tsumea Article

If you've ever been interested in making games but don't know how to program, then you're in luck. It has never been any easier to make a fully fledged game for today's popular platforms (PC, MAC, and mobile), without needing to delve too deeply into a programming language or api.

Back in 2008, I created an article on the origins of Australian game developers which displayed some charts showing the links between various game companies that have spawned off from each other. It was fairly well received and was even used as a base by researchers interested in this kind of information.

We needed a student's perspective for our GDC 2012 Breakfast Club article, so we contacted the Academy of Interactive Entertainment to see if they could get one of the studios from their Incubator program to contribute to our article.

This is the tsumea GDC 2012 Breakfast Club. No, they aren't a rag tag mix-match of high school students but a carefully selected team of the finest games developers that Australia and New Zealand has to offer. And whilst these guys weren't exactly confined to the local high school library, they were instead situated somewhere more chaotic and undoubtedly more stranger.

With a career spanning over twenty years in the games industry and a highly impressive body of work behind him, Adrian Moore is without a doubt one of most experienced and highly respected games developers in Australia. He also boasts an impressive track record in the commercial recording industry working with artists such as Sade, Seal and Pearl Jam. Adrian has just recently gone independent and is opening up the wealth of knowledge and decades of experience as a games designer and musician for fellow games developers.

Hi Chris, can you tell us what your role is at Fraktalvoid and what aspects of the game were you directly involved with for your new game, Speed Blazers?

Chris: I am the director and owner of Fraktalvoid. I was basically involved in most aspects in the development of Speed Blazers. I was the game designer, art director, 3D artist, concept artist, cinematics, producer, marketer and a bunch of other things to help realise Speed Blazers.

Runner up entrants for the Unity Flash in Flash Creation Contest is a two man team consisting of Brendan Watts (Programmer) and Shawn Eustace (Artist). While the Grand Master prize of $20,000 went to fellow Brisbane developer, Cameron Owen, the team achieved the next best placement as runner ups with their highly addictive game, Ski Safari.

During the end of December, last year, Unity Technologies released the Unity 3.5 open beta which included the anticipated preview of the Flash deployment add-on. The new feature gave Unity developers the ability to deploy their 3D projects onto the web through the widely adopted Adobe Flash Player. Flash Player 11, released a few months earlier, included the highly touted Stage3D technology which meant fast, hardware accelerated 3D graphics was now possible via Flash for desktops.

The Binary Mill is a Queensland based independent games company who caught our attention when they released the trailer for their upcoming top-down racer, Mini Motor Racing. It made a splash at the Games Developers Conference this year, and it's on our most-watch list for upcoming titles by local games developers.

The Binary Mill have been around for a few years with a variety of iPhone apps and games under their belts, but we felt it's high time we found out a little bit more about them by grabbing an interview with their company Director, Ingmar Lak.

One of the most welcomed surprises of last year was finding out that the very well received 8-bit styled App Store game, The Incident, was developed by Big Bucket Software, a game and app development company based in Perth.

The success story of The Incident was instrumental in persuading Matt Comi, the main developer behind Big Bucket Software, on finally making Big Bucket Software a full time venture in game and productivity app production. We contacted Matt to find out more about his company and The Incident...