Planet PIGMI

Hiragana Pixel Party!

Ben, 18/05/2012 | Source:

Just stumbled on a really awesome app called “Hiragana Pixel Party”. For me it’s a brilliant mix of bit trip runner and LEARNING! The art’s a nice retro style, as is the music, which complements the concept of learning from rhythm I feel when I play.

The “free version” of the game (the core game without any of the packs purchased) comes with the first set of hiragana and 12 missions, for 99c you can get all the missions which means 192 hiragana missions and 192 katakana missions. Unsurprisingly an army of hateful shoggoths have complained all over the youtube trailers for it, which is sad.. If you’re not at all familiar with the basic Japanese alphabets check it out!

I feel like ranting about people complaining now… no… going to go have fun instead.

WUP: Only 1 Week Away! + Where is Spacecubed?

Rich, 18/05/2012 | Source: Let's Make Games

What’s Up Pitches is Only 1 Week Away!

That’s right, as from today, our event is only one week away! We still have a few spots open for registration of a pitch so if you want in, send us an email now at events@letsmakegames.org. As a quick reminder:

Pitches are 3-minutes long (we will time them!)
We will have a Projector and Microphone available at the venue. For any other extra requirements, please contact us!
Registration deadline is Tuesday 22nd of May
We would prefer to have a copy of your presentation by Thursday 24th of May
To register, we will need a name, a title for your presentation and a way to contact you (e-mail is fine).

We will be announcing the official list of Pitches on Tuesday and we are also finalising some prizes for some of the best Perth-based pitches so stay tuned.

Photo courtesy of Spacecubed flickr stream.

Where is Spacecubed?

We’ve had a few people asking us where is Spacecubed so hopefully this should help you guys find it on the day! Spacecubed is found at the Ground Floor (rear), 45 St George’s Terrace, Perth WA. Here is the map view:

And here is the Street view:

Spacecubed is found just opposite St Martin’s Tower (There’s a Coffee Club opposite as well). Once you see the circular glass and metal rotating doors, go through, up a short flight of stairs, turn right towards the elevators and then continue towards the rear of the building (on the same floor). You should be able to glimpse the Spacecubed signage through an open corridor. We should also have people on the day to help guide you through to the venue.

Parking in the city should be mostly free after 6pm but make sure to check the signs as we wouldn’t want you to have your car fined or worse, towed away. There’s plenty of public transport options and it is walking distance from Esplanade Busport and Train stations.

Special thanks to our great sponsors:

MVX by Sentient Computing

“We create virtual worlds using gaming technology. This enables companies to visualise their data, create interactive and engaging training systems and add a whole new dimension to managing their operations remotely.”

Qantm College - “Qantm College has been at the forefront of digital media education in Australia training students for employment in one of the fastest growing sectors in the country”

and Spacecubed - “Spacecubed facilitates a community of changemakers in a 550sqm co-working, collaboration and innovation space located at Ground Floor rear, 45 St Georges Terrace, Perth. Spacecubed provides central access to hot desks, team working space, events, seminar and meeting space”

WUP: Indie Game Doco and a New Sponsor!

Rich, 17/05/2012 | Source: Let's Make Games

Indie Games Documentary at WUP?!

We’re happy to announce that Melbourne-based filmmaker Lester Francois from Studio Bento will be coming to our What’s Up Pitches?! event to gather some content for his short documentary in the making. This is what he had to say about the project:

“I am developing a short documentary on the new wave of independent game developers/studios. In the wake of the iOS app store/Unity/UDK there has been a surge of DIY game developers in Australia. The film aims to highlight this trend and promote the cottage industry.”

On top of our live stream of the event, this will be a great opportunity to get your story heard. As a reminder, What’s Up Pitches?! is on Friday the 25th of May, from 6pm-8pm. Attending the event and registering for a pitch is completely FREE! We still have some spots available to pitch so contact us via events@letsmakegames.org or check out those links below for more info:

What’s is What’s Up Pitches?!, our limited Video Pitch Option and 5 reasons you should be pitching at WUP?!

