Posted on May 27th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Cube 2: Sauerbraten is a free multiplayer/singleplayer first-person shooter, built as a major redesign of the Cube FPS. It’s been almost a year since the last release and there have been many changes:
- new playermodel, IronSnout X10K
- new weapon models
- new sound track
- new splash screen and logo
- 28 new multiplayer maps!
- 1 new singleplayer map
- new “protect” and “insta protect” game modes
- bots that work for both MP and offline play
- ragdoll physics
- texture blending and new flame/smoke particles for map editing
- in-game movie recording and also PNG screenshots
- new engines features like ZIP archive support, better grass, pre-compressed DXT1/3/5 textures for faster loading, fixed-function shadowmaps & dynamic lights, low cost blob shadows, particle culling, faster shader loading, revised post-process effect system, and more
- support for custom server ports, server passwords, public key crypto, and server-init.cfg for easier server configs
The engine supporting the game is entirely original in code and design, and its code is Open Source (ZLIB license, read the docs for more on how you can use the engine).
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Posted on May 27th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Rosetta Stone, the company known for their foreign language learning software, is sponsoring a game programming contest. The Contest begins on July 17, 2009, and ends on July 19, 2009. All applications to participate in the Contest must be received by Rosetta Stone no later than 5pm (Eastern Time) on July 1, 2009. This event will be held at Rosetta Stone’s location in Harrisonburg, VA from July 17th – 19th, 2009. You must apply by July 1st to be considered for the competition. The prizes are:
- 1st Prize: Macbook Pro with 30 inch cinema display, three levels of Rosetta Stone Software and your game published on a Rosetta Stone webpage
- 2nd Prize: $500 and three levels of Rosetta Stone Software.
Gamers must be or have a team with at least one programmer with game development programming experience using either Flash, XNA, OpenGL, PyGame, etc. You will be asked to provide an example of past creations of any form or level in order to qualify. Teams may include up to four members. All team members must be 18 years of age or over to participate, or be accompanied by a parent or legal guardian at all times during their participation.
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Posted on May 23rd, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Seems like StrangeFlavour LTD isn’t the only UK-based developer enjoying the iPhone games market. “Pocket Gamer UK”: http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk has posted an interview with Nalin Sharma, another independent developer based in the UK that has produced games for the Atari ST, GameCube, PlayStation 2 and Windows. He’s recently ported a tech demo for smartphones over to the iPhone and released it as the game Killer Edge Racing. When asked, “ How did you find the iPhone as a development platform?”, Nalin replies, “Awesome. It is light years ahead of any other mobile development platform. It really is a brilliant system from start to finish, although Xcode does take some getting used to if you are familiar with Visual C++ and with other mobile platforms. In the past, Java games were a nightmare to develop and test, but because this is a native platform you have all the hardware available to develop great games like Killer Edge Racing, and at an efficient cost. He also mentions his surprise at selling over 100 copies in the first six days, though he hopes to sell 10,000 to cover his costs.
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Posted on May 22nd, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Nick Santilli of “the Apple Blog”: http://theappleblog.com/ blogs about his return to the world of coding. His work place is PC-based though small enough that a switch to Apple’s platform would be feasible. To migrate to the Mac, he asks the questions:
- What are your best arguments for using the Mac platform as our main development machines? What makes them a better, more flexible — even more cost-efficient — solution to our large, beefy, Dell machines that we’re currently using (in between blue screens)?
- What you’ve found to be your streamlined software configuration for such tasks?
Specifically, his article hopes to uncover the selection of an IDE, though he is leaning towards NetBeans, as well as database and server tools. If you’re a software engineer or an Apple VAR, take a second and add provide him with your comments.
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Posted on May 21st, 2009 by Alex Sikora
Arik Hesseldahl at BusinessWeek wrote an article on whether or not the iPhone is going to be the most important gaming platform. He covers some of the effects of the new 3.0 features and where some companies are headed with iPhone gaming.
