Posted on August 31st, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Austin developer David Kalina worked for Midway Games while his partner, Randy Smith, was employed by EA. As big publisher’s continue to cut back development and cancel projects, more and more former employees are looking to the iPhone game market for opportunities. David and Randy launched their company Tiger Style and already have a hit iPhone game, Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor. The developers share their story on austinist.com and will also be speaking about their transition to Indie developers at the Austin Game Developer’s Conference on September 15.
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Posted on August 21st, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
VolnaTech has released NimbleKit SDK 1.5.1, an update to its SDK for iPhone developers. NimbleKit allows quicker development using just HTML and JavaScript. The developer claims that you don’t need to know Objective-C or iPhone SD — all you need is to know how to write an HTML page with JavaScript code. NimbleKit installs in Xcode and provides you with a new “NimbleKit project template.” Version 1.5.1 boasts new functions and improvements, according to VolnaTech. Those include application badges; TabBar controller badges; Toolbar, TabBar and Navigation bar improvements; NKAudioPlayer and NKInternetPlayer are greatly improved; Native control to set global iPhone volume; Multibutton dialog sheets; Abilities to mix JavaScript and Objective-C code; Seeking in NKInternetPlayer, and more. Their press release also mentions that memory leaks and threading issues have been fixed, while the overall stability has been greatly improved.
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Posted on August 19th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Dev Hub is running a contest aimed at SDL programmers. The contest’s aim is to make a side-scrolling shooter. The contest is open to all game developers, and has requirements similar to uDevGames. The grand prize is $200 with a deadline of September 1, 2009. If this contest has perked your interest in learning more about SDL, head on over to Bright Hub for their series on SDL tutorials — and yes, they even teach you about parallax scrolling.
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Posted on August 12th, 2009 by Lincoln Green
Perfect for Lone Wolf Developers
If you are a Unity3D user and have ever felt the urge to do a character animation demo, play with ragdoll physics, tweak particle emitters, or even just put a flag on the moon, the FroGames Protopack is for you. The name pretty much says it — it’s a package of art for rapid prototyping in Unity3D. If you are a programmer who can’t draw stick figures and doesn’t have a dedicated artist, but wants to learn Unity, the protopack is for you.
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Posted on August 10th, 2009 by Simon Read
Overview
After completing my previous game New Star GP I was considering replacing the racing cars with space ships and putting weapons in the game. It seemed like a fairly simple way to reuse the code that I’d spent the previous three months working on and quickly create an entirely new game. Meanwhile I had been playing PuppyGames’ Gravitron which I’d purchased through Steam and was mulling over the prospect of making a similar retro style game. It suddenly hit me that I could create the combat racing game with a neon vector look. Throw in some cool explosions and a techno sound-track and hey-presto, I’d have Geometry Wars meets Wipeout.
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Posted on August 2nd, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Millenipede is a fast-paced arcade shoot ‘em up originally developed in less than seven days for the 94th “Wednesday Workshop” at SoCoder and is inspired by the Atari classics Centipede and Millipede. Your aim is to zap all of the millenipedes on each wave while dodging spiders, snails and of course the millenipedes themselves. They’ll make their way down the screen until eventually they hit the bottom, at which point they will roam around the player area until you shoot them. The sound for this game is pure 8-bit bliss and the eye candy will be sure to bring back memories — when games were simple and fun!
The great news for BlitzMax programmers is that the developer as released the source code under a Creative Commons license. You will need both the source code and the additional BlitzMax modules to successfully compile the game. Keep in mind that the source package does not include the game resources (i.e. the graphics, sounds, music and fonts), so you will have to take these from the game downloads.
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Posted on August 2nd, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
The Baja Engine provides a top quality 2d and 3d renderer based on OpenGL. Rendering scales across multiple screen resolutions and aspect ratios without the need to change your code. (Renders are consistent and high quality across all hardware configurations. When necessary, the renderer degrades to work on older hardware.)
Baja also includes extensive 2d rendering support for game interfaces and 2d games. Baja features exciting next generation technologies such as realtime reflections, high-quality water using shaders, and displacement mapping. It also includes framebuffer effects like blur and glow. Baja’s scripting environment incorporates Lua.
Baja runs on both Windows and Mac OS X — your game will run on both platforms with absolutely no changes to level files or source code. Your game content (textures, scripts, models) can also be packed into compiled files to protect your intellectual property. All this can then be packed into a commercial-quality installer that looks as good as any game put out by a large studio.
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Posted on August 2nd, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
flixel is a completely free collection of Actionscript 3 files that helps organize, automate, and optimize Flash games; an object-oriented framework that lets anyone create original and complex games with thousands of objects on screen in just a few hours. flixel is not intended to be used with the Flash IDE, since it is a pure Actionscript library. The developer recommends using Flex Builder, FlashDevelop (Windows only) or mxmlc.
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Posted on August 1st, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
A new release of the SIO2 game engine for the iPhone and iPod Touch has been released featuring improved stability and enhanced support for OpenGL ES v1.1. This release also includes numerous bug fixes and major
optimization — performance is up to 40% faster! SIO2 1.4 also include a new action strip based animation system, faster, smaller and more flexible than any previous versions. SIO2 can be used for free or for commercial products. The SIO2_SDK comes with a set of 20 tutorials, and video tutorials, documentation, online support through forum, email and IM, and also include outsourcing services.
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Posted on July 30th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
0 A.D. is a free, cross-platform, under-development, 3D, historically-based, real-time strategy game. If you’ve played or seen Microsoft’s Age of Empire series, then you’ll have a good idea of this RTS game. The developers recently announced that the code available as GPL and the art content is available as CC-BY-SA.
here’s roughly 150K lines of C++ for the game engine, and another 25K for editing tools. Gameplay scripting uses JavaScript. We build on top of low-level libraries (OpenGL, OpenAL, ENet, …), not an existing game engine (like OGRE). The code isn’t all extremely clean or extremely modular or extremely well-written. It’s been written by a wide variety of programmers, and it’s far from a “completed” codebase. We want to continue cleaning things up as part of the normal development process. We’re not averse to rewriting entire subsystems if that’s the most effective way to make them satisfy our requirements. But in many areas it’s quite solid.
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