Nullarbor 2008 at The Bakery

Well, this weekend we just wrapped up the Nullarbor Bakery Party and it was pretty amazing. We managed to squeeze a good number of people in to check out what the WA indie game scene has on offer … as you can see from our photos. They chose a good night to join us: this year’s Nullarbor competition saw the most entries to date.

There were fourteen all up — many scraping in at the last possible moment. That’s quite an accomplishment when you consider the amount of effort than even the most modest games require. Even more impressing was the fact that several entries were far from modest. We had single-player and multiplayer first-person shooters, a number of interesting space shoot ‘em ups (including “Thrust Harder” which was way cuter than the name suggests), a bunny-based adventure game and even a lady-bug puzzle game with a very nice level editor.

We also had several entries in the music category. Interestingly enough, several of the games didn’t have any sound with their videos … we need to do more to force these two groups get together!

The presentation went smoothly and the crowd seemed to appreciate the effort the developers had put in. You know there’s some quality when people are packed around a tiny laptop to see a new game in action. The voting was thick and fast and we actually had to print out a second an then a third round of ballots to let everyone there vote. We’ll be tallying the results and announcing winners at the next IDGA meeting, so stay tuned.

Keep checking the Nullarbor site for updates on the games, as well as downloads so you can give them a go for yourself. The WA indie game development scene is definitely growing thanks to the computer game courses picking up speed at the universities, and companies like Interzone and Binary Culture helping to bring in some top-tier international developers, as well as helping to keep and skill-up our local talent.

Before the actual presentation we got to see some of that young development talent in action: as we kicked things off on Friday night with a 24-hour LAN event — run with the GameJam — that gathered in developers working on their projects for a final sprint before the close of submissions on Saturday. We managed to get a several teams in and it was a lot of fun with the bar open (selling snacks and coffee along with the traditional beverages), the PS3 on the big screen and free pizza delivered by Dominos at 11pm.  Binary Culture and Qsix set up the network with gigabit to the desktop, local chat servers and a solid SVN repo to ensure no-one lost any data.  Only a few of the most hard-core stuck it out all night but the comeraderie was great and with the infrastructure we provided this time, I’d hope we will have more next year.

After all of the rushing around to get the Bakery LAN-ready everything fell into place just in time, and seemed to go pretty smoothly.  Kudos to Mo at Surrender Events; he did a great job pulling everything together.

We did learn that we have to do a little more promotion leg-work to get everyone motivated and out of their house for something as involved as an all-night demoscene party. Even so, we had a blast. Big thanks to the Bakery crew who were amazing, especially Ainsley.

I know this one has just past (well, almost, past) but I can’t wait to see what we can cook up for next year…