The IGDA.SSC and the NUS GDG held a series of workshops on game design, graphics, Flash and Game Maker. Here are some of the photo from that day events. We want to thank the participants who turn up for the workshops and we hope you learned much! It’s now time to prepare for the CONTRAST competition!

Also, if you check our links section, you will find tutorials, resources and other helpful websites to prepare you for CONTRAST.

We will be holding the workshops again in the month of August and September. Do let your friends know!

For those interested in getting started in 3D for XNA, you may want to try out Riemer’s XNA Tutorial on a simple flight simulation. It’s pretty short and informative and the below is the outcome of going through it.

In conjunction with the upcoming CONTRAST 24 hours game development competition, the NUS Games Development Group and us are organising a series of workshops on

1. Game design
2. Digitalizing art for games
3. GameMaker (programming software) for beginners
4. Adobe Flash for games

Yes, this is an all-in-one package of courses (at an affordable rate of just $4 each!) touching on games development! Interested? Click on the posters below for more information! To sign up, please send a mail to nus.gdg@gmail.com with your name and contact number. Payment will be collected on the day itself.

The dates for the August and September workshops are coming soon! Stay tuned!

ActionScript has changed a lot since 1.0 - now with 3.0, it is almost like Java. If you need some ActionScript help, or just want to see how things are done, head off to Senocular’s ActionScript Library, where you find dozens of scripts for all sort of helpful effects, utilities and design patterns which you may need. There are scripts for AS 1, 2 and 3, so regardless of which you are using, you will sure find something of value there!

Head off to Invisible City - and you will find it to be a website that release a free board game almost every month. Each of the board-game features pieces and boards which you have to print out yourselves to play; but that’s not the point. The point is that those people creates them in their free time.

They are not the only one to do so. Do a Google search for “Print and Play Board Games” and you find that they aren’t the only one. If you check out Game-It-Yourself, you find a massive list of board games people make in their free time. The point is? If you are interested in games development, you don’t have to do it on computer all the times. Try out your ideas with some other medium or just try out some other medium.

A deck of 52 playing cards have given rise to endless variations. There are more than 1,000 variants of Chess listed on the Chess Variants Home Page, where you find rules for new pieces, new board, pieces with new abilities (like a piece that takes on the property of the piece which it has just captured) and more.

So for budding designers, here’s a consideration. Design a lite, mini-boardgame just for exercise or for portfolio. Think of a variant of an idea, try modding existing board games and so on. It doesn’t have to be about the computer all the time.

PS. Just for the record, I am doing a board game in secret, Pondwater did a board game before and one of our friend in NS was doing a fan-based card game based on Command and Conquer. Yes, we do practice what we preach.

For those of you interested in XNA, there’s a full featured video on how to create a 3D game in XNA, inlcuding the assets in SoftImage, and it is a video, not some boring book. You can download it, along with the source code, at GameTheory.

And for those interested in game competitions, “Dream Build Play” - the XNA games development competition, is on. The dateline is on 26th September, so for those who are interested, there is about three months left. Find out more about the competition at the Microsoft official DBP site.

There are over USD75,00 worth of prizes to be won, so it’s not a chance to be missed!

Backflow, the game which is developed by Singaporean and MIT students in the Gambit-MIT GameLab programmee, is now for sale! For more information, do check out the game at their website. And now for some eye-candy:

I was browsing the Internet randomly when I come by this rather detailed tutorial on using Photoshop to draw a Two-Handed Sword (from Lineage II) digitally. Check it out if you are interested!

This is a rather heavy topic, so I done some research on the web and has a collection of links on performing collision detections in XNA. Check it out if you are interested in this area!

Yo just a reminder on behalf for our friends at Settlers Cafe and P.I., the first ever Singapore Boardgame Convention is happening this is Saturday! Here’s the poster which contains much more info than I could ever type.