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…

The Art of Independence – Presentation and Notes

Here are the slides (and my personal notes) from my Free Play keynote lecture. Being the keynote, the subject for my talk was pretty simple and to the point: “The paramount importance of independent games, and how they are crucial to games development as an art form.”

It should have been easy, right? Well, consider this: how do you tell the assembled artists and indie game developers making these games that what they are doing is art and important without it being condescending or obvious?

In the end I just dove in, added some stuff about founding Interzone (which is one big indie studio) and then threw in some extra business stuff to round things off. I went this way because most independent developers struggle with the money and project management far more than the actual code.

If you click here or on the link above you can check it out. If you turn off the pics it’s actually reasonably quick to load and fits everything on the page pretty neatly.

Free Play 2007

Free Play was fantastic. The panel discussion with Paul Callaghan and Jonathan Blow was very interesting, with several disagreements and some lively debate. It was great to have lunch with Jonathan and talk more about the intricate relationships of game design, martial arts and coding. I’m still convinced that we need to think more about narrative and games rather than giving up on them though Jon! It was also very encouraging to see groups of indy developers coming together after every presentation to talk about the ideas that were discussed and how they can be applied to their projects.

It was very interesting talking to some of the Next Wave organisers too; I really enjoyed the idea of a game conference as part of a wider series of art festivals and must write more on this at a later date. I’m hoping that Byte Me! will cover some of this ground but BEAP &/or Festival of Perth people please get in touch!

Free Play 2007

I’m honoured to have been invited to present a keynote address at Free Play 2007, the Independent Game Developer’s Conference (in Melbourne). Developed by the indy game community for the indy game community, Free Play provides a forum for Australian independent game developers to share knowledge, showcase their work and initiate new projects.