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Friday, February 24, 2006 7:34 AM

Hot Lab #8: Cancelled

It is with a surprisingly easy heart that I’m cancelling tomorrow’s Digital Gaming Hot Lab . This is due to lack of RSVPs. This isn’t really surprising since the community has been using Game Maker for quite a while and we do not need to cover the basics. The talk material isn’t a waste however since it’ll be used for driving game development into schools, a mission from Danny Day (BTW, you can read his LiveJournal and here’s his RSS Feed ). I will however rethink my ideas for the next Hot Lab since...
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Monday, February 13, 2006 8:41 PM

Digital Gaming Hot Labs #8

My apologises for posting so late about the next Digital Gaming Hot Lab. I have been completely distracted by work, SA Developer and my first home PC. Anyways, on with the show, and for February I’m giving a talk introducing Game Maker and exposing to you the basics to create a game. I have been convinced by Danny Day and other leaders in the local game development community to focus this year on Game Maker. It makes sense for a couple of reasons: A) It requires minimal coding and coding experience...
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Sunday, February 12, 2006 4:41 PM

It's All Thier Fault

Have a look at this article “ It’s All Their Fault ” from The Escapist (Thanks Miktar for the link) and enjoy. Even if you’re not a game developer you’ll appreciate the extreme views in this “customer/supplier” rant. I wish this article was true because I feel I could handle the flak of producing bad games while driving around in a fast car with a faster woman, my nose powdered by Peruvian Marching Dust. Anyways, back to my slog. I owe everyone an update of Elevator Action but at the moment it’s...
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Thursday, February 02, 2006 5:26 PM

NAG Game.Dev Competition 07: Elevator Action

Well, the first NAG Game.Dev competition for 2006 is underway (read the full objectives and rules ) and the theme is to take an old retro game and remake it but with your own style. My first idea was to remake Sopwith , but I was beaten to chase but Danny Day (dislekcia) who posted it as his idea first. Of course I could still make the game in my own image but I’d rather have something to call my own with drawing comparisons. The idea game I thought I remake was Montezuma’s Revenge but once again...
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Monday, January 16, 2006 7:18 AM

NAG January 2006 devLAN Conclusion

Wow! What an awesome time the NAG devLAN was. I don’t think I’ve spent so much time with Game Maker in a single sitting and though I say it myself, I think I produced a pretty decent game to enter. The “competition” started with arranging tables, PCs and power connections (like in most LANs) and after a short introduction and providing the theme of the day from Danny Day, we were off. The theme was “Everything Random” and we had to demonstrate randomness in our game. What was amazing was the silence...
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Monday, January 09, 2006 10:59 AM

Game Maker devLAN in Pretoria

The good guys over at NAG Game.Dev are organizing a Game Maker devLAN on the 15th January 2006 in Pretoria. This is where the participants all get together and try, individually, to write a game in a limited period of time (about 6-8 hours) against a theme revealed at the start of the competition. Visit the forum thread and RSVP if you’d like to come along. The times and venue are posted there. If you haven’t already played with Game Maker yet this is your chance to learn what it’s all about and...
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Monday, January 09, 2006 9:38 AM

Hot Lab #7 - Conclusion

Last Saturday was the 7th Hot Lab and I think it went really well. I did a talk on the Irrlicht Engine and demonstrated a few of its features and its ease of use. I also handed out copies of Microsoft’s Visual C# Express (along with Irrlicht, some demos and presentation material). The feedback on the talk was positive and while I thought I didn’t show enough to explain the concepts around the engine the general response was that I did a good job. (I’m really going to have to get myself some web space...
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Tuesday, January 03, 2006 9:04 AM

Hot Lab #7: topic change

While it’s not good practice to change the topic of your course a week before your presentation, I feel I’m obliged to in keeping with my Hot Labs objectives and the objectives of my audience. I can however “blame” Mariuce Kerrigan ’s Effective Speaking & Presentation course that BB&D sent me on. The course is fantastic and I can highly recommend it to everyone; especially those growing in the speaker circuit. So the new title of this weekend’s Hot Lab is “Irrlicht Tutorials in .NET” and...
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Thursday, December 29, 2005 9:01 AM

MSDN Webcasts on Game Development coming soon

Hmmm, these MSDN webcasts on game development starting in January 2006 look very cool and I’m definitely going to try and attend them live. “If you have always wanted to develop cutting-edge video games but are just getting started, tune in to our 11 free webcasts. Learn the concepts of 3-D video game production as instructors from DigiPen Institute of Technology demonstrate the key stages of developing a game engine using Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition, a new development environment for...
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Thursday, December 29, 2005 8:23 AM

Article on what is VSYNC

I found this article called Unraveling the mystery of VSYNC very informative and a good read. It explains, in simple terms, what VSYNC is; why you should enable it in your games and when you can disable it. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!
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Monday, December 26, 2005 10:29 AM

Irrlicht - Lighting Fast Realtime 3D Engine

Always the avid follower of the “Make games, not frameworks” philosophy, I’ve struggled to produce anything of game-quality substance using DirectX 9. There is simply too much to learn and understand and while the help and tutorials out there are unbelievably great, I find myself spending time on how to render a scene rather than writing the mechanics of the game. But recently I’ve found the Irrlicht Engine and my view on game development in code has completely turned around. “The Irrlicht Engine...
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Thursday, December 15, 2005 3:53 PM

Digital Gaming Hot Labs #7

When: 7th January 2006, 12:00 – 14:00 Venue: IT Intellect, Bryanston ( map ) Presenter: Andre Odendaal Topic: Introduction to Managed DirectX 3D Level: Beginner Language: C# Platform: Direct X 9.0 Objective: In this hot lab attendees will learn how to use DirectX to render 3D objects, move them around and manage lighting. This is a hands-on lab and prefect for someone who’s new or never used DirectX 3D. RSVP: here This is the first hot lab of 2006 and I’m very excited as I’m starting to revisit material...
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Monday, November 21, 2005 7:54 AM

Digital Gaming Hot Labs #6

When: 26th November 2005, 12:00 – 14:00 Venue: Microsoft, Bryanston ( Map ) Presenter: Andre Odendaal Topic: A look at DirectSound Level: Beginner to Intermediate Language: C# Platform: Direct X 9.0 Oct 2005 Objective: For the 6th Hot Lab I'm giving a introduction into Microsoft DirectX DirectSound and how to implement advanced 3D positioning effects and filters for echo, distortion and reverberation. RSVP: On my blog I’m really excited about the name change to Digital Gaming Hot Labs. It means I...
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Saturday, November 05, 2005 10:09 AM

DirectX Hot Lab #5 Review

The last DirectX Hot Lab went off well, with Danny Day blowing us away with a barrage of tools for game development. What grabbed my attention was Wikipad , which is a notepad like app but with powerful wiki building capabilities for offline. Yes, it exports to HTML as well. But the star of the show was Game Maker , a REALLY powerful and awesome tool for Rapid Game Development. I can’t even begin to go into how cool this tool is, and all the functionality behind it; you’ll have to come down to the...
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Saturday, November 05, 2005 7:46 AM

Microsoft Expression

If you haven’t heard anything about Microsoft Expression yet, check out this tour video and then download the latest Microsoft Expression “Acrylic Graphic Designer”. I’ve been using Expression for just over a month now to do graphics for my game development and slide presentations, and I’ve been blown away with what I can do! I used to be a Paint Shop Pro fan; and Expression is definitely hitting the mark in terms of use and easy-to-implement cool effects. Now what I’m waiting for is “Sparkle” Interactive...
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