I'm Damien Caine, indie game developer (as part of Pixelati) and media creator (videography Director and Editor). I fill the role of Producer and Writer for Danger Balls, Pixelati's initial foray into indie development.

The PlayMaker community site is an initiative that I championed with the help of Pixelati, then Andy Wiltshire of GameMold, and finally with Kevin Toms, Stephen Knightly and Erik Hogan of the AGW. I'm really looking forward to establishing a strong community around the growing indiedev scene in NZ and we've already got a dedicated, passionate core so far.

---

My background in games starts with programming basic and random poke statements on the Spectrum 48k, Amstrad CPC 6128 and Commodore 64. I developed a love of games and a deep interest in game design at this time with my favourites of the day being: Pssst,  Sabrewulf, Alien8, Knight Lore, Green Beret, Bombjack, Exolon, Barbarian, The Sacred Armor of Antiriad, Fruity Frank, Head Over Heels, Boulder Dash, Sorcery, Last Ninja, and Spindizzy.

Favourite game music from the 8bit era...

I've always had a particular love for the isometric view (from games like Alien8 and Knight Lore on the Spectrum to the next evolution with Head Over Heels and Batman on the Amstrad and so on up to Landstalker on the Megadrive).

I then went to work on the Sega Hotline where I got into console RPGs and the well constructed 16-bit adventures like Zelda 3 - A Link to the Past and Landstalker, an Isometric Action Adventure RPG. I discovered a love of RTS with my introduction to Dune II : Battle for Arrakis and became a Streetfighter Alpha and Mortal Kombat obsessive for a while there too.

Sega Ozisoft NZ also imported the major PC titles at the time so I developed a love for point and click adventure, from all the Sierra and Lucasarts classics. Westwood games were also a highlight (from Lands Of Lore to C&C). The introduction of the CD-ROM brought 7th Guest and we all discovered Doom multiplayer late one night in the Sega offices : ).

My time at Sega with "The Sega Guy", Glen Mackie, was a very informative and foundational time for my taste in games and my understanding of game mechanics, thanks in no small part to Glen's awesome mentorship and direction for those of us on the Sega Hotline.

Since then I've been involved in various creative indie projects including music videos, live action short films and a motion-capture animated project.

A cross-section of my favourite games of recent times are Outcast, Homeworld, WoW, Assassin's Creed, Spore, Tomb Raider Anniversary, Call of Duty IV and Crysis (third person exploration adventure is a fave : ).

 

.A favourite exploration / adventure game of the time...

Pixelati is now my main focus - Danger Balls is our current project (entered in the IGF for early 2010) and we have a number of game projects bubbling away in the background.

The skills I've developed in film through writing, directing and editing have come in handy in my game design role which is why I continue to work in media as well.

I hope to work on more exciting projects alongside the PlayMaker community in the future - I think we have exciting times ahead!
 

 

Hey everyone, my name is Tom, i'm currently working as a concept artist at Sidhe in Wellington. I started out in game development working at a little company doing art for some flash games, some of you may have possibly played Anikas Odyssey? Anyway, it was heaps of fun and really satisfying to be involved in these projects and being more or less one guy from a two man team made the whole process and result that much more personally satisfying. I'm still quite proud of the work i did there even though the art itself feels really old to me now.

I've worked on quite a lot of different things at my short time at Sidhe so far, but the only thing i can really show is this teaser for an iphone game i did the art design for.

I think the first game i ever played was shufflepuck cafe on our family's apple (found out a while ago it was made the year i was born!) it had super awesome characters....  i think it influenced my sensibilities more than i would have thought, haha

Soon after that though my mum got me a snes without me even knowing what it was, and from then on, i really really really really liked games. Super Mario world and Donkey Kong Country are what i grew up on. But i think i was still very impressionable during the N64 era with Super Mario 64, Legend of Zelda:Ocarina of time and Banjo Kazooie.

 

As far as more current games...
These games have all made a significant impact on me and what i think a game can be/do, in one way or another.

    -Jonathan Blow's Braid
    -Edmund Mcmillian's Coil
    -Rod Humble's The Marriage
    -Cactus's Psychosomnium
    -Sony???'s Pata-Pon
    -Valve's Portal
  
 
Over the last two years I've become super interested in the indie scene. I'm really interested in moving away from just being the art guy and being involved in game design more, or the entire production of the game in general. I'm really enjoying my current gig at Sidhe, its great, but its very different. I just don't get the same kind of fulfilment i did from the small team stuff. So yeah, i guess I'm here to meet some potential collaborators and see if anything could come from that in the future.

