A New Change ...

As you regulars have probably noticed. I've gone with a new look that's a lot easier on the eyes. Let me know what you think.

Speek soon.

SGS '07 Speaker....Got What It Takes??

Think you got what it takes to be a SGS '07 Speaker? -Check it out and if you sign up let us know! =)



Serious Games Summit 07 Wants Speakers



Looking for individuals involved in all aspects of game design



The CMP Game Group today announced that the 2007 Serious Games Summit(SGS) is accepting speaker proposals. The board of advisors is seekingsubmissions for 6 conference tracks: Assessment & Results, Behindthe Game, Business & Deals, Game Design, Learning &Instructional Theory, and Products within Projects. The SGS will takeplace March 5-6 at the Moscone Convention Center North in San Franciscoas part of the Game Developers Conference (GDC).

"Next year's summit will revolve around 'Taking Control' and will setthe tone for two-days of sessions crafted specifically to help findsolutions to the problems affecting the serious games community," saidJamil Moledina, executive director, GDC. "Furthermore, the SeriousGames Summit GDC offers a collegiate atmosphere that allowsparticipants to network and exchange ideas with their peers in anintimate setting, making the summit a must attend for those interestedin advancing the industry."

Those interested in making a speaker proposal should visit http://www.gdconf.com before the deadline of September 5, 2006.

GameDaily BIZ: Serious Games Summit 07 Wants Speakers

H-A-D-O-K-E-N ! ! !

And Street Fighter II continues to live on in all of us......




Street Fighter II Sees Success in Live Arcade


And a mighty "hadoken" rang out across Live


Capcom announced today that Street Fighter II' Hyper Fightinghas become the fastest selling selling Xbox Live Arcade title to date.This has resulted in "hundreds of matches being played every hour." Street Fighter II' Hyper Fighting released earlier this week on Xbox Live Arcade and is available for 800 Microsoft points.

"We are elated by the tremendous response Xbox Live users have given Street Fighter II' Hyper Fightingas players around the world vie to be on top of the game's numerousleaderboards," said Charles Bellfield, vice president of marketing,Capcom Entertainment. "It'll be exciting to see who ranks number one onXbox Live Arcade after the first weekend of gamers playing the greatestarcade title in history."

"The phenomenal response to Street Fighter II' Hyper Fightingon Xbox Live Arcade comes as no surprise as this has been one of themost eagerly anticipated titles of the summer," said Greg Canessa,Group Manager of Xbox Live Arcade, Microsoft. "We are thrilled thatgamers everywhere are jumping into Xbox Live Arcade and enjoying thefantastic game play experiences this title and our platform has tooffer."

by David Radd

Publishers at 4th LivePitch Revealed ...

Publishers at 4th LivePitch Revealed

Includes Capcom, Konami and Codemasters

The Game Initiative today announced the publishers participating in the fourth annual LivePitch. The list includes Capcom Entertainment, NCsoft, Majesco Entertainment, Atari, Konami Digital Entertainment, MTV Networks, WildTangent, and Codemasters. Developers must submit projects to www.LivePitch.com by August 15, 2006 to be eligible for consideration.

GameDaily BIZ: Publishers at 4th LivePitch Revealed

Spy Hunters Sweepstakes! Great Prizes!

Spy Hunter Sweepstakes Reveal

Two tickets to E3 2007 as a prize. Whoops.

This is a great sweetstakes!! The Prizes are incredible. I highly recommended checking it out! Read more at GAMEDAILY by clicking the link above.

technorati tags:spy, hunter, sweepstakes, E3, 2007, prizes, Gamedaily

Want to Learn How to Program Too?

Looking to get into game programming as well? Or just looking to learn some programming skills?

Check out Learnprogramming.org. They've done all the searching for you to get some of the best books to help you get started. I wouldn't waste my time searching for the best current books available out there when these guys have already done it for you. =)

They're one of my favourite sites. I even have them linked in the menu to the right - check them out!

A Gamers Console

For All you PC gamers out there, you know that with each new game released will come packed with new technology. And keeping up is a bit of a hassle. You will always hear us complain, but you'll also always see us first in line picking up the upgrades to play the games. Here's one very nice Desktop PC bundle for the true gamers.

