Epic Games' Tim Sweeney interview

To finish off 2012 here is a very interesting (and recent) interview from Epic Games' Tim Sweeney from the Gamasutra website. Tim discusses a number of things in this interview, ranging from the upcoming (and very eagerly awaited) Unreal 4 engine to more general technological issues (such as convergence).

 

 

Well worth a read for insights from one of the leading personalities of games technology today.  

VS Games 2013 Twitter account

VS Games 2013, the fifth outing of the International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications hosted at Bournemouth University, UK between the 11th and the 13th of September 2013 has a Twitter account. This will be used as an additional channel of communication.

 

 

If you want to follow conference news and updates via this avenue please visit https://twitter.com/vsgames2013 and add VS Games 2013 to your followers.

Article on Legend of Zelda's level design

For students (and educators) of game level design I can recommend the following article on the Gamasutra website (which was published earlier in the year and is part of their 2012 summary), "Learning From The Masters: Level Design In The Legend Of Zelda" by Mike Stout.

 

 

Well worth a read for a very informative study on the 1986 NES classic. The article can be found in full here.

VS Games 2013 conference and Elsevier's Computers and Graphics

Authors of selected technical articles for the VS Games 2013 conference (for which I have blogged before and has a submission deadline of the 25th of March) with a focus on computer graphics will be invited to submit extended versions of their works to be considered for publication in Elsevier's Computers and Graphics journal (the website of which can be found here).

 

 

For more information about VS Games 2013 please visit the conference of the website here.

Program Committee member for IADIS CGVCVIP 2013

I have recently been invited to be part of the Program Committee for the IADIS Computer Graphics, Visualization, Computer Vision and Image Processing (CGVCVIP) 2013 conference which takes place in Prague between the 22nd and 24th of July 2013.

 

 

The conference focuses in the areas of computer graphics, visualization, computer vision and image processing (and all relevant sub-fields) according to its official website which can be found here.

Make Something Unreal Live 2013 mentor companies

Picking up from my previous blog post about Make Something Unreal Live 2013, four game dev companies have been announced as mentors for the four finalist student teams (one of which is, as mentioned before in this blog, from Bournemouth University and the Games Technology course we have here).
  

The companies are Splash Damage, Ninja Theory, Lucid Games and Climax Studios. The Bournemouth University team is mentored by Climax Studios which is a game developer based in nearby Portsmouth.

 

More info about the mentors and Climax Studios can be found here and here.

Make Something Unreal Live 2013, Bournemouth University team in the 4 finalists

This has made it last week on many websites quite prominently and I am very glad to also now feature this in this blog too; a team consisting of second year Bournemouth University students (6 from the Games Technology degree and one from our Music and Audio Technology degree) has now made it to the final four for the Epic Games'/Wellcome Trust Make Something Unreal Live 2013 European competition.

The team is called Static Games (pictured above amongst the other student teams) and their game is titled Mendel's Farm (the theme of the competition this year, as set by Wellcome Trust, is Mendelian inheritance). All four finalist teams will now start working on their game (using the Unreal Development Kit), guided by mentorship from 4 UK game dev studios, with the goal being finishing this during the Gadget Show Live event in April 2013 (taking place at Birmingham's NEC). The winning team will receive a full commercial Unreal Engine 4 license.

 

This is great news (you can read more about it on countless site including the official Wellcome Trust one here), well done to our 7 students for their hard work and here's to hoping they will win this in April! 

Non-photorealistically rendered Double Dragon

One of the first games I ever had the chance to play has now had another installment, this time with updated cel-shaded graphics. This is Double Dragon Neon which very cleverly follows the 2D setup of the original 1980s game, albeit with updated non-photorealistic visuals and some additions to the gameplay to make it more appealling to today's gamers.

 

 

It's great to see such an iconic title coupled with stylised graphics of this type (see pic above), the game is already available on the Playstation Network and XBox Live Arcade.

Develop article on Bournemouth University's Games Tech course now online

The Develop magazine article on Bournemouth University's Games Technology course is now online in its entirety. This is under their Training Spotlight series and was published in the November 2012 print issue (I blogged about it a few days ago).

The article can be found here.

Tax break for games industry details announced

This week the UK chancellor George Osborne confirmed (in his Autumn Statement) that the tax break for game developers in the UK will be at 25%. The finer details are yet to be published but this is news which could well create many new jobs in the domestic industry in the near future.

 

 

This piece of news of course received extensive coverage in specialist press like Edge magazine (see here) and Develop (see here).