iGame Radio

Organizers of this October’s GDC Online Game Conference in Austin (formerly known as GDC Austin) have announced additional summits for game development aficionados everywhere. The third iPhone Games Summit (started in 2009…we wonder if someone at GDC Online can count) will bring together “top game developers from around the world to share ideas, best practices and discuss the future of this revolutionary platform”. The summit will focus on business and marketing strategies, micro-transaction strategies, and understanding of the iPhone 4.0 operating system and beyond.

This is a two-day event, October 5th and 6th, with the second day paired with the iPad Game Summit. This summit will provide “key business learnings to top technical takeaways from developers already surging to major success on this already extremely competitive format platform”.

GDC Online 2010 takes place at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas from October 5th to the 8th. More information and registration can be found at the GDC Online website.

EDIT 2: Discovered today that TellTale will not be bringing Secret of Monkey Island: SE to the Mac…Aspyr is!

EDIT: Stupid me, I forgot all about the Fallen Earth MMOG announcement! Yeah, that’s right, the Fallen Earth Mac beta is available now. Check it out!

I want you all to understand how awesomely cool the news has been for Mac gamers from the GDC this week so far. We’ll be getting the complete rundown on tonight’s podcast from Peter Cohen of The Loop, who is manning the front line there in San Francisco. But for a brief rundown, here it is:

• OnLive has announced that they are going live come June 17, 2010. This is the on-demand gaming service that will be available for PC and Mac (and soon iPhone).
• Razer has announced that they will increase support for Mac drivers on all upcoming peripherals, including the Razer StarCraft II peripheral suite.
• Gas Powered Games, awed by Valve deciding to bring Mac support to Steam, has announced that they would be behind Mac support on Steam from now on: “We, as a developer, will include a Mac platform option in all of our proposals moving forward,” said Chris Taylor of Gas Powered Games. “We’re in 100% support of it. Absolutely.”
• TellTale’s Monkey Island: Special Edition and Secret of Monkey Island 2: Special Edition will be hitting the Mac as well. Not that this is a surprise…
• Khronos Group announced that OpenGL 4.0 has been released. More graphic goodness for us all!
• Bigpoint is making some significant news for the Mac. It announced that it had chosen the Unity platform for the upcoming browser-based Battlestar Galactica MMO. This means that Mac users should be able to play the game. Also, it announced leveraging the Unity platform to create a synchronous gameplay experience cross-platform, code-named Uniter, for the purpose of playing games on PCs and smartphones. Though the press release doesn’t specify, there is no reason not to include Mac and iPhone in there, and including iPhone but not Mac would be, well, kind of stupid. IMHO.

I’ll be grilling Peter tonight about it all. So stay tuned!

 

Part 2 of Gaming the IGF 2009. Includes an interview with Michael and Auriea of Tale of Tales, developers of The Graveyard, a finalist in the Innovation Category. Also, I interview Daniel Tabar of Data Realms, developer of Cortex Command, who won the Technical Excellence and Audience Awards at the IGF.

For some reason, I thought that the Independent Games Festival Awards Ceremony was last night, not Wednesday night. That’s what happens when one doesn’t attend the GDC, I guess. Anyway, kudos to everyone who entered the event, and especially to the winners. And major congratulations to the ones who won that have Mac clients! For your reading pleasure, the winners of the IGF 2009 (I bolded the ones with Mac clients or who would be bringing out Mac clients soon after the contest):

Seumas McNally Grand Prize ($30,000)
Blueberry Garden, by Erik Svedang

Innovation (Nuovo) Award ($2,500)
Between, by Jason Rohrer

Excellence in Visual Art ($2,500)
Machinarium, by Amanita Design

Excellence in Audio ($2,500)
BrainPipe, by Digital Eel

Technical Excellence ($2,500)
Cortex Command, by Data Realms

Excellence in Design ($2,500)
Musaic Box, by KranX Productions

Best Student Game ($2,500)
Tag: The Power of Paint, by DigiPen Institute of Technology

Audience Award ($2,500)
Cortex Command, by Data Realms

D2D Vision Award ($10,000)
Osmos, by Hemisphere Games

You can check out the interview with Jason Rohrer and Phosphorous of Digital Eel. I also did an interview with the guys who developed Tag for DIT’s podcast. The GDC got in the way of the rest, but I hope to have interviews with Data Realms, Amanita Design, and a few others shortly thereafter.

Today there’s been a flurry of conversation regarding the iPhone in and around the GDC. Seems Apple’s little smartphone has come home to roost as the next big gaming platform, and not just of mobile games either. Some examples include a survey done by VentureBeat in time for their GamesBeat 2009 event set for tomorrow. Based on more than 160 responses coming from people registered to attend the event, 61 per cent voted that the iPhone would impact the industry the most — not surprising, given the rapid rise of Apple’s iPhone as a game platform. Among game platforms, they also saw the iPhone as having the most potential (74 percent), followed by social networks (64 percent), casual web-based (62 percent), and consoles (57 percent).

Better yet, Neil Young of ngmoco gave the keynote today, titled “Why the iPhone Just Changed Everything.” As 1up.com commented “After all, at no point in the past would hundreds of people have roused themselves from bed to attend a Monday morning speech about mobile games. Not in the U.S., anyway. Publishers have been trying and failing for years to achieve any sort of traction in the American mobile gaming market, and it’s only with the advent of Apple’s iPhone that U.S. gamers have started to take the prospect of gaming on a phone seriously.”

Think about it. Where else can you find fart-apps selling side-by-side with Metal Gear Solid?? Seriously, each and every developer has an equal chance of getting the publicity and the attention from iPhone gamers in the App Store. And frankly this enables small developers that actually have good ideas and good games to get the break they need.

But wait, there’s more! Apparently Nintendo is so paranoid about the App Store that, though their official line is “we have no intention of competing directly with the iPhone, iPod, or the App Store”, apparently according to some sources, at a sooper secrit Nintendo meeting, Nintendo is putting some plan in motion to encourage developers to develop “short-form content” for its new DSi handheld. They are encouraging developers to think about making shorter ‘applications’, both games and non-game. It should be very interesting to see what Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo, says on Wednesday. He will be keynoting the GDC.

Lastly, it seems that Big Daddy may be scheduled for more than just the Mac soon. A question by an attendee made at the GDC to IG Fun CEO Sean Malatesta (who developed the mobile version of Bioshock) about the iPhone resulted in this comment: “Honestly, I can’t comment on BioShock on iPhone right now,” he told the audience. “It’s top secret.” Ooooh, boy! Are we talking Bioshock for the iPhone now??