New Sponsor!

We are very proud to announce Qantm College as one of our Silver Sponsors for What’s Up Pitches?!

“Qantm College has been at the forefront of digital media education in Australia training students for employment in one of the fastest growing sectors in the country. Qantm College offers specialised industry-focused courses in 2D and 3D animation, games design, games programming, interactive digital media, and graphic design – all aligned with emerging industry trends and technologies. Students are taught by passionate, industry-experienced professionals who are dedicated to providing high quality practical learning, inspiring creative confidence and preparing graduates with the applicable skills and knowledge needed for immediate entry into the workforce.”

They will also be doing a pitch on the night entitled “Sourcing skills in games design”.

I get to be an awesome Demon Hunter who doesn’t look like a prostitute! – Diablo 3

Liza Shulyayeva, 17/05/2012 | Source: Liza Shulyayeva

I started Diablo 3 last night and it is awesome.

For the record, I’m not a Diablo fan. I’ve played 1 and 2 and enjoyed them, but never finished either one (I was little and got scared :( ). I didn’t follow any Diablo 3 news until a day or so right before release.

The Diablo 3 release has been plagued with technical issues and all kinds of complaints, among them:

Internet connection required even for SP
Server downtime on top of the above
The game being pushed out in an incomplete state
Game breaking armor bugs
Lack of character customization/skill trees
Microtransactions
Graphics and art direction (really?)
Pretty much anything else that you can think of has been whined about

Many of the above are valid, but I guess because I was never a big Diablo fan I didn’t really build up huge expectations over however long this game was in development for and didn’t feel too inconvenienced when issues came up.

Server problems are to be expected on launch, always. You’re an idiot if you give the game a score of ’0′ on Metacritic based on launch day server woes (in my opinion. I know this is technically debatable). I’ll admit that these things should not happen and would not happen in an ideal world, but come on – you have a huge number of people who preordered a game all logging in at once over the first few days post-launch and expecting everything to be just dandy? Could Blizzard maybe have staggered the release better? Maybe, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter because I expect these things at launch from any online game.

The always-on DRM does bug me. I should not have to be online to play a single player game. In practice, though, I’m used to MMOs where you’re online all the time. It’s not like this is anything different for me experience-wise. I don’t have the time or energy right now to go on a crusade against Blizzard’s DRM measures so pardon me if I’ll just deal and enjoy the game.

Everything else in terms of problems is ‘meh’ for me. I’m not seeing this as a sequel of D2 because I don’t remember anything about D2. The lack of skill tree does not bother me. I entered the game with a totally open mind, having next to no idea of what I would find (except I knew there’d be zombies). Yes, there are problems. Show me a game without any.

So meet Drakonka, my almost-level-11 Demon Hunter:

Drakonka

She is fricking awesome. My one complaint about her is that she’s wearing high heels while trying to stay alive in a zombie-infested Hellhole. She may not be the most practical of ladies in terms of footwear, but at least she doesn’t look like a total prostitute:

Tera -.-'

Can we just stop being unappreciative jerks please?

Liza Shulyayeva, 17/05/2012 | Source: Liza Shulyayeva

This is not going to be a very popular opinion considering my reader demographic, but I’ve grown a little sick of the gaming community as a whole and recent whining about Diablo 3 has triggered…well…this post. Why do so many of us have to be so negative about everything that comes out? Ok, I understand things like being frustrated about server downtime, or installation problems, or major bugs. I completely understand the frustration there.

