Category Archives: mobile

Train2Game News: Mid-week round up

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Five months since its release, Minecraft on the Xbox 360 is still selling 27,000 units daily. That’s an estimated 4 million copies sold, further solidifying the games legacy.

Valve’s Steam distribution service now sells software as well as games. The software is for games development. The products currently available on the store are ArtRage Studio Pro, CameraBag 2, GameMaker: Studio, 3D-Coat, 3DMark Vantage, 3DMark 11 and of course, Source Film-maker.

Halo 4 won’t be getting Kinect controls, says 343 Industries’ Frank O’Connor. His opinion is that while the motion sensor has its uses when it comes to the UI, controlling a core game is not what it’s for. Kinect will be used for Halo Waypoint however, which can be launched from in the game.

Reportedly, Arkane studios’ Dishonored will take over twenty hours to complete playing stealthily with killing no one. A brutal play through, killing anyone in your path, will take between 12 to 14 hours but that’s without exploring every nook and cranny, and knowing the solution to everything beforehand. It should take more thorough or inexperienced players longer than that.

PlayStation Europe is offering a month long internship to who ever can make the best game on LittleBigPlanet for the PS Vita. The best submission, as voted by a PlayStation judging panel, will be rewarded with a month-long internship at Swedish studio Tarsier. Games will be judged on gameplay, originality, and commercial appeal. The winner will eventually help work on official DLC for the game. To register an interest, go here.

A new mod has been developed for Crysis. The mod, StarCry, sees many different hit sci-fi shows making their way into the new user made campaign for the game. Franchises such as Stargate SG1 and Star Wars are featured in the mod.

Chasing Aurora developer, Martin Pichlmair, says that Nintendo is working hard to make the Wii U eShop friendly and open for independent developers. This opens up a whole new market with a new innovative console to work with.

World of Tanks official site, Wargaming.net, say that registration numbers have passed the 40 million mark. Players have been pouring into servers to check out the big 8.0 update, which overhauled WoT’s visuals and added proper physics. World of Tanks is one of the biggest free to play games in the world.

Cliff Bleszinski has announced he is leaving Epic. After two decades with the company he is moving on to expand his career. Whilst with the company he was responsible for games such as Jazzy Jackrabbit and the highly acclaimed Gears Of War series.

Bad Piggies, the Angry Birds spin-off from Rovio, shot to the top spot on the US iTunes App Store within three hours of launch. The firm said the game was the fastest chart-topper in the company’s history. The game is the third from the Finnish studio this year to hit the top spot within it’s first day of release. The other titles were Amazing Alex and of course, Angry Birds Space.

Train2Game News: Students in their local papers

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Train2Game Students Aaron Reeve, Michael Wittington and Scott Williams have been featured in their local newspapers for being a part of the world record breaking game jam held at University of Bedfordshire in Luton.

You can see the articles in the links below.

Sevenoaks_Chronicle_September_2012

Southall Gazette September 2012

Woking Informer September 2012

Well done guys. Good luck with everything you do.

Train2Game News: A day at Eurogamer Expo: Part 1

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On Saturday I was sent to the Eurogamer Expo held at Earl’s Court in London. I am going to give a recap of my day for anyone who couldn’t be there.

My first clue that the day was going to be a good one was seeing The Mask queuing to enter. I was surrounded by hundreds of other early entry ticket holders all eager to burst through the door and get their hands on the up coming games.

As the doors opened and we all filed in. I knew exactly what I wanted to play. I walked straight to the over 18 area to finally get my first taste of Arkane Studio’s Dishonored.

The demo gave you a good taste. I got to use the possession skill, walking around in guards bodies to sneak around, before falling out and assassinating them. The blink skill is a good mechanic, similar to that of Nightcrawler from Xmen, you can teleport short distances without being detected and get to hard to reach areas. The world its self looks beautiful and the level design is so versatile. I can not wait to get my hands on this game.

Next up I had a shot at Hitman: Absolution. Everyone who played the Square-Enix game got a little Agent 47 model, who now sits proudly on my desk. The graphics are of a very high standard and the game play is typical Hitman from what I could see. Having only played Hitman:Blood Money previously, I was happy to see the ability to peak from hiding places, which was seriously lacking in earlier games. This will probably be another one I end up getting.

After seeing highly amusing stickers that were for the iOS game Carmaggedon I had to hunt down the stand. It is a remake of the game released fifteen years ago that had so much controversy surrounding it. When the game was first released the public didn’t like the fact that you had to run over people. They had to change it to zombies or face the game being banned. Now that times have changed the game is back in all its glory, the way it should have been.

I then visited the Train2Game stand to say hello. I was happy to see many students and potential students attending. Royal Rush, the winning game from the world record winning Game Jam, made by RetroMetro, was playable at the stand. Train2Game held competitions daily, who ever got the highest score on the game was awarded a prize later in the day.

