I am happy that the brothers David and Richard Darling, who started their company in the mid-80’s, were honored for their “services to the computer games industry”. They have blazed a trail for independent game developers to follow, and I am truly grateful to them for their pioneering efforts as bedroom coders.

David and Richard, I salute you.

I learned about subpixel rendering only very recently after playing the amazing physics-based game BreakQuest, which utilizes the technique to allow great-looking particle effects to be implemented through software rendering. BreakQuest’s author Fèlix Casablancas explains the concept of subpixel rendering very well in a forum thread on his website, and I think it’s a good read for anyone who wants a clear explanation of the concept of subpixel rendering.

Will has other Pygame stuff on his website, and I’m sure there’s a lot more on the way – he’s the author of an upcoming Pygame book from Apress . I’m excited already!

I’m trying to beat a deadline, and need the space to submit an entry, so I made this entry for me to be able to upload something.

I’m sorry if that previous paragraph didn’t make sense – I’ll add details later.

Ready to make your dream of creating video games come true? The Dream-Build-Play Challenge is your chance! Design and build an original game for Windows XP SP2 or Xbox 360™ using XNA Game Studio Express, a new tool from Microsoft®. Besides worldwide fame and recognition, your entry could also win you some fantastic prizes.

I’ve talked about XNA Game Studio Express before, and here’s another reason for you to consider this game development option – you can learn game programming, and possibly win something at the same time . The first prize winner will get:

• An invitation to enter into an Xbox Live™ Arcade Publishing Contract on terms and conditions applicable to such offer
• $10,000 USD
• Alienware Aurora® 7500 desktop system with AMD Athlon™ 64 FX-62 Dual Core Processor, courtesy of Alienware PC and AMD
• Retail copy of Windows Vista Ultimate operating system
• Autographed Xbox 360 Premium SKU retail console
• 2-year subscription to the XNA Creators Club
• 25 four-month subscription tokens to the XNA Creators Club, to share your masterpiece with friends and family
• Choice of Softimage®|XSI® Advanced 6.0, Autodesk® 3ds Max® 9, or Autodesk® Maya® Complete 8.5

The runner-up prizes are quite attractive as well! Just like in the Intel contest, GarageGames plays a special role here with their product Torque X.

Entries are due on July 2, so that should give you plenty of time to learn how to code games with XNA. If you’re looking for a project to work on, this should serve as an excellent motivation!

The next challenge is PyWeek 4, which will run in the first week of April.

Register NOW!

The PyWeek challenge:

1. Invites entrants to write a game in one week from scratch either as an individual or in a team,
2. Is intended to be challenging and fun,
3. Will hopefully increase the public body of game tools, code and expertise,
4. Will let a lot of people actually finish a game, and
5. May inspire new projects (with ready made teams!)

Entries must be developed in Python during the challenge, and must incorporate some theme decided at the start of the challenge. See the challenge rules for more information.

I haven’t tried participating in one of these yet (I got as far as signing in and writing a very enthusiastic plan of action, but no code ), but I think I should give this a shot this April, and you should, too! I’m amazed at the output that this has generated so far – in a span of just one week, plenty of very good games have been written. The physics-based Nelly’s Rooftop Garden and the well-polished Trip on the Funny Boat are personal favorites – try downloading these games and see what can be done in just a week.

Making good art has always been my weakness – that’s why I rely so much on SpriteLib. Maybe I should consider using simple geometric objects and pygame.draw…

Greetings folks! This is the official announcement of TO Jam 2. This years event promises to be bigger, more exciting and prestigious than last year. We currently are able to confirm the following information about the event:

-Will be held in the downtown Toronto area
-Event will happen May 4,5,6
-Refer to the event website http://www.tojam.ca for the latest news and developments
-Refer to the discussion forums to talk about your ideas, look for team members and ask questions about the event

If you live in Toronto, then this is probably a good event for you to participate in. By participating in this kind of event, some pressure will be put on you, and the chances of actually coming up with something gets better – it’s good to start May 4 with the idea that you will have a “complete game” by May 6. Also, participating in events like this allows you to meet up with other game developers – the event itself is a natural venue for working on a game as a team.

To get you started, the TOJam organizers have made available some frameworks that you can use with the games. One may be used with Flash, the other with Pygame. Unfortunately, the Pygame framework isn’t available for download yet, but details about it may be found on a pygame-users message from last year.

Hopefully, our local IGDA chapter will organize something like this as well .

