Predictions that games will keep growing

For those of you looking to get into the games industry, here’s something to convince those skeptical friends and family members. A recent Arstechnica article reports that the games industry, which has been growing like crazy, is predicted to keep on growing. The games industry took in almost $42 billion last year. A PriceWaterhouseCooper report predicts that it’ll grow to $68 billion by 2012.

Posted in Careers, News, industry news | 1 Comment »

EA releases Spore Creature Creator

Electronic Arts, which will launch Will Wright’s Spore in September, has released Creature Creator — a module that let’s players create Spore creatures.

Technology review interviewd Lucy Bradshaw, Spore’s executive producer, about the use of procedural generation in Creature Creator (Creating Creatures).

The Creature Creator, the first piece of Electronic Arts’ highly anticipated evolution game Spore, launched Tuesday. Created by Will Wright, who’s known for the video games SimCity and The Sims, Spore begins with a player controlling a single-celled organism and progresses through various evolutionary stages until the player controls an entire space-faring race. The Creature Creator part of the game consists of a modeling interface that lets players build their own organisms from a set of highly customizable and flexible … The Creature Creator’s free trial edition is available today. A full version is available for $9.99 on the PC, with a Mac version to follow. The full version of Spore will launch in North America on September 7.

Posted in General, Programming, industry news, virtual worlds | No Comments »

World of World of Warcraft

Onion News Network has a funny piece on virtual worlds, taken to their logical limit: ‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’.

“My avatar is the biggest World of World of Warcraft fan in the whole World of World of Warcraft world. … The graphics are amazing, uhh, they’re revolutionary. I mean, I mean, when you stare at the computer screen you actually believe that you’re in a dimly lit basement staring at a computer screen.”

Posted in social media, virtual worlds | No Comments »

Frederick County “Future Link”, and memories of the past

I gave three half-hour hands on presentations at the Frederick County, Maryland Future Link conference for high-school sophomores Thursday. It was pretty fun, and the students (about 25-30 in each group) were great!

Preparing for this, I remembered that back when I was in junior-high and high school, I’d learned a ton about programming by typing in the game programs in SoftSide magazine, a little bit at a time to see what they did and debug them. Later I branched out to writing my own (very simple) games, which I gave away to my friends. One was a snake game, using the IBM PC’s line characters for the snake body. I wrote it as a high-school student in Maryland, then went off to college in Illinois. One day, I came back from classes to find my roommate from Washington state playing it! I don’t know how it made it coast to coast, but I really hoped to be able to give that sense of possibility to the students Thursday.

We used Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio, in part because it’s free and very accessible, in part because it has a rich set of examples, and in part because their new community game distribution system gives a way for individually created games to get out there. Plus, I was able to bring one of our XBox 360s to show what we did running on a game system. We started with the catapult mini-game example. With only half an hour, we could only do relatively simple things, but I wanted to show how easy it is to get started. First I dropped in an image of my head to replace the pumpkin that the catapult normally flings, then we walked through changing the bounce logic to do random bounces instead of the simple predictable bounces it normally does. Some of the students went off in their own directions, creating other simple modifications beyond the ones I’d suggested. Not bad in half an hour!

Posted in CS, Events, Game consols, General, History, xbox | No Comments »