tsumea Article

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...

There has been a lot of talk over the past few weeks among industry observers here and overseas concerning a recent article which appeared in GameSpot about the size of the Australian Games Industry. “Aussie dev industry shrinks 50% in 3 years” was the headline – but was the headline justified?

It's been a while since the local games industry has had a nation-wide head count, but that's changed now thanks to Justin Brow from 60Sox (on behalf of the ISIS program).

If you love sci-fi then you owe yourself to play Black Market. It's a flash based game currently still in Beta which is a mix of space trading, RPG, and a long story arc containing a whole slew of missions in a universe that's been richly layed out by Big Block Games, an independent games developer based in Wellington, New Zealand.

Bane Games, a new independent games developer heralding from Brisbane and consisting of devs who used to be in the commercial games industry, have just launched their first game for the iPhone, iPod, and iPad devices. Their game is called Flick Buddies, and we had a special opportunity to talk to Alistair Doulin, one of the main programmers from Bane Games, about their move to indiehood, their team, and their newly released title.

In early July this year, Brisbane game developers, Halfbrick Studios, reached the one million sale mark of their very popular fruit slicing game , Fruit Ninja, for the iPhone/iPod touch, after having only been available for 74 days on the Apple Appstore. They've followed it up recently with the anticipated version for the iPad, and it too has been receiving some tremendous success in the Appstore charts.

Andrew Goulding is one of countless developers from the local games industry with years of experience under their belt who've made the huge career changing move towards independent games development.

With so many taking the plunge in recent times, it was worth grabbing Andrew aside for a few questions on his new indie studio, Brawsome, his latest game, Jolly Rover, and his personal experience on going solo.