TigerDirects CybertronPC – X-Plorer Gamer Intel Pentium D. Now this thing is gorgeous. Sleek blue and black colour case, speaker and sub-woofer. Powered by an Intel D dual core processor. With a 160GB harddrive and 1 GB of RAM at 400MHz and a 256 graphics card all for about $1000 CAD. That isn't too bad for you Canadian shoppers. And for those of you who dont like the blue it comes in a range of colours from green, gray, to red and yellow. For true hardcore gamers you may want to upgrade that graphics card, but it should run fine when playing your current favourites. Check out the bundle below.

E3, Wii, Halo 3, WoW

E3, Nintendo Wii, Halo 3, and World of Warcraft are currently the most searched for gaming related topics. Hopefully i'll get a chance to update you all on all of them. I'm a fan of all 4.

E3 is always great. A fun and exciting place to find out whats new and whats to come in the video game industry.

Wii, as I've mentioned in a previous post, is the new Nintendo console. Looks great. Can't wait for that to come out.

Halo 3. If it's anything like the first and second one it should be loads of fun. Especially the online play. It's always fun playing with real people then AI.

Which brings me to World of Warcraft. I've been in this realm for about a year now. Absolutely amazing game. With coninuous updates, the world just gets bigger and better with time.

4 great topics to talk about. Drop by soon for continous posts on the topics. In addition to my game development posts of course. It's coming along, but I'm far from creating games related to any of the 4 topics. Maybe someday....sooner than later =)

Fun Filled FLASH!

Wow, it's been some time since my last post. I'll skip the details and go right into my post.

I've decided to create my CEO requested project in FLASH. I have to admit it's coming along quite nicely. It's pretty fun creating graphics and animation with FLASH. So much so, that I've recently ordered 2 new books.

1. Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Game Development by Glen Rhodes and,
2. Flash MX 2004 Savvy: Also Covers FLASH Professional by E. Watrall, N. Herber

You'll notice they're moderate/advanced level books. I've found that practically all the basic knowledge you'll need to be comfortable using FLASH is already included in the software through lessons and tutorials.

It's unfortunate that I can't share my current work with the rest of you. Company/business policies. You know how it is.

So to conclude for today. For those of you that dont want to dive to deeply into heavy coding or have very little to no programming experience I do recommand starting with FLASH. FLASH's action script is not a full-fletched programming language just yet, although, I must admit it does act like one sometimes.

Revolution has a new name! NINTENDO Wii. What is Wii?

Nintendo Revolution has a new name. NINTENDO Wii. Pronounced 'We'. Why the sudden change?

"While the code-name "Revolution" expressed our direction, Wii represents the answer.
Wii will break down that wall that separates video game players from everybody else.
Wii will put people more in touch with their games...and each other. But you're
probably asking: What does the name mean?"

Check it out Nintendo Wii

It's an interesting concept. Strange yet cute name. Nothing surprising from those wacked out minds who created 2 ass kicking plumbers that ate shrooms to gain super powers.

I've always been a big fan of Nintendo. Hell, I grew up with it. Great fun and always different from the rest. Can't wait to see what the minds at Nintendo come up with next.

E3 2006

It's almost that time again. E3 is opening its doors this May 10-12 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Online registration ends this Friday, April 28 so if you want to go you better turn up the warp drive.

Here's a little snippet from their website www.e3expo.com :

Hear the industry's top creatives speak about their upcoming games, including Spore designer Will Wright, God of War 2 lead David Jaffe, and Metal Gear Solid 4 creator Hideo Kojima.

Other recognized developers in this program include Doom 3 lead designer Tim Willits, Killer 7 designer Gouichi Suda of grasshopper manufacture, Junction Point founder Warren Spector, Lionhead founder Peter Molyneux, Lumines designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi, and Tabula Rasa designer Richard Garriott.