What really bugs me is not our annoyance about technical problems or things not working as designed, but how much we whine about design or art or other decisions that don’t tarnish our experience in the long run (or wouldn’t if we didn’t get so worked up about them) and things that most of us don’t even understand; things that were put into a game or left out of one for what is likely a good reason that you or I can’t fully appreciate because newsflash: we weren’t there. We take these things so personally, as if Blizzard or [insert whatever developer you're complaining about now here] went out and ruined this game just to spite us somehow. Yeah. I’m sure they all sat around a big fancy table in a big fancy meeting room and brainstormed all the different ways in which they can make the community at large hate this thing that they’re sinking 12 or 14 or whatever-hour days into building. That’s exactly what happened.

Developers make mistakes. I get that. Many mistakes. It just gets tiring to hear people be so negative over and over about every single thing they see. Can’t we just focus on the good parts for once? Why do you even play games? To have something to complain about? We are a bunch of spoiled, ignorant kids whining about anything we can think of – graphics, sound, art direction, story. And it’s not like I’m saying that we shouldn’t voice our opinions or bring these things up (that would make me a hypocrite), but most instances of people “bringing these things up” are very far from constructive, mature criticism and very close to repetitive foot-stomping like the developer is your fricking mother refusing to buy you candy at the supermarket. You know those kids? The really annoying ones that make you swear off of having children for life? Please stop being one. It’s exhausting.

“Whine whine whine, everything sucks. The game is crap. The story is crap. The animations are crap. It’s AAA and they want our souls. THE PIXELS ARE TOO SQUARE.” You don’t like something? Express your opinion in a way that doesn’t make you sound like a spoiled 12-year-old and move on.

I like playing games because they’re fun, not because I’m interested in seeing this thing that someone made for us to enjoy dissected like it’s some sort of challenge to find something, anything, everything that could possibly be wrong with it and then act personally affronted. As if someone putting in some mechanic you don’t like very much is the equivalent of them personally slapping you in the face. STFU and enjoy the damn game. And if you think it’s that horrible, STFU and play something else. Nobody’s holding a gun to your head (one would hope).

(Also I saw this on Reddit and had to share even though it is completely irrelevant to the topic):
</rant>

Update: Anthony was awesome enough to link me to an article on games.on.net in the comments, which I think was published just before this post and also deals with the sense of gamer entitlement. Check it out!

You are not so likely to be eaten by a grue

Ben, 16/05/2012 | Source:

Decided to mess with pulling information from external files while working on a small project of mine, as a result I ended up trying to make a text based adventure system. Its pretty bare bones/not really stellar writing in there but it gets the point across I guess (oh and to top things off it’s unfinished! So enjoy being stuck at the end of a chain in the game below I guess).

Next mission is to try find a way to get it to just look for keywords such as “north” so that players can experiment with sentences and stuff so that saying “I go north in a pretty red dress” words alongside just “go north” Also finding a better way to handle how it switches the two text objects content via the ajax requests would be nice, it’s a little bit messy at the moment.

Oh, finding a way to make the game pick up the choices that need to be typed is one big to-do too, currently it displays what you can type, but the game picks up what they have to type from the code, not a text document, so the games still not completely modifiable through text, it probably never will be, but I’d like to see how close things get.

Indie Games Marketing Course videos and materials

Anthony, 15/05/2012 | Source: Let's Make Games

Good news indie game developers! We’ve just updated our Releasing a Game resource page with the videos and course materials from the Indie Games Marketing Course. There you can find the presentation videos, slides and the Surprise Attack positioning workbook.

You can also find Tim’s presentation and Chris’ presentation on our YouTube channel.

Big thanks to our videography team for creating these fantastic videos, and to our guest speakers Tim and Chris!

DayZ – mass grave

Ben, 15/05/2012 | Source:

I’ve had a blast with Day-Z since it came out, even just thinking about it fills my head with glee. It’s stalker mixed with everything I want in a zombie mod. I’ve died countless times, from players more than zombies. Or from my own human error, falling off a ladder and breaking my legs was a slow and painful way to go.