Once again Charles River Media and series editor Steve Rabin are looking for game developers to share their wisdom in the next brand new volume of the groundbreaking AI Game Programming Wisdom series. Anything that an AI game programmer would typically deal with is fair game, including pathfinding, AI architecture, animation control, scripting, learning, and various decision-making techniques. Selected authors will have several months to write and will share in a portion of the book’s royalties. Proposals for 8-20 page articles are now being accepted until March 31st.

For those of you who are in a position to contribute to this volume, here’s your chance . I have a copy of the first book in this series, and I have to say that it is a very useful and impressive volume. It’s not the type of book that you would read from cover to cover. Instead you are presented with a series of focused articles that deal with cutting-edge game AI techniques. It’s more of an encyclopedia/cookbook than a textbook. Emphasis is on depth than on breadth, and this can prove to be very useful if you’re trying to solve a very specific problem that’s actually already covered in the book.

Maybe I’ll try to contribute in AI Wisdom 5. I’m particularly interested in the racing articles provided by the series, and I thought that the articles contained in AI Wisdom 1 are all top-notch. I find Euan Forrester’s Intelligent Steering Using PID Controllers (contained in AI Wisdom 2) article very interesting – probably, the information contained in this article will be especially relevant to today’s games, because game AI would have to be designed to consider the underlying physics engine. Unfortunately I don’t have a copy of AI Wisdom 2 YET. Hopefully, I’ll have access to this article soon and hopefully write a follow-up to it – I did some work with optimal control theory as an undergraduate and I’m thrilled at the possibility of applying it to (hopefully cutting-edge) game development!

Of course, if you find the above interesting as well, go ahead and write about it. I would love to read the result, and hopefully build upon that work eventually.

Be sure to read the guidelines before submitting your proposal. Now go work on those articles! There are royalties to be earned!

In April of this year you’ll be able to download an update to XNA Game Studio Express, this release mainly focuses fixing your requests and issues that you’ve filed through the Microsoft Connect site(yes, we really do read and respond to your bugs and feedback as best we can).

A list of improvements for the release is given on the site. What I found most interesting are the items that he saved for last:

Developer sharing of packaged XNA Game Studio Express Games

• Users can now package their binary games into a single file to share with other users of XNA Game Studio Express.
• These files can be emailed or hosted on websites like any other files.
• To run a game double click a file and it will unpack to your Windows based PC or Xbox 360 console, it’s that easy!

This is amazing, although you will need to shell out at least $49 for a Creators Club subscription that will allow you to take advantage of these. However, the compilers and the game libraries needed to develop the actual games are free to download, and there are plenty of training materials available as well. Developing for the PC is free, and seeing your game run on the XBox 360 costs less than a hundred dollars – just a few years ago, this was unheard of! It really is an exciting time to be a game developer

GameProducer.Net had a chance to talk with Adrian Crook, game producer at Relic Entertainment. Relic has stunning games in their portfolio, for example: Homeworld, Company of Heroes and The Outfit.

In this interview, Adrian describes the work of a game producer, and even says that “the lack of a ‘typical’ day is probably what I like best about being a producer!” He shares that he got his start in the game industry at the QA department of EA Canada in 1995, and got work as a Producer a year later.

When asked about how someone can land a job in the game industry, Adrian responds:

I get asked this question all the time. You could go to a game school like Vancouver Film School, or work on a mod, or get a job in the production, QA or Balance departments of a developer or publisher. Or all of the above. Either way, you need to demonstrate a love of games and solid communication and organizational skills. Then you need to get noticed somehow… so taking any game industry job to start is a good thing. If you’re an awesome performer and vocal about your career goals, then you’ll likely end up where you want to be.

A whole lot more is discussed in the interview, so go read it!

San Francisco – March 13, 2007 – We’re extremely proud to announce that later this year, Unity will support creating games for the amazing Nintendo Wii game console.

This is a very intriguing announcement. I’ve been a huge Mac fan since I was a kid, and I really thought that the Unity game development tool was a fantastic concept when I saw it. With this announcement, making games for the revolutionary Wii may become a possibility for a lot more people, hopefully for you and me.

With this, it becomes possible to make Wii games with Python! Well, sort of. Unity supports game scripting via the language Boo, which uses a Python-inspired syntax. With this feature, it should be easier for Pythonistas to learn how to use Unity.

Currently, Unity is a Mac-only tool, but supports deployment on Windows and Mac. Eventually, I hope to own my own Mac and a copy of Unity. All I have to do now is look for $2700 to spend…