At midday it was time for the Dishonored developer session. We all took our seats and were introduced to Christophe Carrier and Dinga Bakaba from Arkane Studios. They took us through the story and some of their development ideas before doing two demos for us. The first time through they demonstrated the stealth aspects of the game, using the blink mechanic and distractions to get to the end of the level. No one was killed and he was only spotted once before disappearing out of sight. The second time was much more brutal. Killing everyone he could find using different methods. The highlight of which being the moment he froze time with a bullet in mid air, possessed the guard who had fired it and walked in front of the shot before leaving his body and unfreezing time, making the guard shoot himself.

That covers my morning at Eurogamer. There was so much to do and see through out the day I am going to have to split this in to two blogs across the day. Check back later for the continuation.

 

Train2Game News: Games industry blasts to new heights

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The latest numbers from trade association UKIE show the UK games industry being worth £3.266 billion. It accounts for almost half of the entertainment market in the United Kingdom

Over 28,000 people are employed by the industry, 9000 of which are skilled roles at over 200 development studios. The research suggests over 32 million people actively play games in the UK, with the average age of 33. An equivalent of more than one console is owned per household.

In addition Google Play, the android market place, is catching up to Apple’s App Store.

Google play has just surpassed 25 billion downloads of its 675,000 applications and the App store hit 25 billion downloads back in March of its 700,00 apps.

Google has seen over 500 million Android device activations and Apple has seen over 400 million iOS devices activated. The number of Apple devices should rise with the recent release of iOS 6 and the iPhone 5. A current potential 900 million mobile gamers on Android and iOS alone.

Google intends to celebrate the 25 billion downloads milestone by offering cheaper featured apps and other discounts on films, books, albums and magazines for the next five days.

With such large numbers people can not ignore the games industry. It is now a big part of the world and should only get bigger with the introduction of the tax break.

The numbers have been released for the start of the London Games Festival which begins today with the opening of Eurogamer.

Train2Game News: Matty Wyett-Simmonds student diary: Week 42

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Week after the big game jam and have been hard at work!

We’ve had to make up for the time off and we’ve all been pretty busy here. We did a few late nights (up to 10pm) as well.

I’ve been churning out art assets at the same time as fixing assets that don’t work correctly in game. I also did my first purely 2D art work in a very long time which was pretty cool I think.

Other than that I’ve not had much of a week. Me, Craig and Amanda went to the pet store at lunch time one day to get some dead mice for her snake, Craig desperately wanted to get hamsters for the office which I don’t think Clive would have appreciated as much as we would.

I was in my first car crash this week too! I wasn’t driving though so I don’t know if it counts, but still it happened.

I also got a new phone which is awesome (Samsung Galaxy sIII), My sII died the night before so I went out and got it on contract. Very worth it if you haven’t tried a Galaxy phone, much better than the iPhone5 I think.

Train2Game News: Ezekiel Morris student diary: Week 15

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This week has been very stressful and not the best of weeks. Trying to fix animation errors and getting things to work in Unity, so it’s been annoying.

I don’t like Unity I know some people might find it OK but my experience using it is I hate it. It was simple enough using UDK.

I enjoy animating characters but I never realized how much hard work was involved especially when you’re given a deadline. Learning how to use Maya and Unity at the same time has been tough. So when I import the animation sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, it’s annoying to have to keep on asking for someone to sort the problem. I try doing it myself but still struggling a bit with some issues, the animation works in motion builder.

Finally I’ve found out what’s stopping the animation and it’s working perfectly. I haven’t felt comfortable using Unity I ‘am afraid I will break the game. I know this isn’t my strong point but the good thing about this experience is I now know how to use Maya so great experience. I can’t wait to do my thing soon.

Train2Game News: Mid-week round up

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Blizzard Entertainment released Mists Of Pandaria yesterday. The latest expansion for World Of Warcraft. Blizzard have also said that they have no fear of Windows 8 and will release games for any platform their players are on.

Avenged Sevenfold have released a new track that will feature on Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2. The song, Carry On, is the second song the band have released for a Call Of Duty game. They previously released Not Ready To Die with one of the Call Of Duty: Black Ops DLC packs.

Telltale’s five Walking Dead episodic games will be put on disc in December for Xbox360 and PS3. The game is based on the graphic novel turned TV show and through playing them myself I can say, if you are a fan of the series, play this game. You won’t be disappointed.

Nvidia’s head of cloud gaming, Phil Eisler, believes that cloud gaming could take over from consoles. He believes that consoles have one final generation in them before they die out, leaving the world of gaming in the hands of the cloud.

Ubisoft have announced that Assassins Creed 3 will not play on Windows XP. The company has released the specifications needed to play the game. There is a version for Windows 8 in the pipeline though.

