Okay, so that was the Boom…

Happy to finally be back in Perth after another two weeks circling the globe.  What a ride it’s been though, watching the world’s markets fall apart close-up and in real time.

I don’t like the way that so much of the world’s press and politicians are talking about panic — in the US they were even threatened with Martial Law — because to some extent at least, it’s only virtual money that’s been lost so far.  It’s only when the rhetoric scales out of proportion that things get really scary.

Anyway, we know that the boom is over now.  Due to some fortunate econo-political circumstances, it looks like it’s going to roll off reasonably slowly rather than falling off a cliff, whch is great news.  However, don’t be fooled that there is any chance the boom will continue; the credit market pretty much doesn’t exist anymore, which pretty much guarantees that there won’t be any new mine projects that aren’t already funded (and some of the ones that are will stall or fail).  it looks like the Chinese might be able to maintain growth rates roughly half of what they currently are, which is more good news but still means a lot less heat and much harder negotiation.

This is good news!

A soft landing!  It’s more than we could ever hope for and while it’s still a dream, it is still in the future!  We have time to work out what industries we want to promote in Western Australia’s post-boom economy.  I mean, we always knew it would end and there have been previous efforts to broaden the Western Australian economy but clearly they were always focussed on the future, not RIGHT NOW, which makes it hard.  Things have changed now, the date that the boom stopped is in the history books, so let’s get busy working on creating the fundamentals of a solid economy that is properly diversified and will keep our society employed and productive no matter what happens in the global credit markets.

We need to kick this debate into a high gear though; everyone loves to watch a disaster and the ongoing rhetoric of the panic-stricken train-wreck of the US financial markets, replete with toxic bonds and tsunamis of bank failure will make it hard to concentrate on the real issue.  Which is, incidentally, how we diversify our little, geographically isolated, overly focussed economy, making it ready for the next wave of opportunities and improving our economic resiliance.

I’ve got a few ideas as to what we can do here in Perth that I’ll talk about in future posts.  Perhaps surprisingly, they aren’t all focused on games either!

Building a better bot

Other than the winners of the Nullarbor contest the other big announcement from the Perth IGDA meeting was that of the The 2K Bot Prize.

ECU’s Philip Hingston took the stage to tell us about the comp to build a better bot.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nullarbor 2008 Prizes

It was a great pleasure last night to hand out the prizes to this year’s Nullarbor winners. The standard of the games this year was outstanding and it is a credit to everyone involved that due to the incredibly high quality, we had the closest results ever.

This year we also decided to have a judges prize, which we awarded to Jack Casey (aka Beetlefeet) for his outstanding game “LadyBug” (video, game). I’m sure his prize — a copy of Maya Unlimited from Autodesk — will be very helpful in crafting next year’s entry!

The music prize was also very close, with fewer entries but all of them very nigh quality. Congratulations and $250 narrowly went to Simon Whitber (Nxus7) for his winning entry, beating out the competition by just 1 point. The final results were:

As I mentioned, the people’s choice voting was the closest it has ever been, with only 3 points (potentially just one vote) separating the top 3 games.

Nullarbor Game Prize Results
Position	Screenshot	Title/Developer	Points	Links
1		Buttons’ Grand Adventures ECU ML Red Team ‘08	43	Game Video
2		The War of Art AH,MD,SM	42	Game Video
3		Morning Star Peter Alexander	40	Game Video
4		Ladybug Beetlefeet	38	Game Video
5		Thrust Harder Kransky Bros	24	Game
6		The Things NoTime	20	Game Video
7		Super Jesus Twelve Productions	19	Game Video
8		Space Pirates First Empire	19	Game Video
9		Retrovector Brad Power	18	Game
10		Column Breaker OneTwentyThree	11	Video

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…

Semi-Permanent

Just finished my presentation at Semi-Permanent 08 in Perth and wanted to make sure the link to Rod’s game is up here in case people want to play it.  I’ll post my presentation tomorrow but in the meantime:

• Rod Humble’s “The Marriage”

I Just Want To Make One Thing Perfectly Clear…

I received a phonecall from Tracy Cook on Monday and talked to her about a number of issues for the computer games industry in Western Australia. It was a pretty up-beat discussion with a few obvious issues discussed. Unfortunately, the tone of the article that was published does not match the tone of the interview. I don’t really understand where the negativity came from, so I wanted to make sure that the context around the discussion and my views is available.

First up, I see bringing Interzone to Perth as a tremendous success on all counts. There is no question about that; IZ has attracted an incredibly talented team that is working hard on a very cool game. It has helped put some momentum behind the game industry in Perth and we now have a growing game development community.

Challenges do exist in the path for us to nurture this fledgeling industry in Perth and one of those challenges is the dollar but WA has never competed purely on price in this market.  We don’t compete with China on that basis but we do compete on the quality of our people, the compatibility of our culture with the US & Europe and our unique geopolitical location. The main challenge that I see is to build up the infrastructure here so that we are able to compete with the world on the basis of the quality of our developers and their ability to regularly ship successful games; once that is the case, any fluctuations on the dollar simply don’t matter.