 

/life story

I noticed (and liked) the art style for the Bird Strike trailer a few days back, Tom - awesome work! I think you and Tim/Mukpuddy share some stylistic influences.

Hi everyone!

My name is James and I am currently a game developer working for my game studio in Christchurch called Digital Confectioners. We're a two man team, with Sam focusing on the web side of stuff and myself focusing on the game stuff.

Game development started way back when the Doom Construction Kit was released. I started making new levels for Doom and it was really fun to play those levels with friends co opertively. When Duke Nukem 3D came out, I started to mess around with scripting and level design. While I participated in a few mods, I did start to branch out and develop some of my own titles. I developed a short mod called Brute Force, which added stealth game mechanics to Duke Nukem 3D. It was a really fun mod to work on, and it did seem a few people enjoyed it. After Duke Nukem 3D, I started working with the Unreal. Unrealscript was vastly more complex than CONscript but it was also more powerful. While Duke3D allowed you to change the behaviour of existing objects and predefined behaviours it was still very limited. Unrealscript definitely broke new ground for me and I could finally start developing titles I wanted to make. I stayed very quiet during Unreal, Unreal Tournament and Unreal Tournament 2003 and only started to become known during Unreal Tournament 2004. I won one of the phases in the Make Something Unreal Content for Unreal Tournament 2003 with my physics ragdoll clone of Posturavat, called Karma'ed. A lot of people like the simple game of pushing a ragdoll down some stairs, with the added comedy of gore and gibbing. During Unreal Tournament 3, I won first place in Make Something Unreal Contest for my remake of UWindow which was a new user interface for Unreal Tournament 3. I also won first place with a mod I helped with called The Ball. The Ball is now an official example of what you can do with the Unreal Development Kit.

At the moment I am currently prototyping using the Unreal Development Kit on a top down shooter that takes elements from various old school games (Alien Breed, Chaos Engine, Magic Pockets to name a few).

This is straight from the About Me part of my blog, I think it's a good start point:-

Kevin Toms. The original author of Football Manager. Founder of the Football Manager genre of computer games. Million selling games designer.


How I started

I wrote Football Manager first. A game I wrote in my spare time. I had written games before, mostly board games, and a couple of games on programmable calculators. The first computer for Football Manager was a Video Genie, which was a clone of the popular American computer, the Tandy TRS80. The Video Genie was cheaper for me to buy, but from my memory still cost 330 English pounds.

Friends played the Football Manager game and got very addicted to it. This gave me the name of the company that I used to launch the game, Addictive Games. The ZX81 computer was also out at that time, and I made what proved to be a very smart decision to convert the game to run on a ZX81 too, before launching it. I needed the 16k add on RAM pack for the ZX81 to fit the game in, but most people bought that anyway.

The Launch

January 1982 was when the first ad was placed for Football Manager. It was a quarter page ad in Computer and Video Games magazine. It was designed by me and started a style of advert design that I continued for a few years.  I told people about the features of the product and the advert was in black and white at the time.


Testimonials

A common feature of the ad design was to include testimonials from players of the game. I realised that people wanted to trust what they were buying. Reading comments from purchasers would help build that trust. I also recognised that it helped that the comments were detailed. So I would include reasonably lengthy content from people’s letters. At games shows later some came up and told me they were the ones who wrote the letters. They liked their words being published.

ZX81 outselling TRS80 100 to 1

Within three months of launch I calculated that the ZX81 version of Football Manager was outselling the TRS80 version by 100 to 1. In fact, if I had only launched the game on the TRS80 the sales would have been too low to pay for the advertising costs alone, and I would not have had a viable business!

Businessman or Games Designer?

There was no choice, when I launched Football Manager. There were no games companies to speak of. There were not even any retail outlets. The only way to sell the games was by mail order. So, this inevitably meant I was selling the game directly myself. I always had an interest in marketing, even though my profession was Computer Programmer, working on mainframes. So it came (fairly) naturally to find  myself marketing my own game. And the ideas I had, the approach worked. It did mean I had to learn a lot about being in business. In fact it was not long before there was a constant conflict between my desire to write more games and the pressures of the growing success of the business.

