Yug and Oracle have two great studio tours and interviews with Infinite Interactive and Transmission Games, two very much well known Melbourne-based game developers.
At Infinite Interactive, the guys sit down with Steve Fawkner (CEO and Lead Designer) and Janene Fawkner (Producer) and chat about how Infinite Interactive came to be, their titles: Puzzle Quest, Galaxtrix, and NeoPets, as well as various other topics like working at Infinite and the company's very low turnover rate (only three people have ever left), and the closenit Mebourne game developer community...
Steve: Yeah, we catch up quite regularly actually – sometimes just for lunch or a chat. It's a pretty friendly community....There's some core studios that get along very well and have similar principals, like us, Firemint, Tantalus, Transmission, Torus, Iron Monkey and a few of the others. We're all in the GDAA so we catch up at meetings there but also for lunch in general.
Click here for the Infinite Interactive studio tour.
Yug and Oracle are next at Transmission Games (formerly IR Gurus), sitting down with Mike Fegan, CEO at Transmission Games. Mike provides a bit of background on himself and how he got into the industry, and gives some great insights into some of the financial successes for many of the games developed at IR Gurus / Transmission Games. If there's an industry person you need to talk to about the costs and difficulties of retaining I.P, funding for games, the benefits of tax incentives, and many other important business matters, Mike seems to be extremely clued in all of that and it shows in this interview. In regards to the well known skills shortage in the industry, the CEO describes some of the problems education institutions have in bringing out industry ready graduates, as well as the lengths studios are doing to snap up the brightest talents. It's a procedure that's been done by game developers overseas, and it's interesting to see that it's common here also...
Mike: The time taken to train a junior puts you behind the 8 ball in a production point of view. So that's one issue. I think that other main issue in Australia is that there is a fundamental disconnect between industry and the educational institutions. For example, most courses, like those offered by AIE and QANTM don't teach C++, which is the fundamental programming language for games. They teach .Net. When these graduates come in we spend six months training them on C++.... but the thing is that halfway through the year we're all sort of queuing up to see who the best guys are and sign them up before they finish. That's how desperate we are for them.
Mike also explains why the Sin City project was canned, and there are other great nuggets of information in there, so be sure to check out the AustralianGamer tour of Tansmission Games here!