However, we’re not quite there yet and one of the most obvious questions I answered was indeed the issue of the US dollar; has the falling dollar had an impact on the cost of a US company such as Interzone that is developing games in Perth? Of course it has, the cost for every foreign company doing anything in Australia has increased. Is this a problem? Absolutely, it makes it much harder for all Australian industries to compete on price and the game industry is not outside the laws of economics.

Will I be asking for additional government assistance to deal with this issue? No.

Are there skills shortages in Perth in your area? Yes, as was expected when the studio was set up, there are not a lot of highly experienced game developers in Perth. Of course there aren’t, Interzone is the first triple-A MMO studio to set up here. We’re working to build our talent base here and have internal training in place. We are training up graduates as fast as we can but we obviously can’t hire too many of them because we only have a certain number of people that are skilled that can then do the training.

Is Interzone looking to move the studio overseas? No.

What other countries would be competing with Perth for game development opportunities? Canada is always an option, a very equivalent country in a lot of ways and you get the benefit of being a bit closer to the US. The US itself, with the way the currency is working, is becoming more and more attractive to new developers. Then there is Korea, China and all the developing nations are skilling up in this sector, there is a lot of different options from that perspective.

As a result of the declining US dollar, will new projects come to Perth? Before commencing any project of the size that Interzone is undertaking, there is a level of due dilligence that has to be done. Clearly, an important part of that is where the main development is going to be based. An international organisation like Interzone has a number of options on that front and the mix will be appropriate for the title that is greenlit.

What are the greatest challenges that the game industry faces in Perth at the moment? It is still a fledgling industry; Interzone came to town a little more than 12 months ago now and there remains a great deal of work to be done to build up the industry. As Chairman of the IGDA Perth Chapter, I’m working pretty hard to help develop the infrastructure that is needed to build upon the success we are having with Interzone, to help develop a sustainable and resilient industry here in Perth. These things take time but we appear to be making progress on a number of fronts so I’m very optimistic.

I’ll try to post more when I have a moment.

Jason Della Rocca Coming to Perth

Jason Della Rocca, Executive Director of the IGDA, is coming to Perth on the 13th of November. We’ll be announcing at least one more event for while he’s here but for the moment, why don’t you plan on coming over the the next IGDA Perth Meeting at the Velvet Lounge (Flying Scotsman Pub, cnr Beaufort and Walcott St, Mt Lawley) starting at 7pm. Jason will present “At Least 10 Reasons Why the Game Industry Doesn’t Suck”.

In addition, you can win prizes (including an Xbox 360, latest release games, speaker kits and more) from our generous sponsors - Anyware Computers, Crumpler Bags, Epic Games, Game traders, Microsoft, One Stop Entertainment and GO3 Electronic Entertainment Expo – and meet your new Perth chapter of IGDA committee members!

IGDA Perth Chapter Committee

I’ve been nominated as the Chairman of the Perth Chapter of the IGDA and just gave a little mini-speech at the chapter meeting a few hours ago trying to let everyone know what I thought the Association means. It was all a bit off-the-cuff as I had to run to catch a flight moments later, but the main points I wanted to make is that, to me, the IGDA is a really important body that both directly and indirectly (just by existing and encouraging discussions) helps to develop:

• The Community,
• The Profession and
• The Industry.

Obviously, just building the community was the first step and we need to continue to consolidate the gains we have made on that front. All of us getting together every month to talk a bit about what we’re all doing, with both the formal presentations as well as informally over a few drinks, is a really good thing. It’s incredibly important that this regular forum exists and continues to grow, that the IGDA remains relevant to all of the developers in Perth and actively welcomes new members.

As the community develops I think it would be great if we can also start to do a little bit more professional development as well. I’m keen to hear what interest there might be in a series of more technical seminars that are designed to develop and expand skills in a more specific manner than we are doing at the moment. This would be entirely separate from the existing meetings, which I don’t think should change in any substantial manner. I imagine these technical seminars being conducted on a range of topics but each presentation would dig deeper, assume a more specialised interest, last longer and might feature international or interstate speakers via video conference.

Anyway, I just wanted to share my thoughts on what the IGDA meant to me. I’m more than happy to answer any specific questions that people might have, in the comments or by email.

Getting Into The Game Industry

We’ve got a new presentation up on the Interzone website that talks about some of the roles and responsibilities that you might like to take up in the Game Industry. We will be adding to it and filling out more details on paths that you might like to take to get there along with other positions you might not immediately associate with a gameco but I figure that if you know the destination you have in mind, the journey can be much simpler. In general, you need way too much education, the ability to perform under pressure, iterate quickly and work fast while staying at the top of your profession. Link.