If you are an enrolled college student, 38 Studios (that’s a studio name, not 38 different studios) want you to make a game for them starring their own character, Munch, and his.. uh.. evil twin… evil Munch for their 2nd annual Massachusetts Game Challenge. Why would you want to do that? How about $500 cash? $1,000? 1,500? It’s not the most exciting proposition out there, but the promise of cold hard cash is never a bad motivator.
They are also holding a game jam from tonight until February 8th to kick things off at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, so if you’re a student there or somewhere nearby, this could be good times.
The studio was founded by Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, and is currently working with author R.A. Salvatore and artist Todd McFarlane to develop an MMORPG based on an original fantasy IP codenamed Copernicus (crazy).
Contest detaisl on 38 Studios page
GameJam details
Greg Costikyan has released Vector 3, a tabletop game he designed in 1979, under the Creative Commons license. The downloadable archive contains the rules PDF as well as printable (though low resolution) board and set pieces graphics. From Greg:
Vector 3 is a 3D space combat board game; its virtue is that players learn the essentials of vector arithmetic and Newtonian mechanics by playing. On a number of occasions, people have told me they learned more about this from the game than from lecture courses. I could see using it in the context of a high-school math or physics course.
Board games have always been fascinating to me in their straightforward presentation of game design rules, untainted by the many complications that plague video game design and while of course there are graphical and sometimes even audio components to board games, mostly they are just about the game rules and the interaction they solicit from the players. I think that video games have alot to learn from that purity.
I think I’m gonna try to print this out and see what it’s all about.
Greg’s announcement on Play This Thing
Direct link to Vector3 archive
Can’t wait for the upcoming Cave Story Wii? Make yourself a little paper Balrog and clutch it in your arms as you cry yourself to sleep at night. Or just put it on your desk. Whatever.
Secret Balrog papercraft blueprints via Nicalis Blog via Cubecraft blog
Don’t forget to check out the other amazing papercraft blueprints on the Cubecraft site
The jolly bunch of lowbit weirdoes The Poppenkast, normally the proprietors of short (and I mean short… 3 hours short) game development competitions, are running their first big compo, the theme of which is “Game Noir” (quoth: “game noir = film noir but then a game”). The competition is already a couple of weeks in , but the deadline has been extended until march, so if you’re itching to make something, here’s a good reason to do it. There’s even a very functional and useful prize involved!
The Poppenkast BIG COMPO on The Poppenkast Forums
There’s also a somewhat related article on Gamasutra from last year called “Is The Industry Ready For Its ‘Game Noir’?” that’s pretty interesting.
There are already a few interesting entries in the works. Hit the jump for a few sneak screenshots.
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“Programming Vertex, Geometry, and Pixel Shaders” by Wolfgang Engel, Jack Hoxley, Ralf Kornmann, Niko Suni and Jason Zink is a book published for free to the GameDev.net wiki and covers a wide range of shader programming techniques. It is covers mostly DX10 techniques and seems to be D3D-centric, but I’m sure there is plenty of knowledge to be gained even if you’re into OpenGL. It seems to be very thorough and even on a quick skimthrough, it seems more useful than a couple of actual physical books on shaders that I own.
The authors are working on a DX11 print-only version and are open to your comments and suggestions.
“Programming Vertex, Geometry, and Pixel Shaders” on GameDev.net Wiki
Well this one came out of nowhere. The first annual global game jam is apparently coming up. I had no idea such a thing was about to happen, but now that I know, I feel warmer inside.
This isn’t like a virtual game jam, either. Oh no. This is like a get drunk with and hug/fondle your fellow game developers game jam, so please do check it out. There is a list of locations on the Global Game Jam Website, so go find your city, or the city closest to you, or the city that you wouldn’t mind spending a week hitchhiking to, and get jammin!
This bit of breaking news is almost a month old, but I haven’t seen it posted around.
Back in December NYU announced the creation of the NYU Game Center, which will focus on research, design and development of video games. So far it seems that it’s just a banner under which all of the existing NYU game-design related courses, which are offered in its other technology programs, will be collated, but there is plans to add new ones in the coming year.
From the NYU press release:
Beginning in spring 2009, the Center will offer a series of talks and panel discussions that will be open to the public and featuring leading game designers. In fall 2009, it will offer undergraduate courses to 10-12 students a year who may choose a minor, major or double major. Graduate courses are slated for fall 2010. Approximately six graduate students a year will be admitted to the two-year Master’s program or certificate program.
Read the full press release here
After installing a new spam blocker I realized that there’s no decent way of removing the hundreds of spam comments that have previously gotten through, so seeing that there haven’t been THAT many non-spam comments in this blog’s lifetime, I decided to trash them all. I apologize to those commenters who were actually human.
Gamasutra has posted a postmortem of Tales of Tales’ “The Graveyard”. It’s an interesting (and very thorough!) read and includes a few pages on the people that worked on the game, like the animator, Laura Raines Smith and the composer Gerry De Mol. Go read it now.
The Graveyard Postmortem on Gamasutra
Infinite Ammo recently wrapped up their first game, an anaglyphic demo for Gamma3D called Paper Moon. I got to work on some of the environment art, and it was just a blast, the most fun I’ve had making a game in a while. The whole thing took about 10 days, Alec and the rest of the crew in Winnipeg were awesome to work with. It was kind of a weird process though! Pictures after the jump. Read More »