Indie Game Challenge videos

Posted on by
4

You’ve heard about the Indie Game Challenge, right? It’s a similar concept to the Independent Games Festival, highlight independent game development, but being thrown by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, the same folks that do the DICE Summit each year (which is fantastic, by the way!) The Indie Game Challenge is a collaboration with GameStop and SMU Guildhall, and the prizes are pretty significant – $100K for the winners!

They’ve produced some pretty amusing videos highlighting possible games for the event… ;-) Gave me a laugh. Check them out! I’ll embed one here and link to the other three.

Office Worker:

Makeover Master

Housework

Catbox Fever

Using Chrome

Posted on by
8

I find myself using the Google Chrome web browser more and more these days. I downloaded it just to have a look, and what was immediately obvious was how fast the darn thing is. It is fast to start up, and fast to load a page. Literally, while my PC is booting into Windows XP, I can start up Chrome and start reading the morning news. My PC will be happily chugging along in the background, starting up all manner of processes, while I’m happily chugging my coffee and reading gamasutra.com. Try THAT with Firefox or Internet Explorer.

The downside of using Chrome though, is that it doesn’t yet have a way to synchronize bookmarks. This is one of the fundamental features which makes Firefox valuable to me – using the Xmarks add-on I have my bookmarks synchronized between my home PC, work PC, and laptop. This ability is as valuable to me as using an Exchange server to keep my email and contacts synchronized. It is just one of those no-brainer things that I don’t want to have to think about.

So for now, I go back and forth between Chrome and Firefox. Which is kind of irritating. Apparently Firefox 3.5 will speed things up, so we’ll see if I get sucked back over to the Firefox camp. And I don’t even want to look at Opera or Safari. I have enough browsers to think about already. :-)

Real-time Flight Control

Posted on by
4

Have you been enjoying playing the iPhone game Flight Control? It’s a game where you have to route planes and helicopters to land on a set of runways, keeping the aircraft from hitting each other as slowly more and more aircrafts come on the screen. Here’s a sample screenshot. It’s great fun!

Flight Control

Now check out this radar screenshot from around Chicago’s O’Hare Airport today, with multiple storms having passed through the area during the course of the day, and another huge one coming from the west. Yikes!

OHare Airport Radar

Middleware Library Survey

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been conducting a middleware library survey for any game developers who are currently using middleware in their projects. As with the previous game engine surveys, this one is also largely focused on the core games audience, so the middleware discussed in the survey tends to focus on middleware for those types of titles. (Please visit this site for a great list of middleware libraries available!)

The survey has been kept deliberately short (5-10 minutes) in order to maintain sanity levels – hopefully it will provide useful information without driving survey takers crazy. :-)

If you’re interested in taking the survey, we’d love to hear from you. Please take the survey here. Thanks for your interest!