Price cut in PS3 Development Kit

Looks like Sony is making a play to boost third-party game development for the PS3. At $10,250 for North American developers, it’s not quite at Christmas Stocking levels, but it is half what it used to be. We’ll have to wait and see if that translates into more PS3 games from small third-party development houses. Here’s the Wall Street Journal article if you want references.

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The ten most addictive online flash games ever made

It’s all over the Web. How can you not look? Just don’t don’t do it when you should be finishing that big project — ten addictive flash games.

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Make games for OLPC with the Etoys programming environment

Etoys is a computer environment and object-oriented programming language for use in education that is getting increased attention these days because it is included in the One Laptop Per Child XO. A post in Lambda the Ultimate notes:

“Etoys was invented by Alan Kay’s research group and is in continuous development and use as an integrated feature of Squeak Smalltalk. The Squeak/Etoys community includes lots of researchers, programmers, teachers, and kids around the world. Squeaky Tales is a series of short tutorial screencasts designed to each people to program with Etoys. I’m very excited that this may be what’s needed to make Etoys programming easy to learn for people at home. My experience has been that it’s easy and fun to teach Etoys programming face-to-face with everybody using their own laptop, but that it’s very slow and frustrating to try and learn Etoys by yourself just by installing it and clicking around. If Squeaky Tales makes it easy and fun to learn Etoys all by yourself at home then it’s quite a contribution to the world!”

Posted in CS, Programming, social media, sofware | No Comments »

Game Career panel at UMBC Commons

The UMBC Shriver Center has organized a panel of experts from Firaxis Games, Breakaway Ltd., Legendary Studios and the Imaging Research Center to talk about their experiences in the video game industry. If you want to learn more about the video game industry or are interested in a career in gaming, modeling or simulation (and if you’re reading this blog, that seems likely!), this should be pretty good.

It is Monday, November 5th from 12-1 in the UMBC Commons room 331.

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