Thanks to Xuanming (who goes by the nick Kougansharde on the forum) who have graciously taken up the time to do up a web banner for the IGDA.SSC. If you wish to link to us, you may consider using this banner. Also, if you are running a games development web-site which have resources for aspiring game developers and students, we would not mind putting up your link in exchange for you putting up our banner

Enough talk. Here’s the banner; gaze upon its glory! Many thanks, Xuanming!

By the way, we welcome any request to change the banner to suit your website needs. Just let us know via. the comments.

Sometimes making character sprites could be tedious, as you have to draw the small batch of pixels in different direction and orientation. While surfing the Internet, I come across the Basic 2D Character Sprite Kit which is a helpful utility (free too, I believe!) for character artists into pixel art

The sprite kit can automatically generates sprite art from one set of art, and comes with a couple of starter templates. Here’s the link if you are interested!

Well, it must be because it is crunch mode for the university students and something about 22nd March, but we did manage to round up 8 peoples (plus one newcomer, Cool Beat!) for our board game chill up. First, have to thank Lyon and Maggie for allowing us to use their office (Gold Kirin International!) so that we get to game for free

Alas, we only have time for a 8 player games of Citadel (it doesn’t take that long, usually, but there’s eight of us) and we have weird things where the King assassinates the King, an artist beautifying a battlefield, where a thief learns it doesn’t pay to steal from the Church and the artist being assassinated. Hell lot of fun, and wish more of you guys were here

We will be having a game party of sorts in late April/early May when school is out and exams are done for. So watch this place!

Yo all!

This post is mostly for programmers

Ogre3D is an open-source rendering engine and it can do some things darn well. However, it just handles graphics and it is not a full game engine and let’s face it - unmanaged memory management is a pain and so is C++ (personal opinion, no flames please). So while exploring for an engine for my games development module, I come across NeoAxis , a C# game engine using Ogre3D for rendering, which means you get all the cool shaders, decals, specular lightning, blooms and etc while using C#. Look at the feature list for yourself:

• Map Editor (with A* path-finding waypoints and nodes built in!)
• Resources Editor
• Physics Engine integrated
• A fully working and flexible Entity class

The downloads include various demonstrations, from a RTS where there is actual real enemy AI, a third person adventure game, physics ragdoll simulation, a tank game and a crane demonstration.

For those concerned about managed memory being slow…well, the demos run fine at acceptable graphical quality with minimal lag on my 3 years old IBM laptop which is using battery. It’s pretty well encapsulated, so learning the architecture may be a bit steep, but hey, the editors make life easier for the programmers

Next Post: I promise something less techie

The IGDASSC has just acquired Kingsburg and Citadel to its board game library! Right now, we have

• A Game of Throne (All three expansions)
• Citadel
• Saboteur
• Saints Petersburg
• Kingdoms
• Risk 2210 AD

Can wait to try them all out!

Hi guys,

On the 22nd March, 2pm at Settlers (Saturday), we are going to have a board game chill out for those stressed by exams (post or pre), projects and etc. It is just a light and friendly meeting and we will be sticking to simple games (nothing longer than two hours!). If you are interested in coming, do drop me a note at extrakun@yahoo.com.sg!

For those who has some programming background (Java, C# or C++) and wishes to try your hand on some relatively quick and easy 3D games programming, I will highly recommend XNA. Microsoft is pushing out lot of good samples (with source-codes!) from small mini-games to 3D Descent-like shooters.

For those who are starting out, there are video tutorials offered by Microsoft which if you are really keen, you can go through in one day (scroll all the way down till you find the series of tutorials which starts with “Video 1″ to “Video 4″).

A quick guide to installing XNA - first, you must have Windows SP 2. Then you have download XNA 2 and C# Express, a process that could take up to an hour depending on your connection speed. Oh yes, everything for XNA is free and Microsoft is making plans to allow you to put up your games on Xbox Live (if you subscribe to their Creators’ Account). So do try it out if you are looking to make lightweight 3D games or 2D games - XNA has good support for 2D too.