UMBC's got GAIM

Predictions that games will keep growing

Marc Olano — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 20:56:01 +0000

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.

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EA releases Spore Creature Creator

tim finin — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:21:00 +0000

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.

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World of World of Warcraft

tim finin — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 14:45:38 +0000

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.”

‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’

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

Marc Olano — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 15:06:00 +0000

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!

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May Baltimore IGDA meeting Student Showcase

Marc Olano — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:04:11 +0000

The May 29th meeting of the Baltimore chapter of the International Game Developers Association will be a showcase and demo of student projects around the area. See the announcement for details on where and when.

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Free self-organizing conference on Social Computing this Sat in Baltimore

tim finin — Tue, 06 May 2008 23:57:01 +0000

Many online games have a strong social component to them — from Second Life to World of Warcraft — and the trend toward making games social is increasing. If you are interested in social media and social computing systems, you might consider going to a free self-organizing conference on the topic taking place this Saturday at the University of Baltimore. Lunch and parking are free and supported by the sponsors, which include UMBC. Here’s a press release for SocialDevCamp East, which describes itself “the Unconference for Thought Leaders of the Future Social Web”

BALTIMORE, MD (5/5/08) — Where is the social web going? It’s going mobile, to geocentric services, and to open platforms. On May 10th at the University of Baltimore a community of like minded developers, social media gurus and thought leaders will attend an unconference to discuss the future of the social web. Thought leaders from DC to Boston will converge upon Baltimore to meet, forge relationships, and envision the future.

SocialDevCamp East is a BarCamp-style event. BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences â€” open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants. The first BarCamp was held in Palo Alto, CA in 2005. Since then 31 BarCamps have been held in cities around the world. And now under the guidance of planners, David Troy of Roundhouse Technologies, LLC Ann Bernard and Keith Casey of WhyGo Solo.com, Baltimore will be added to the list.

According to Dave Troy, â€œPart of what we’re doing here with SocialDevCamp East is telling a story: a story about how there is latent intellectual capital and talent here on the East coast that wants to emerge, evolve and change the world. It’s the story of a new kind of silicon valley happening here â€“ an Amtrak metropolis from DC to Boston rich with talent, schools, and industries that will shape much of the future of technology.â€

With registration well over 150 the conference has gained lots of momentum using the social media tools that the conference will explore. As with all BarCamps, the attendees will create the sessions. Currently suggested topics include: Where is the social web going? How will location-aware devices affect the social web? How will platforms and data portability play out?

SocialDevCamp East - Charting the Next Course will take place Saturday, May 10, 2008 from 8:30am - 10:00pm at the University of Baltimore, Thumel Business Center Building, Baltimore, MD The event is free to attend. To find out more information go to: http://barcamp.pbwiki.com/SocialDevCampEast

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ZeniMax opening new MD studio

Marc Olano — Fri, 02 May 2008 19:17:56 +0000

ZeniMax (parent company of Bethesda Softworks) is opening a new studio in Hunt Valley, MD, ZeniMax online. New studio means lots of new hires, as their job listing page shows.

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Nice article on the “Anatomy of a Video Game” class in the Sun

Neal McDonald — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:35:54 +0000

Link.

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UMBC 3rd Annual Digital Entertainment Conference

Marc Olano — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 19:04:47 +0000

First, the announcment:

UMBC’s Game Developer’s Club along with the Computer Science Department, is hosting their annual Digital Entertainment Conference on April 12 from 10:30am - 6:00pm in Lecture Hall 3 in the Administration Building. This all day event includes speakers from local video game companies like Breakaway, Big Huge Games, and Firaxis. They’ll be speaking about different aspects of the video game industry, including art, programming, and design. If you have any interest in getting into the industry or just playing games, mark your calendars and come join us on April 12!

DEC’s official web site: www.umbcgdc.org/dec/
For Facebook members, you can join the DEC event here:
www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=9446589599

This has really been a great event in the past. It is open to the public, so whether you are a UMBC student or not, if you want to find out more about what the games industry is really like, you should come.

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Scholarship for Women and Minority Students

Marc Olano — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:31:56 +0000

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has created a new scholarship program for women and minority students pursuing full-time undergraduate degrees related to game development (that’s both of the degrees in our GAIM program). They’re giving away 15 $3000 awards for next year. The deadline is May 15th.

More information: www.scholarshipamerica.org/ESAF

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