The list of creatives is complemented by an equally impressive lineup of corporate and business development strategists including Electronic Arts Senior VP and Managing Director Asia Jon Niermann, Executive Vice President of MTV Networks Music and Logo Enterprise Group Jeff Yapp, and Buena Vista Games Senior VP and General Manager Graham Hopper.

Recent additions to the program include Bethesda Game Studios Executive Producer Todd Howard (Oblivion), Ubisoft Divertissements Creative Director Clint Hocking, and KBC Securities (Japan) analyst Hiroshi Kamide.

This year's program marks the largest group of speakers ever.

Sounds like a great show. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to take time off work this year to attend, but I'm looking forward to checking out all the post-show updates.

Layers, Animation and Art, Oh My!

Sorry about the title, I just had to do it ;)

I've found that if you want a really easy and quick way to gain a general idea and understanding of such concepts as layering, animation and timelines, and graphic design (such as masking, transformations, filtering, etc) that you take a look at FLASH and Adobe (any Photoshop x.x or CS2 are fine). Both come with easy to follow lessons that walk you through some of these concepts. Learning the concepts through these 2 technologies allows you to visually perceive what is actually going on. You will learn what such terms as 'masking' and 'skewing' mean and actually see what they're suppose to do.

I've found this to be a very fun way of getting started. Maybe you will to, especially when an integral part of any final game is its graphics and animation.

Another bonus is that once you're done with these lessons, and you've played around with your new learned skills, you'll be able to create amazing art work, banners, and even logos for your websites.

Gamedev.net... Check them out.

For anyone looking to get into game development. Check out Gamedev.net. I have a link to their site on the right. It's a great place to find information and answers to all levels of game development. That's where I started my journey and that's where I tend to continue to refer to throughout it.

Duty calls!

The CEO at my company has just asked me to put something together to assist attendence at our communications meetings. What the CEO asks, the CEO gets. So I'll be putting aside my game programming book for the next month or so. What's asked of me is game/animated related so I'll still be getting the experience I'm looking for. This should be fun.

Wish me luck.

One bump after another

Haven't had much time to move forward over the long weekend. I was pretty busy with some spring cleaning, a birthday, and of course work that never seems to end. Now that i've taken a break from all that I've decided to read another sub chapter or two from the book. But just my luck, when attempting to install the Blitz demo packed with the book I was getting installation errors. Wasn't sure why at first until I took out the cd and flipped it over. What did I find? My brand new cd was cracked! That's right, a large star shaped crack right near the center. So I went to the BlitzBasic site and downloaded the demo from there. I'm not sure what else I may need from the cracked cd. I may have to contact the author and see if he can at least p2p what i need. *fingers crossed*

It seems so far that my experience with game programming has been all but complaints hasn't it? I'm optimistic it will get better. There's no where to go now but up! =).

To Blitz or not to Blitz?

Well after reading the intro chapter for 'Game Programming For Teens' 2nd ED. I've already come to a fork in the road. The author (Maneesh Sethi - shout outs to him by the way, for writing a book at such a young age) uses BlitzPlus to compile his games created in BASIC. Maneesh only adds a demo version of BlitzPlus and you (the reader) are suggested to either purchase the full version or use an older verson BlitzBasic. Now, the question is. Do I run out and buy Blitz?

Oh, for those who aren't aware, demo versions of Blitz are set to run only 30 times before locking up. Yes, Maneesh does state this in the book, but as the reader it would have been great if the full version was packed with the book. In anycase, it looks like if I dont' finish this book before my 30 runs of the Blitz demo, i'm done.

And must ask myself again, to Blitz or not to Blitz?

DAY 1. The Adventure begins!

Hi guys. Well I've finally decided to take a break from playing games to learn how to build them! And what's more fun then to share my travels from the very start with the rest of you?

I've decided to start smart (Well i hope it's the smart thing to do) and start simple. I'm an applications/web developer so programming is nothing new to me, but game programming? That's a whole new world.

Anyhow, after doing some researching I've decided to purchase 'Game Programming For Teens'. It builds games using BASIC, which isnt' exactly what I may be looking for, but from what I've read it gives great intro to many aspects of game developing.

Enough rambling...let the journey begin.