Posted on April 11th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Panda3D is free 3D Engine that can be used for any purpose, even commercial development. Panda3D has tutorials and an active support forum. Highlights of this engine include full Python integration, performance monitoring, depth & shadow textures, installers for multiplatforms, Cg shader language, sample programs, HDR rendering and Cel Shading. The Mac OS X one-step installer includes everything you need to get started with Panda3D: the engine, the python libraries, tons of utilities, and lots of sample programs. Currently, it requires Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) and the NVIDIA Cg Toolkit.
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Posted on April 8th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
One sale from a gamer is good. Convincing that gamer to stick around and buy more games is, of course, better. And generating new customers from existing ones is best. In other words, in today’s challenging marketplace, “repeat business” is the holy grail. You want to attract players who love your games (and why shouldn’t they?) — and then foster a relationship with them so that making incremental sales afterwards is a breeze.
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Posted on April 8th, 2009 by Andy Korth
An Army of One Creates a Design Document
The initial plan for Reclaimed was fairly ambitious. Since I was an army of one, I knew I had to limit the scope of the project carefully. The goal from my original design document stated that Reclaim would “create a basic persistent multi-player online top-down tile-based game.” All that, and have it at least moderately fun to play while falling into uDevGames’ three month development time limit.
For a handful of gamers, the design document’s goal was achieved. In fact, one gamer played 41 hours, and there were at least six that played for about 13 hours. On the other hand, of the 171 people who logged in, a lot of them didn’t spend more than a minute or two online. This includes a number of my contest peers — one notably spending only 95 seconds in game! It seems that while some players enjoyed Reclaimed, others definitely did not play long enough to receive a good sense of the game. The real question is why?
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Posted on April 6th, 2009 by Iain Bethune
Background
I seem to be spending more and more time on planes these days — often slowly taxiing around airports or waiting in a holding pattern to land! While idly staring out of the window I started thinking about what it must be like to be an air traffic controller, trying to get so many planes to land safely and quickly with only a limited number of runways and aircraft stands. Thus the idea of FIDRIS was born. Fast-forward several thousand years and you have a game where the object is to manage a space station, docking as many ships as you can given finite resources of time and space.
As one of the uDevGames voters commented “I’d say it was a creative risk to tackle the idea of this game”, and that’s definitely the case — at the start of the contest I just had this idea, but didn’t know if it would actually turn out to be ‘fun’ or not! What I did know was that it was a simple enough idea to be finished and polished within the three months I had available for the contest.
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Posted on April 3rd, 2009 by Iain Bethune
Nicholas Lovell from GamesBrief posts an interesting take on the surge in popularity of the iPhone as a mobile gaming platform, and discusses some of the problems faced by the flood of new games on the App Store. Visit PocketGamer to read his column.
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Posted on March 29th, 2009 by Iain Bethune
Startup Gendai Games® is announcing today the launch of the open beta program for GameSalad® Creator, an intuitive and easy to understand application that allows non-programmers to create and publish games to the web and iPhone. Since the quiet launch of their open alpha in February of 2009, Gendai Games has logged over a thousand unique alpha testers into their developer program.
With the free GameSalad Creator, designers can develop and test their games on their intel based Mac. Utilizing the forthcoming GameSalad iPhone Preview app, the game creator is able to prototype and test their game directly on an iPhone that is paired with their computer in a matter of seconds. Once ready for distribution, the game creator can purchase an exported build that is ready to submit to Apple for inclusion in the App Store. The pricing structure has yet to be announced but will be made available before the official launch of GameSalad.
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Posted on March 28th, 2009 by Iain Bethune
Unity 2.5 for Mac and Windows available now!
Unity Technologies are extremely happy to announce the release of Unity 2.5. For the first time Unity development is now available for use on both Mac OS X and Windows! True cross-platform development with Unity has now been realized.
Windows Editor Support
Unity 2.5 adds full support for Windows Vista and XP with full feature parity and interoperability with Mac OS X. The Unity editor has been rebuilt to look, feel and function identically on both operating systems, each running the same underlying engine. The best part? Unity on either platform can build games for either platform!
Tabbed Interface
Taking cues from the best designed applications, the rewritten editor has received dozens of improvements. The most visible change is the tabbed interface, where every part of the interface can be moved, undocked to a secondary monitor, and even stacked to achieve logical grouping.
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Posted on March 25th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
iGame Radio has extended the deadline for its Logo Contest, plus included information about some of the prizes available. Launched in February, the logo contest seeks everyone with an itch to draw, paint, or move those pixels to create the right design for a new logo for the iGame Radio podcast…the original Mac gaming podcast. And the deadline has been extended to May 22, 2009. The prize package has been building as well, and includes prizes from MusicSkins and PopCap Games. As more prizes are added to the package, they will be included on the website.
Posted on March 18th, 2009 by Alex Sikora
Yesterday, Apple announced the new iPhone OS 3.0, that they are planning to release this summer. The new OS contains over a hundred new features including copy paste, spotlight, push notifications, widescreen keyboard in key apple apps, in-app purchasing, and more. Many changes were also aimed at the developer, with the new 3.0 iPhone Software. The Map Kit can now be integrated into applications, and developers have access to new APIs for all the features listed above. A beta version of the iPhone 3.0 software and SDK are available to all paying developers who want to get started right away developing with these new APIs.
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Posted on March 16th, 2009 by iDevGames
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
CONTACT:
Carlos Camacho
iDevGames.com
http://www.udevgames.com
uDevGames 2008 Winners Announced, “Laserface Jones vs Doomsday Odious” Wins Best Overall
Vernon Connecticut, March 16, 2009 — iDevGames announces the winners of the uDevGames 2008 Contest. uDevGames is a Mac game development contest that requires teams to create a Mac game in just three months. The contest began on December 2, 2008 and features 20 games by Mac developers from around the globe.
“Laserface Jones vs Doomsday Odious” by Justin Ficarrotta was announced as the winner of ‘Best Overall Game.’ This category was chosen by public voting (including participating developers) which ended on March 12, 2009. Developers also scored games in six additional categories: Gameplay, Graphics, Audio, Story, Presentation and Originality. The winners will divide a prize pool of over $20,000 donated by the sponsors of uDevGames 2008.
“I’m completely psyched. The last three months have been a rollercoaster, but uDevGames 2008 has been a really amazing experience. There’s something about the pressure of the deadline and tangling with scores of other talented developers that gets the brain juice flowing, and motivates me to create things that may otherwise have never existed. My career kicked off from uDevGames 2004, so it was a pleasure to be able to come back and compete again. Big thanks go out to Ben, Dan, Bruce and Steve who all provided awesome content for the game, Carlos and the uDevGames volunteers, fellow developers for making me sweat for it, and to all the friends, family and Mac gamers who played and voted for Laserface Jones, and spread the word!” said Justin Ficarrotta, winner of Best Overall Game of uDevGames 2008.
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