Village Gamer

GamerCamp Level 3 is coming to Toronto’s Bathurst Street Theatre (and other various venues around Toronto) on November 25th-27th, and this is shaping to be the event’s biggest – and possibly best – festival to date (at least until Level 4). The full GamerCamp Schedule and Speaker Bios are now online. This year’s keynote speaker will be Seth Cooper, Chief Architect and Lead Designer of Foldit, a membrane-folding puzzle game that made international headlines when its players solved, in less than three weeks, a key mechanism in HIV that had stumped scientists for over ten years. Seth’s Friday morning presentation is sure to be inspiring. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend of September 30th, more than 400 college and university students competed in the Great Canadian Appathon2, creating  a mobile game in under 48 hours. At the KPMG- sponsored Grand Finale on November 2nd, the top three teams showed off their games before a panel of judges. Read the rest of this entry »

TransGaming Inc. and  Activision Publishing, Inc. have announced that Activision’s innovative new game, Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure™, has been brought to the Mac platform using TransGaming’s Mac enablement technology so that Spyro fans around the world can enjoy the game on their Mac computers. Read the rest of this entry »

Maide, a mobile software startup based in Toronto has an ambitious rethinking of how tablets will be used in the future. With a vision that may change how people interact with their desktop computers, Maide is pairing the multi-touch capability of the iPad with the raw power of the computer to create a powerful new input device for your desktop. Read the rest of this entry »

Interactive Ontario and X-Summit invites game designers & enthusiasts to a free session on 3D gaming technology which will take place at The Carlu on Wednesday, October 26th. The session begins at 9:30a.m. and includes breakfast, but space is very limited so RSVP now to reserve your seat. Read the rest of this entry »

The winners from this year’s IndieCade Festival have been announced. Congratulations to all of the winners and nominees who were among the chosen few for 2011, but especially to our Canadian developers who were recognized with awards:

Best in Show went to FEZ by Polytron Corp. and the Best Visuals award went to Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP – Superbrothers, Capybara Games, Jim Guthrie.

Other Canadian nominees were:

Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure by Untold Entertainment
superHYPERCUBE by Game Dev Collective Kokoromi
The Depths to Which I Sink – Bigpants

Big Blue Bubble, in conjunction with DIG 2011 Game and Web Developers Conference, has created a great game design competition for anyone with a game design idea. All you have to do is describe your game concept in less than 500 words, attach up to two relevant images or sound files, and submit your idea to the judges. Final day for entry is October 3rd, with the winner being announced on November 7th. The winner will get to work with a team of Big Blue Bubble programmers, artists and producers to create their very own game. There are a few conditions which apply, so please see the full competition guidelines below: Read the rest of this entry »

Vancouver’s East Side Games has acquired local games studio Compass Engine. This marks East Side Games’ first acquisition since officially forming earlier this summer. Established in 2009 by Ben Hesketh and McElroy Flavelle, Compass Engine started out building a platform for location based games before deciding to focus on the creating of their own titles for the iOS platform, namely ‘Catch the Canary’ and ‘Bounty Island’. Read the rest of this entry »

3D animation and visual effects developer Side Effects Software has announced a new promotion for first-time users of their Houdini software. VFX, commercial and game studios looking for a new level of flexibility and control can now save money while enjoying the benefits of Houdini’s procedural node-based workflow.

The Houdini First-Timer promo includes either a workstation or network license of Houdini Master and one year on the Annual Upgrade Plan. This promotion is for freelance artists and studios that have never owned Houdini before, is limited to 2 licenses per studio and must be purchased within the month of October. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday MacLean’s published an article titled Grand Theft Tax Break, written by Jesse Brown. This article, as you can guess by the title, was a disparaging piece about the tax credits and incentives received by the video game industry in certain regions of Canada.

I am going to overlook for a moment the entire tax incentives debate, mainly because I am not a developer or studio owner and I’m not a policy wonk – there are simply too many areas of the incentives program that I don’t entirely understand, so it’s best to skirt around that issue for now and get to what really got my dander up in that article. I will also overlook the inherent problems within the industry itself, because like any other industry in this country, there are work-life balance issues that need to be dealt with, but they don’t really come fully into play here.

I have to wonder what Mr. Brown has against the game industry, or if he has any friends who work in game development. If that article had been about an ethnic group or any type of visible minority, it never would have been published containing the insults and general slurs it does. It is one thing to be angry about something the industry receives, it is another to wipe a wide brush of insult across those who work in the industry. If the article was in any way meant to be a satirical rebuttal of the New York Times article Mr. Brown uses as reference, in my opinion the author fell far short of his mark. Read the rest of this entry »