at gamers, artists and advanced hobbyists who would like to bring their concepts and designs to life without a huge budget or large development team. If you’re not interested in burying yourself in complex code and want to start Mac game development immediately, this article is a good place to start.
2D Animation Toolkit Requires Mac OS X Port
KToon is a 2D Animation Toolkit designed by animators (Toonka Films ) for animators, focused towards the Cartoon Industry. This project is covered by the GPL License using C++, OpenGL and QT as programming resources from KDevelop as the development platform. At the moment, KToon is only available for Unix systems but the developers expect to make it work on Windows in the future. Minimun Requirements:
- Unix-based Operating System
- QT 3.3.2 or higher
- 256 MB on RAM
- 800MHz or higher
- 5MB of free HD space
This application would be quite useful for sprite work if it could be ported to Mac OS X. Perhaps some of the developers here could take a crack at porting it?
3D Game Editor Unity 1.1 Released
Unity is a 3D game editor which happens to contain one of the most advanced game engines out there. Packed with power it is built to meet the demands of next-generation game developers. Create dazzling, different, captivating games with state of the art technology such as the Ageia physX™ Physics Engine, the most modern graphical effects, and highly optimized JavaScript. And when you are done with your prototype, publisher demo, or gold master, you are only one click away from having a Windows runtime, a Mac runtime, a Browser version, or even a Dashboard Widget. One source. No differences.
Quake III Source Code Released
id Software has released the source code for Quake III under the GNU General Public License. At the time of its release in 1999, the game was immensely popular, and many considered it to be at the forefront of gaming technology; indeed, its engine was widely licensed for use in games such as American McGee’s Alice and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. The package released by id Software today contains the complete source code for the Mac, Windows, and Linux versions of Quake III, including a Project Builder/Xcode file for the Mac code. While the Quake III engine is obviously no longer state-of-the-art, the release of its source code gives developers an opportunity to see the code behind a major AAA title by one of the most popular and respected game developers around, and if projects such as Doom Legacy and Aleph One are any indication, it may even give the game a new life in the open source community. (It should be noted that this release contains only the source code for the Quake III executable, not any game data files; it is still necessary to own a commercial copy of Quake III to actually play the game.)
3D Modeler Cheetah3D 2.3.2 Released
Cheetah3D is a lean, fast and elegant 3D modelling, renderering and animation tool for Mac OS X with an easy learning curve. It offers many tools from powerful polygon editing over advanced subdivision surface modelling to HDRI and radiosity renderings. Support for many common 3D file formats rounds up its feature set. Cheetah3D 2.3.2 just contains one bug fix—HDRI textures should now be loaded correctly again.
Image Editor Seashore 0.1.6 Released
Seashore is an open source image editor for Cocoa. It features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes. It supports multiple layers and alpha channel editing. It is based around the GIMP’s technology and uses the same native file format.
We are currently working on the new site. It is recommended that you check out our forum or visit our IRC Chat Channel at the server irc.freenode.net with the channel #idevgames.
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