iDevGames

Macnn reported today that GarageGames has released their Torque Game Engine Advanced 1.8 (TGEA) Beta for Mac OS X. Torque is a popular 3D game tool, which allows for complex Mission building, GUI creation, terrain editing and other tools to make. The TGE: Advanced 1.8 Beta is free for existing customers, $300 for an individual, $1500 for a company, and education prices can be obtained from the company.

Related Links:
• Macnn.com: Torque Game Engine Advanced now supports Mac  
• GarageGames.com 

Unity has been up to a lot lately. They brought their Unity 3D engine to the iPhone, and have had many new events. A recent update from Tom Higgins their Product Evangelist has a lot of new information to offer.
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Looking for free sounds to use in your game? Check out Soundsnap, a large collection of royalty-free sound effects and loops available on the web. Soundsnap is the best platform to find and share free sound effects and loops- legally. It is a collection of original sounds made or recorded by its users, and not songs or sound FX found on commercial libraries or sample CD’s.

• Related link: Soundsnap.com

BEYOND THE UNKNOWN

Venturing into the unknown can often be a daunting task, and Chimps Ahoy! had all the right ingredients to be very scary. Being Griptonite’s first foray into mobile games; having a short development cycle; and working on an unknown platform all combined to slightly intimidate us as a team. “Slightly” I said! However overwhelming the task might have seemed though, the excitement of being a launch title on such a unique platform instilled a thrill of adventure into the project, causing us to jump at the chance to develop a game for the iPhone.
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The 11-person team at Freeverse, Inc. might be small, but the company has scored big with the action arcade game Wingnuts 2: Raina’s Revenge, which won the 2006 Eddy Award for Best Game and was named runner-up for the 2006 Apple Design Awards for Best Mac Game.

Freeverse created a fun and addictive game, and according to the development team, the road to outstanding creative development was paved with Apple technologies such as Xcode, QuickTime, Core Image, the platform’s OpenGL implementation, and Mac OS X as a whole.

Related Links:
• Developer Connection: Building Wingnuts in Xcode with OpenGL: Freeverse Creates a Great Mac-only Game

EntropyDB is an embedded object database for Mac OS X 10.5 and iPhone OS written in Objective-C. It is built on top of SQLite. You can embed it in your own application or you can use it for RAD (Rapid Application Development) or Rapid Prototyping for iPhone with the open source Rapid tool.

• Related link: EntropyDB

Pagetable:

Today, we are releasing Commodore BASIC as a Scripting Language – it works on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X 10.4/10.5 (Intel and PowerPC), and you even get the source, so you can adapt it to other operating systems and CPUs.

Download Commodore BASIC

In 1986, Spike Lee broke into the movie business with She’s Gotta Have It — an independent film made outside of the major studios on maxed-out credit cards. The movie helped define a new era in independent filmmaking.

Now, a similar moment may be approaching in the gaming world; as developers become increasingly frustrated with the big gaming industry, smaller companies have etched out a niche by encouraging employees to be creative.

• Related Link: Indie Video Game Developers Have Room To Play

This summer, two EA veterans formed a company specifically to create iPhone games, that company is called Ngmoco. This stands for “Next Generation Mobile Company”. Ngmoco had been relatively quiet until recently, when it offered MacWorld a look into it’s three new offerings, and their thoughts on the iPhone game market. See the link below for the article.

Related Links:
• Developer: iPhone can rival Nintendo DS, Sony PSP for games 

iFund™

KPCB’s iFund™ is a $100M investment initiative that will fund market-changing ideas and products that extend the revolutionary new iPhone and iPod touch platform. The iFund™ is agnostic to size and stage of investment and will invest in companies building applications, services and components. Focus areas include location based services, social networking, mCommerce (including advertising and payments), communication, and entertainment. The iFund™ will back innovators pursuing transformative, high-impact ideas with an eye towards building independent durable companies atop the iPhone / iPod touch platform.
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