There's another article mentioning Rat Bag's woes in getting programmers onboard at TheAge.com.au...
"We go around to all the universities and talk to the students, but very few apply," says Mark Bracken, Ratbag's vice-president of marketing and business development. "There seems to be a myth going around that it's too hard to get a job in games programming in Australia, which is simply not the case. You don't have to be a coding superstar; you just have to be passionate about games. There are…
Free Play: The Next Wave Independent Game Developers' Conference is proud to finally announce our major keynote speaker:
HARVEY SMITH, Austin, Texas, USA
Harvey Smith (formerly of Ion Storm) has produced arguably the most intelligent, brave and innovative work in game design ever to come out of our industry.
We consider the nature of Harvey's work to be consistent with the progressive and alternative focus of Australia's first independent developers' conference. Harvey will be visiting…
(From the New Zealand Game Developer Association website!)
Registrations have now opened for the first ever New Zealand Game Developers Conference, dubbed Fuse 2004.
Held in Dunedin, the event promises to be an important milestone in the ongoing development of the NZ games industry with a range of speakers from local industry, government, and offshore and a host of planned talks and workshops.
Register now at the official conference website at www.nzgdc.org.nz
Tantalus Interactive today announced its latest handheld offering, Trick Star, for Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance. Tantalus is one of the world’s foremost handheld game developers, with Trick Star following fresh on the heels of last year’s GBA hit Top Gear Rally. Established in 1994, Tantalus has released over twenty titles, including a string of high profile releases on Game Boy Advance. Top Gear Rally was published by Nintendo and was the recipient of several…
Tantalus Interactive today announced the establishment of Tantalus Asia, a studio based in Kuala Lumpur that will focus on developing titles for wireless devices. Based in Melbourne, Australia, Tantalus Interactive was founded in 1994 and has established a reputation as one of the world’s leading handheld game developers. The company also makes games for console, including the recent hit Unreal 2 for X-Box.
The Malaysian studio is a joint venture between Tantalus Interactive and…
(from the website of Kevin 'Zaph' Burfitt, Producer, Atari Melbourne House)
On Thursday 6th May, the Sunrise show on Channel 7 will be crossing to Atari Melbourne House multiple times to show the studio and Transformers (PS2), starting at 6am(!)
If you want to see some of the faces behind Transformers, some behind-the-scenes bits, and some sleepy looking programmers then tune in!
Yes, I'll be getting to work at (gasp) 5:30am !
http://seven.com.au/sunrise
Andrew James, Lead Artist at Irrational Games Canberra, writes in the latest installment of IGN's Tribes: Vengeance Developer Diary. T:V is nearing alpha and Andrew explains where the art team is at, currently polishing up the single player and multiplayer levels. There's mention of the fun to be had with the Havok's physics engine, and also the compromise on normal mapping with per pixel lighting.
"Since we didn't have time scheduled to create every asset as a high-res model and process them…
Wellington, NZ - April 30, 2004 - Game development studio Sidhe Interactive celebrated winning not only the Creative Gold category at last nights' annual Wellington Region Gold Awards ceremony, but also a win in the overall category, the Supreme Gold award. The awards, now in their 6th year, celebrate commercial enterprise and excellence in the region.
Previous winners of both the Creative and Supreme Gold awards have included Weta Digital and Weta Workshop, special effects wizards behind the…
Nocturnal Entertainment will release Catapult v1.40b in 2 weeks. Catapult is a 'all-in-one' integrated development package aimed at the Gameboy Advance.
The upcoming release has more than 250 improvements/fixes over the previous release, and represents the single biggest incremental improvement since Catapult was announced.
Some of the core new features include:
- multi-layered level editor (each level can contain up to 4 layers)
- rendered fonts (much cleaner looking text)
- support for XM…
Submitted by Zaph
Atari announces that Transformers has Gone Gold:
Atari Inc. (Nasdaq:ATAR) announced today that its highly anticipated TRANSFORMERS(TM) video game, created exclusively for the PlayStation(R)2 computer entertainment system under license from Hasbro Inc. (NYSE:HAS), has gone gold. Based on Hasbro's hugely popular brand, Atari's TRANSFORMERS video game will be available worldwide on May 11th.
Atari's TRANSFORMERS video game puts players in the TRANSFORMERS universe like never…