As you can tell, it's a very quiet time for the website, being the holiday season and all. It's probably at it's most quiet during the period between Christmas and New Years Eve, so I guess now is a pretty good time to summerise the highlights for the local industry in 2003, as well as comment on what Sumea Launchpad has achieved in the last 12 months. It may be a bit long winded, but hopefully a few of you will find it a little bit interesting! In any case, it'll be a good chance for me to let you know of some of the going ons behind the website that most of you don't really hear about, unless you're lurking in the Sumea irc channel, of course :).
First of all, perhaps the most unfortunate news this year was of Queensland's Evolution Games closing their doors. Evolution Studios was winner of best new start up at the AGDC 2002 and released Rocket Power: Beach Bandits. It was otherwise a very productive year for many local developers, many of which are working on world class titles - Atari Melbourne House with Transformers Armada - a highly anticipated title, with previews commenting on it as Atari's best title in their lineup of games in the works. Irrational Games clearly has the hopes of many with Tribes: Vengeance. Other industry milestones include Krome Studio's Ty, the Tasmanian Tiger making the Sony hits status, something that's reserved to special titles that sell incredibly well. I'm not sure what the exact numbers are, but I'm certain Ty has sold over a million copies!
This year heralded more support for independant developers through the Playstation2 and XBox Developer Kit schemes, organised by the Game Developers Association of Australia. The Digital Media Funding provided Victorian developers assistance with funding and ownership of their games. Never before has as much support been offered to those wanting to make it out on their own in game development!
On the educational front, it's definately encouraging that more and more universities are offering game development courses throughout Australia and New Zealand. The Academy of Interactive Entertainment will expand to Melbourne in 2004, making Melbourne even more appealing as the epicentre of game development in Australia. Melbourne has in fact been named as one of the five game development hotspots in the world, by Wired magazine.
And now onto the website. Believe it or not, we've had some small victories of our own!
Sumea Launchpad has managed to reunite old school mates, and even long lost workmates for a work reunion. We were given a name, and that the person had moved on to work in the 'games industry'. All it took was a post on our main page, and the person was found within a day! Although I unfortunately missed the episode, Sumea managed to appear on the channel 7 game review show called "Control Freaks", bringing an influx of young visitors to this website. Hopefully it'll spark some interest in game development for them in the process. We've been a small hand in what will hopefully be an annual Independant Game Developers Conference, and we've given some help to a Singaporean game developer company get connected during their relocation to Perth. We've provided assistance in getting a high school in Queensland an experienced game developer to lecture game development there.
Many of our forum members got in the industry this year.. Malus, Gazunta, Doord, J.I Styles, Lee Smith, Doolwind, Adamant, Ninja etc, and I hope that our jobs section was responsible for many, many others getting their foot in the industry as well. Something that I've been most happy with is the large presence of game industry people and people from educational institutions (like the AIE and Qantm) in the forums, offering their support and help with the rest of the community. It definately is great for everyone. The Sumea Challenge has been a very successful competition, and it's definately growing with each new challenge. Bullant Studios generously provided a $900 prize for the previous competition, and I can even promise you even bigger things down the track for the Sumea Challenge! But you will have to wait and see, of course. :)
The most common feedback received for Sumea is that it's such a great resource on the industry. The site has been used for research by a co-Japanese/Australian company, and we've had feedback from companies such as Sony, Intel, and Discreet. Due to the great relationship we have with our local game developers, we can provide our visitors with up-to-date news, press releases, new job openings, along with some special things planned in the near future, such as the portfolio guide for artists from the creative directors and lead artists from our industry. It'll be the definitive guide, I can assure you!
Of course, most of these happenings at Sumea wouldn't have happened at all if Krome Studios had not bailed the site from disappearing by offering sponsorship support to keep the website up. Thanks again Krome!!!!
When the site first opened, it was only posted at the forums on Polycount, Planetquake, and Urban Terror. The rest of our visitors have come through word of mouth or google searches! Since then Sumea has grown, we have around 250 members - programmers, and artists with profiles, quite possibly making it the largest gathering of talent exposed in the Australasian area. Not bad for a website which started off with a tiny news page, a single page linking to developer websites, and a gallery for local game artists :)
I'd like to end this rather long post to give thanks to all the regular members who've help make the forum such a great and helpful place, and to all the developers I've annoyed over the year, and to all of you a Happy New Year!
Bring on 2004!!
-- Souri