Throughout the month of June the iGDA.SSC held about 5 coaching workshops on XNA and software engineering for games. Here are the screenshots of what were done; we’ll release those games as Open Source when they ready!

Hamilton Graph Game

The first gme is the Hamilton Graph Game (obligatory Wikiepida link) where you have to spot a Hamiton Path and click on the nodes to solve the puzzle.

Up next is a Sudoku game in XNA. The designer has even implemented a pencil tool where you can jot down the numbers 1 to 9 for reference.

Sudoku in XNA

One of the important aspect of the workshop is not just program a 2D game in XNA, but also to explore the concept of agile development and software engineering. Over the next few weeks example snippets from the source code will be used to demonstrate those principles, so stay tuned!

On other news, Mikoishi is holding an animation competition for their Dropcast game; using characters from their DS game, you have to come up with an entertaining, ass-kicking and awe-inspiring 2 minute animation. Budding animators, here is your chance!

GameDev.Net has featured a series of tutorials on creating minimal pixel art with Photoshop. If you have attended the game art workshop last Saturday, or just curious about learning more, this series of articles have many tricks of the trade to impart.

“What’s pixel art, precious?” you may ask. Below is an example of one.

Flowers done using Pixel Art

Don’t worry if you go “huh” at the title of this post. This is for the programming crowd

There are many menthods to find out if two objects have collided, but what’s next? You have to know what to do with the collided objects. There are many ways to go about it, but one of the more elegant one, which uses OOP Design Patterns, is to use the Visitor Pattern. Here is a good page on how to use the Visitor Pattern to handle the game logic after two objects have collided.

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!