Mega Awesome Battle Arena is the kind of game that, on the surface, looks like it was made by kids. And that's because it was: a 4-year-old and 6-year-old, to be exact.
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Launching in partnership with Sydney's flagship Microsoft Store and the Academy of Interactive Entertainment (AIE), the newly formed "Xbox Academy" is offering a three hour hands-on gaming workshop where you can learn coding, art, marketing and other aspects of development - for free.
When companies act against the interests of consumers, it makes sense for consumers to boycott those companies. The same is true when companies decide to take anti-developer positions. It only makes sense for developers to avoid those companies as partners, publishers and platforms.
Zenimax, the parent company of Bethesda (who make Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Dishonoured and more), has been engaged in a half billion dollar lawsuit with Facebook over the origins of the Oculus technology. There’s some details about it here, but suffice to say it’s all been ugly and unreasonable to date.
Innovative, technology-based and packed with "jobs of the future", Australia's video game industry has the potential to drive our next big "clean" export. Global revenue for games is expected to reach $US98 billion in the next two years. In the last financial year, 81 per cent of Australia's game development industry income came from overseas markets.
So what is standing in the way?
Earlier today you would have seen the story how Alex St. John, the creator of DirectX and founder of WildTangent, came out over the weekend trying to recharacterise the conditions of game development. It's art, not a job, and game developers shouldn't be as concerned with stress, work-life balance or fair wages. Those were some of the arguments St. John made, although you should read them within to understand the full context.
St. John also has strong views on who precisely game studios should hire. It's contained in a presentation called "Recruiting Giants" and suggests, among other things, that coding isn't actual work, "real" programmers don't value money and that working juniors and interns so hard they burn out is "good for them".
Ever wonder how procedurally-generated dungeons are actually, well, generated? This Gamasutra post explains one way with very cool/helpful animations.