Bethesda have released an animated prequel to its upcoming Dishonored. The webseries is called Tales of Dunwall and the gorgeous animated shorts are being released in three parts. The videos can be found on YouTube and they show the downfall of the in game city.

Sony Xdev are giving a small studio the opportunity to win £25,000. This new initiative, called Playstation Pioneers, will reward developers for a PlayStation Mobile game concept and will also offer successful candidates the opportunity to work alongside XDev. Further details can be found here.

An extra four titles have been added to the Humble Bundle 6. The titles are: Bit.Trip Runner, Gratuitous Space Battles, Jamestown, and Wizorb. If you have already purchased the bundle, you will get the new games added at no extra cost.

If you are attending Eurogamer this weekend you can get a special surprise when you play Company Of Heroes 2. Everyone that plays the game or attends the developer session at the event will get a code to access a future beta for the game.

Finally Train2Game will be at Eurogamer this weekend. If you are attending go and say hello, it is always nice to meet these people. I will be attending on the Saturday so if you see me feel free to talk to me. I hope everyone that attends has a brilliant time.

Train2Game News: Craig Moore student diary: Week 44

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Its story time kids!

This week has been a bit of a mammoth task for me, it has been a case of completely planning and attempting to organise the full storyline for the game. It’s a bit of a new beast for me, taking to creating a narrative is something I have only really ever lightly touched on.

Being an arcade gamer at heart my story lines tend to start and end at ‘Save the Princess’ so embellishing on that and pushing my narrative skills has been a good exercise. Especially when considering the fact that I am working with quite a strict set of predetermined story lines it certainly stretches the old grey matter.

That has literally been my week, when I look at the work I have done it doesn’t sound like much, but making it all intertwine and essentially work takes up a great deal of time and trying to ensure it’s going to work best for the player is another world entirely!

Apart from that I have been knee deep in my Train2Game work, I’ve moved on to my final few assignments while I am waiting for my first submission to be marked, hopefully I will get the course finished before the end of the year, at least that is my target.

Ciao!

Craig

Train2Game News: Amanda Blatch student diary: Week 1

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So.. first diary, first week. What is there to say? First day at DR Studio I met a lot of people, t’was pretty cool. Also did my first concept sheet for an in-game character and vectorized it and made her look so sickingly adorable it was fun.

Wasn’t the last character piece this week though as I went on to do the same to an additional two characters, before then getting my hand held through the entire cutting and rigging process in Maya and 3Ds Max as they were things I hadn’t done before.

That night I learnt to rig for this game I’m sure my housemates were going to forcefully drag me away from the computer had it not been so late and I was so very, very tired. Luckily after a good night’s sleep I was able to pick it up again in next to no time and storm my way through the remaining two vector characters so they were ready to go in the game.

Annnnd I think that is about it!

Not really much to say as my week was mostly about learning the style, processes, where to store files correctly and how to use programs that I hadn’t used before. Wait, actually there was that car accident after my first day of work at the beginning of the week where Matty and Craig did NOT nearly die despite what their diaries this week might say. Mostly based on the fact that when travelling at about 15-20mph, the vehicle will not scream into a blazing inferno.. so there.

Boom. Week 1 diary complete! See you all next week.

Train2Game News: Matty Wyett-Simmonds Student diary: Week 41

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Sorry for the lack of diaries lately! I’ve been so busy with the current project that I just didn’t have time to write them.

Everything is going swimmingly well now and we are in a position where we just have to keep churning assets out to make the game. I’m working mostly on the tech side of art rather than creation. This is how I like it though as I enjoy doing it, but I’m not the most creative person. The others are working on concepts for characters and buildings and everything is starting to look awesome.

We also now have a new student starting next week who some people may know, Amanda Blatch!

I know her from the gadget show as she was on my team for a good 6 months. She is again another artist and specializes in character art mainly. She’s also moving in with me Craig and Ezekiel so should be good to see another face around. Also my tortoise is now living with us (was with my girlfriend before but she’s going to Leeds to start her new PhD! Congratulations to her!) At the same time though Amanda is also bringing her pet snake so now we have a house with two reptiles in, which is awesome!

The tidal wave that was Sea Park is slowly calming now and there are regular users, so the game must not suck which is always good. We may go back to it to make updates and such for the people that are completing the game but for now we are concentrating completely on the new project which we are hoping will take half the time to make and release.

Game Jam starts tomorrow! I hope everyone else is excited, will hopefully meet a few people from Microsoft, last year it was Epic Games, two very big names indeed!

I have a new portfolio site now using HTML5 only, which is working very nicely; check it out if you can http://mattyws.wix.com/portfolio#!home/mainPage

Hope everyone enjoys their weekends; I certainly will at the game jam!

Best

Matty