After years of neglecting the Mac as a platform for games, Apple’s phone, not its computers, offers the most gaming promise. The iPhone’s tech-savvy base of 21 million users is an ideal audience for a new breed of compelling games that should make the device even more compelling. Between the iPhone and the iPod Touch, which can also run the same games, Apple could soon have the best-selling handheld platform on the market.
In related news, iDevGames is interested in postmortems written by iPhone game developers. If you’d like to reach out to your peers and gain further marketing reach, be sure top contact our Editor-in-Chief.
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Posted on May 20th, 2009 by Joe Flores
Dysentery Over a Cup of Coffee
Overall, I am quite happy with the quality of the game I produced for the uDevGames 2008 Contest, despite the emergence of some unfixed bugs and a game not as feature — complete as I would have preferred. I entered the contest rather late compared to almost everyone else, and without pre-existing code or a clear idea of what kind of game I was going to make. My co-conspirator and I essentially threw together the idea and basic logic for Simoebic Dysentery over a cup of coffee at the beginning of January, finished asset development by the beginning of February, and I had a working beta built by the end of the contest by the beginning of March. Built essentially in my free time, I feel that the game would have been coded better and had more features had I been able to devote more time to its development.
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Posted on May 13th, 2009 by James Dessart
Taking Advice From a Veteran Programmer
When I read that uDevGames was happening again this year, I got excited. I had just read an interview with a successful casual games developer about how he achieved his success. It gave me some ideas, and one of them blossomed into GnomeSpy.
Following the advice in Justin Ficarrotta’s article on A uDevGames 2008 Survival Guide , I wrote up a prototype using Cocoa through Xcode. I play-tested GnomeSpy internally until the gameplay reached a certain level of fun, then released the prototype to iDevGames’ forum members. Along with play-testing by friends and family, this provided an invaluable resource for determining reasonable completion times for the basic six-color game.
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Posted on May 12th, 2009 by Matt Hergaarden
How it all started
The development of “Surrounded by Death” started with our passion for first person shooters and zombies! We always wanted to make some kind off mix between tower defence and the invasion of horrifying brain eating zombies. We from Wooglie were developing games on Unity for about half a year now and just recently set up our own gaming site. We read about this competition on the Unity3D forum and we thought it would be an excellent opportunity for us to create a cool game and win prizes with it! So we brainstormed on what to make for this competition. After a long brainstorming session we came to the idea of making a zombie invasion game. We called for help from the Verdun-Online team(which is also a project Wooglie is participating on) to assist us with the art and the sound. Leonidas, Stone Lion joined our team and we then consisted of a team of four enthusiastic developers to make an awesome game for Mac!
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Posted on May 10th, 2009 by David Guy
Avoid All Contact
The game I chose to work on for the 2008 uDevGames contest was one I’d had in my design notebook for awhile. I picked it because of its simple gameplay and simple graphics, making it something I felt was doable by the contest deadline.
The game idea involved maneuvering through levels of narrow, twisty passages, filled with static, animated and/or free-floating obstacles while trying to avoid contact with almost everything. Controlling your avatar would be accomplished by simply dragging it with the mouse, and gameplay would be at a methodical but hurried pace.
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Posted on May 5th, 2009 by Justin Ficarrotta
Background Info
After growing up wanting only to make videogames, and making a few small games with Pascal and later Hypercard in grade school, I released my first game for the uDevGames contest in 2004, called Kill Dr. Coté. It won the award for Best Gameplay, was a fan favorite, went on to be published by Freeverse, and got me my first job in the industry as a programmer.
Since then, my output has been scarce. I quickly followed up with “Arachnoid: Predator of Worlds” in July 2005, but after that, working full time in the industry drained me and thwarted any progress on independent work. Several years passed, and during that time I first yearned for the energy to work on a project, and after that failed, I started to even doubt whether I would be capable of such a project and still keep myself fed. When I heard that uDevGames 2008 was starting, I figured it would be the best time to find out once and for all. While in 2004, my purpose was to prove my talent and ability to the world, this time around it would be to prove it to myself!
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