G3 - Day Two

Been a busy day today with a 8:45 start at the media design school in Auckland. This was an opportunity to see students in action on a game that they developed at the end of there 32 week course in the undergraduate course in game development. Think radioactive penguins that are anti social, and the only way to kill them is with ice, and they can kill you. Also looked at development of a fps with the unreal engine, set in a 1960's diner, the detail that goes into those things is amazing. One of the end products that we looked at was a game called Goliath, this won awards from the International Gaming Association. I will be adding this to my course once I figure out how to bypass some of the schools security features, damn windows firewall.

I keep getting asked at the event if I am a graduate student or someone who is looking at getting into the gaming industry. You should see there faces when I tell them that I am secondary school teacher who is currently teaching his students game development using gamemaker. They want to know more, and I want to know more from them, what skill sets do the students need. Most people talk about needed Maths and Physics, this is going to become a shock to those students who don't like maths and drop it. They don't see the current Computer Programming courses in schools as worthwhile. This needs to be looked at, what are teachers teaching in school, what are there aims with the courses.

Back at the event at the town hall we were shown the Microsoft xbox 360 game lost odyssey again, wish I had pulled out my camera for this a little sooner, it had a great graphic of IT graduates and the lack of them being produced now. But it did give the change to take a few shows of the XNA slides, which will be posted here later. Once I open my pc, as the safari interface for blogspot is crap!

A few more presentations took place looking at Sidhe Interactive, a game development company based in wellington, founded in 1997, 70 person studio, and is one of the top 4 independent studios in Australasia.
One of the latest games that the company has developed is gripshift, developed for the PlayStation portable, now being ported to the PlayStation 3.

Collaborative Digital Projects, looking at the use of bluetooth technologies to help with there business in the nightclub industry in Auckland, people being able to use there mobile phones to interact with the music and experience, publish there own photos to the VJ screen and interact with the artists.

Social game groups, a Auckland based volunteer group to help people develop and produce games, most work is done in a collaborative environment and they meet once a week for face to face meetings, just to help with the enthusiasm for the project,

International Collaborations
Looking at how game development takes place when all of your team are around the world and in different time zones.

Second Life demonstration, this turned out to be a talk about how second life originated and the development of second life and how objects are created and distributed. No Internet connection was available for the presenter to show us. Only had trailers to show us.

Indie Game development, this was an interesting presentation, a sole game creator and the products that he creates and sells online, I didn't realize that they have there own community and followers. Seriously interesting, Have to look at incorporating pixel art into my courses. It is so cool what you can do.

I have been thinking about one of the other conferences that I went to a number of years ago. There was a presenter that was developing learning games based on the quake 3 engine. I am wondering where he has gone and what he completed as part of his research. Navcon 2004 I think was the conference in Christchurch.