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.

Hi All! Below are the videos from Mr Theo Sanders’ Talk. Due to time constraints, we can only put up two clips were created. Mr. Sanders were an ex-producer at Blizzard and is now the Director of Products at Razer. He has graciously taken the time to talk for the Student Chapter on Reward Mechanism in games.

The first clip is on the Warcraft III Battle.net Ladder System while the second clip covers more on the various type of  Rewards Mechanism in games.

First Clip:

Second Clip:

Enjoy!