The description from the above trailer explains the game in a nutshell perfectly:

Welcome to Chernarus. A 225 km2 open world post-soviet state and one of the areas hit by a new and presently unknown infection which has wiped out most of the world’s population. You are one of the few who have survived and now you must search this new wasteland in order to fight for your life against what is left of the indigenous population, now infected with the disease.

Go Solo, team up with friends or take on the world as you choose your path in this brutal and chilling landscape, using whatever means you stumble upon to survive.

This is Day Z – This is your story.

Tonight I decided to end my old characters miserable life and start new for 1.5.7. Entered an Australian server, I knew it would be night due to the servers being 1:1 but this time it was different, I couldn’t even see silhouettes of tree’s buildings or my characters feet. There was no moon, the only way to navigate for a new survivor would be to use flares, but by doing so making yourself a target for other people.

Crawling through the mud and the rain on a moonless night I suddenly could hear the buzzing of hundreds of flies, perhaps a dead player I thought to myself, exited with the prospects of finding a dead body, hopefully with some bullets and a can of beans at the least.

I decided to crouch and crawl around the ground to find the body. With no luck I reluctantly popped a flare only to find a mass grave.

So after finding that I spent a few minutes crawling through dead bodies covered in flies I hurried away as quick as I could, from the grave and the light. It’s going to be a long, dark, night.

By the way, If you haven’t yet checked out DayZ get it, here: http://dayzmod.com/ emergent game play is a brilliant thing, and the stories i have read and lived in it are great.

iiNet TopGeek 2.0, Hippo Creek, & Diablo 3

Liza Shulyayeva, 14/05/2012 | Source: Liza Shulyayeva

Not many coding updates lately because of other work. I’m working on the game a little each day and will post when there’s a substantial update to make. Box2D is still driving me a little insane on a regular basis, but I’m getting the hang of it. Meanwhile, a quick overview of the past few days:

iiNet TopGeek 2.0 Final

On Thursday night iiNet hosted its TopGeek 2.0 final and the original finalists were amongst those invited. Some of you will remember that last year I got to the top 10, stopping just before the final round. I’ll be honest – I had next to no participation in this year’s competition in terms of TopGeek Facebook group or other activity, but the final was an awesome opportunity to meet up with many of my fellow contestants from last year, meet the new guys, and see much of the Perth Twitter community in general. And it was awesome!

The winner was none other than Steve Wright. I have to admit I was rooting for Skai (who was one of last year’s finalists), but then Steve gave me his omni-tool and of course I switched sides immediately. Sorry, Skaidris.

While the actual positioning of the competition (ehh..finding the top “geek” in Australia) is a bit meh for me, the entire contest does have a great atmosphere and community spirit. iiNet seems to have learned a lot from last year’s contest because looking on from afar, this one seemed much better organized and “fun” in general. Not that last year’s wasn’t. If it wasn’t for my participation last year I wouldn’t have met all the awesome people that I did. And I certainly wouldn’t have gotten a chance to go to EB Expo with the awesome Jess!

Hippo Creek!

On Sunday night I caught up with Dex, an old friend (has it been 4 years or 5 since we met, Dex? I can’t remember, but by my standards it’s old!). I had to blow him off the week before because I was sick, so this week we decided to go out for dinner to catch up after a long spell of…well…not catching up. We went to Hippo Creek at Hillarys Boat Harbor (I keep thinking there’s meant to be an apostrophe in Hillarys, but when I look online there isn’t one…I feel like I’m misspelling when I write it without). As someone who doesn’t eat meat except for seafood Hippo Creek (which is full of all kinds of meat) was an interesting choice. But they did have two seafood meals on the menu. I ate Marron and have never tasted anything this delicious in Western Australia in my entire life:

Mud Huts. AKA Heaven.

Marron. This was as delicious as it looks.

Dex had a giant meat…thing.

I forgot what this was called.

Guild Wars 2 stress test

Played a bit of the Guild Wars 2 stress test last night (there was no NDA) and made an awesome Necro who had missed an opportunity to join the circus: