Just got this from Freeverse, creators of fine Mac and iPhone software:
Freeverse is proud to announce that a member of it’s development team, Game Designer Justin Ficarrotta, has won the uDevGames Mac Game Development Contest with his independently developed space shooter, Laserface Jones vs Doomsday Odious.
Besides winning the title of “Best Overall Game” for this year’s uDevGames contest, Laserface Jones also received the following awards:
• Best Gameplay - 1st Place
• Best Graphics - 1st Place
• Best Audio - 1st Place
• Best Story - 3rd Place
• Best Presentation - 1st Place
Laserface Jones was Inspired by the classic space shooters from the 8-bit and 16-bit era, including Gradius, R-Type, and Life Force. It took over 3 months of development, as Justin was working on it while also working full-time at Freeverse.
“Laserface Jones was a labor of love for me,” says Justin Ficarrotta. “I gave every spare moment I had to make a tribute to all the timeless shoot-em-ups I grew up with. I’m so stoked that people are loving the game as much as I do.”
I completely failed to write about the winners of the 2008 uDev contest even though I said I would last week. Well, they’re here! Better late than never.
I have no idea how developers can develop games in such short periods of time. Brian Greenstone from Pangea ported Enigmo from the Mac to iPhone in two weeks. Two weeks? It takes me two weeks to leave the house!
Download Laserface Jones. That’s what I’m doing. Right now. Review in ten years.
I remember back in the day when online access was a 300 baud modem connected to Quantum Link, when 3D graphics were hours and hours of work on supercomputers, when we were just as likely to type in a game from the latest issue of RUN Magazine as to go and purchase the latest game from the computer store. It was during these early, formative days of gaming that I discovered one of my all-time favorite games, the classic Star Trek. Now this was not massive space simulation, nor was it an advanced RPG. It was a simple game of space exploration, where the goal was to find and destroy a number of Klingon vessels. Although there wasn’t much to the game (a grid of asterisks and shapes that vaguely approximated your vessel and the Klingon ships) it was the first taste of controlling a starship in the vast reaches of space.
It actually looks like EA have done some pretty cool things to expand the world while at the same time focusing the game. Instead of making sure your Sim doesn’t wet itself and go to work, you focus more on dreams and aspirations of your digital self, roaming neighborhoods and actually enjoying yourself.
Could go all a bit Barbie, we’ll have to wait and see. I hope you can still make swimming pools, let your Sims go for a swim, remove the ladders and watch them drown. Or remove all the doors from a house and watch your Sim starve. Once your Sim is dead, sell the gravestone for hard cash! Hardcore! Yes, I did remove legs from spiders as a child. And dogs. And people.
I think it’s safe to say that The Sims 3 will fairly popular. Oh, and the game is being Ciderized. No love for Aspyr then.
Jeremy White, CEO of CodeWeavers, creators of CrossOver for Mac (a commerical implementation of WINE), had this to say about the misty future of their flagship product:
We’ve just shipped a lot of those ‘under the hood’ improvements for games out in CrossOver Games 7.2. We’re really pushing Direct X 9 support pretty far along, and getting ready to move on Direct X 10.
I actually think I’m the only one who gets excited about under the hood improvements. Mainly because it means stuff runs faster and is more stable, especially games. Not sure how DirectX 10 games will run under CrossOver for Mac though. Classics like Max Payne, Deus Ex, Half Life 2, all run wonderfully under CrossOver for Mac, but more modern games can prove a problem.
DirectX 10 is Microsoft’s latest iteration of their proprietary graphics API. DirectX 10 has many improvements over DirectX 9, one of them being that it can only run on Vista. What, that’s a feature! Trust me.
But seriously, DirectX 10 is supposed to bring all sorts of new improvements to rendering, lighting, and so on, meaning things will look more realistic and shinier. Did I mention it only runs on Vista?
Voting has begun for the uDev 2008 contest, the premier Mac games development contest:
iDevGames invites Mac gamers to take part in a public vote to help select the winners for the uDevGames 2008 Contest. uDevGames is a Mac game development contest that requires teams to create a Mac game in just three months. The contest kicked off on December 2, 2008 and features 20 games by Mac developers from around the globe.
The 20 game entries will be subject to public and peer voting, ending on March 12. Entries will be scored by the public (including participating developers) for “Best Overall Game.” Developers will also score games in six additional categories: Gameplay, Graphics, Audio, Story, Presentation and Originality. The winners will be announced on March 16 and will divide a prize pool of over $20,000 donated by the sponsors of uDevGames 2008.
uDevGames was established by iDevGames with three underlying objectives in mind: create, educate, and succeed. The goal is to motivate developers to create fun games for the Mac platform, and then to release the games under an OSI open source license.
uDevGames actively helps to educate Mac developers, and aspiring new developers to the Mac platform, in technologies such as OpenGL and Objective-C. In addition, the contest helps spotlight developers that create unique and exciting games for the Mac, as well as help introduce the best and brightest talent to game publishers.
“We kicked off uDevGames in 2001, and for the next three years, it made a fantastic impact on the Mac gaming scene. uDevGames has served as a springboard for many of our past developers into the world of professional game development. By leveraging their experience in the contest, whether they win or not, this year’s developers will no doubt contribute positively to the Mac and iPhone platforms,” said Carlos Camacho, Editor-in-Chief, iDevGames.
uDev is a fantastic way for developers to work on games for Mac OS X. I’ll be taking a look at a few titles over the next week.
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