June 2007 - Posts

• Competition Results!

  Right then, here we go :

  Category 1a - Concept Art

  Winner : Ian McCaughrean - "OrcaSub"
  Honourable mentions : Alistair Aitcheson, Jenny Rathbone (bunnyjen), Paul Rayment (Paolo_ray)

  Category 1b - Title Screen & Box Art

  Winner : Scott Johnston (whatwhat)

  Category 2a - Title Screen Attract / In-Game Music

  Winner : Chris Green (Greeny) - in-game mood pieces

  Category 2b - Sound Effects

  Winner : JP Sweeney (Jipster)

  Category 3a - Best Overall Game

  Winner : Daniel Jeffery, Gareth Clarke, Dave Faulkner, Robert Faulkner - "Herriman - Under Pressure"
  Honourable mentions : "Jam", "Kraken"

  Category 3b - Best Use of Category 1 & 2 Materials

  Winner : Richard Clifford, Nicholas McCrea - "Abyss"
  Honourable mention : "Jam"

  Very well done to all of you - we'll be in touch at the beginning of next week to sort out your loot.

  The games themselves are almost ready for public consumption. I'm afraid it's actually going to take us till the end of the weekend to get everything uploaded and ready, so please bear with us for a wee bit. Needless to say, the results are worth waiting for.

  By the end of the weekend we'll also have written a bit about why the judges picked the winners.
  

  I'd just like to say a final 'thanks a million' from myself and Leaf. In total we got 31 entries over all the categories, representing an enormous amount of time and effort on your part. Quality all round was incredibly high, and I think everyone really got into the spirit of the competition. The upshot of course is that we now have a great bank of music, sounds, game designs and concept art to play with, and some great examples of ways to use them.

  Let's do it again soon : )
  

  Posted Jun 29 2007, 05:34 PM by walthergropius with 14 comment(s)

• Almost there...

  Game downloads, those all-important results and - hopefully - some in-depth pondering about all the entries will all be going up later today.

  I PROMISE 

  Posted Jun 29 2007, 10:22 AM by walthergropius with 2 comment(s)

• Competition Judging

  We have a date - we have a time - we have a plaice. You batter believe it!
  

  Myself and Leaf, with some kelp from our wonderful friends at Microsoft and some very special guests, will be trawling though the ocean of entries and fishing out the still-flapping winners on Wednesday 27th June.

  We'll make an announcement very soon after that, so stay, er, tuna-ed.
  

  (That's out-ray-geous - you've gone overboard this time. You're fried fired! Ed.) 

  Posted Jun 21 2007, 05:09 PM by walthergropius with 8 comment(s)

• Post Mortems

  Inspired by cubed2d's sleep-deprived ramblings here (in a good way of course) - how would the game teams feel about jotting down the story of how they got their game out?

  You know the kind of thing : what went right, what went wrong, what you realised at the last minute etc.

  Would make really interesting reading, and I'm sure we could all learn a lot.

  Posted Jun 18 2007, 02:37 PM by walthergropius with 1 comment(s)

• I'd just like to say...

  Well bloomin' done!

  All the games are in, they all run just fine - and we're going to have a fantastic time judging them.

  You lot are ace : ) 

  Posted Jun 18 2007, 02:26 PM by walthergropius with no comments

• Upload page for game category entries is now open.

  Like it says on the tin - the upload page is now open. See this competition page for more details. Entries will be accepted until 9.30pm tonight and then we're done - bar the judging and giving out of swag.

  Posted Jun 17 2007, 06:30 PM by leaf with no comments

  Filed under: competition

• FX Composer 2 Beta 3 Released

  Nvidia have finally made a public release of their new version of FX Composer. This is a very different product to the previous versions with many changes, one of which could be very interesting for those who find creating shaders from scratch difficult - they have released a version of mental images' mental mill which can be used to create shaders using drag & drop blocks.

  Posted Jun 17 2007, 03:11 PM by leaf with no comments

• Start of the Coding Competition

  Well kind of the start. This is the start of the last 48 hours of the competition. The official deadline for submitting your competition entries will be 9.30pm Sunday 17th June.

  As previously mentioned we have a small selection of mandatory elements that need to be included in your game. We can now tell you what they are:

  1. Your game must use at least one of the art or sound entries. We have posted the entries in the download area for you to download and use. Currently these are only available to registered members of the user group. You should credit the author of any entries you use, using the XNA-UKUG Splash Screen.
  2. Your game should progress across 3 levels. Although you may interpret the progression in different ways such as 3 distinct types of level, or 3 levels of difficulty.

  Good luck with it. We shall be opening the upload area for game entries in the near future.
  
  Posted Jun 15 2007, 09:07 PM by leaf with no comments

  Filed under: competition

• Competition Splash Screen Assembly Ready

  

  For those of you entering our competition with a game (that's this weekend if you need a reminder), you might remember that one of the things your game must do is show our splash screen at startup - don't worry, it's pretty small and can be dismissed very easily. This splash screen is used to show our sponsor's logos (without them we wouldn't have the prizes), enables you to credit all the people involved with your game's production and gives this user group a bit of promotion.

  The current splash screen is quite simple. It uses GDI+ to draw graphics and text and displays in a separate window before the XNA window is shown. In the future we hope to have a graphics pack that XNA-UKUG members can integrate into their games if they want to promote the user group. 

  To find out more about how to use our splash screen see this competition details page.

  Posted Jun 14 2007, 08:40 PM by leaf with no comments

• Upload Your Competition Entries

  The competition upload areas for the art and sound categories are now active. Go to the competition upload page for further details. If you're having any problems use the forums or you can use this page to contact me.
  

  Posted Jun 11 2007, 01:19 PM by leaf with 4 comment(s)

  Filed under: competition

• Concept Art Example

  For those of you interested in concept artwork, I thought I'd point out this post of good examples of concept art iterations. It shows quite well how concept art works within a game production environment - with the concept being re-worked multiple times, responding to input from other people in the game team.
  

  Posted Jun 09 2007, 09:41 AM by leaf with no comments

  Filed under: concept art