ZX Spectrum Football Manager

This was a critical product in the growth of Football Manager. It was late summer 1982 that I got my Spectrum. The ZX81 and Video Genie/TRS80 were black and white display computers. The Spectrum had colour, and it was only about 100 pounds to buy, which was an accessible price to many people. The ZX81 was cheap too, which built the number of customers for my game, but the Spectrum added much more. 48k of RAM memory was a big help for my game which was a strategy game that needed memory.  And then there was the scope to add graphics…

Football Manager Spectrum Video:

 

Now? I am writing an iPhone Football Manager game. - Bringing a simple but effective games design up to date.

 

 

I Andy.

I make Games.

Greets I'm Aaron Cross Unity3d Specialist, Artist + Programmer. Mainly working on (other peoples) iPhone games these days. Full time freelancer, no job too big or too small! lol. I have a greyhound, and live in the country just south of Palmerston North. I want to play more music. Cheers all AC

Hey I'm Joel,

I don't have nearly as much experience as the rest of the crew, but been tinkering around with various builders. A Day Of Defeat map I made appeared in the Steam news so I got a lot of downloads for that. Working on a small Game Maker game at the moment.

It's good to see such talent in New Zealand, hopefuly we can get a Game Works down here in Wellington!

Hey Guys,

My name is Liam Rüdel, I just moved over from Ireland for a year. Have a Degree in Computer Games Development. Looking to make a career out of games dev. I'm based in wellington. Hoping to meet some like minded people here.

 Hi guys, I'm Rob Smith - but really just vijil (including RL)

I'm working as a concept artist at www.huhus.com - it's not games, but it's halfway there.  I'm also a capable 3D modeller, texture artist and half decent sculptor.  I guess matte painting should be in there too.

Check out some of my work at vijil.daportfolio.com :)

 

In terms of games, I've written more than one tabletop wargaming systems!  Dunno if that counts... I've also written umpteen thousand words worth of a design doc for a space shooter.  Shattered Horizon stole my ideas, but I still think there's a lot that can be done with the basic concept of a space shooter that plays more like an FPS.  One day I'd like to have a go at it.

You've written tabletop wargaming systems? We must talk... 

Hi all,

I'm Brent Silby. Since 2001, I've been designing retro-themed arcade games under my Def-Logic brand. Most of my games were originally written in dhtml/javascript (quite unusual to do games in javascript), but I have now ported them to Flash. My games have been licensed to numerous casual game sites across the web, and have received favourable reviews from jayisgames.

I'm happy to have found this page. Its good to see more support and interest in the NZ indie game design scene.

Cheers

Hi Brent,

Welcome to Playmaker! Thanks for listing your games on this site, I look forward to giving them a try. You now have been granted edit rights on the Def-Logic page at http://playmaker.org.nz/gamedev/def-logic

Thanks Erik,

That's awesome! I've got plenty more games to list too. Will filter some more into the list over the next few weeks.

Cheers,
Brent

Hey Brent, great to see you online : ). Love your work - I'll have a poke around some more!

Hi my name is Dave and I am a developer in Dunedin.

Like James Tan, I made many Duke 3d levels when I was a kid. Also made a bunch of other things in visual basic which were all terrible. All my previous work has been lost over the years. But I recently released this as freeware:

http://dwwilson.info/?page_id=14

This motherfucker took me 900 hours to make. She's my baby, the only half decent game I have ever made.

I'm currently porting it to xna with the help of a friend, and re-doing all the art.

If you want the full history, it's on my website.

oh and I just found out that Shatter was nominated for excellence in audio at this year's IGF. Grats to them :D

Hi Dave,

Welcome to the site =) Drone looks really cool, feel free to add it to the games portal through http://playmaker.org.nz/node/add/game

Done.

Awesome work on Drone, Dave - would love to hear a break down sometime of how you made it, if you ever felt the urge.

Hi,

I'm Mark Sibly, an aging ex-game developer from Auckland who hopes to get back into games again one day!

I was 'briefly famous' back in the 80's for some Amiga games, and currently develop the 'blitz basic' line of compilers.

I'm currently working on 'blitzmax 2', yet-another-BASIC-compiler, but this time aimed at a large number of target platforms (iPhone support still up in the air!).

Bye,
Mark Sibly,
http://www.blitzbasic.com

 

Hi Mark,

Welcome to Playmaker!

I heard a vague rumour that you were working on adding more target platforms for BlitzMax, though I didn't know it was a full blown sequel. Sounds great!

Hey there,

My name's Tristan Clark - I'm part of a two-man team called Launching Pad Games, based in Wellington. Tim Knauf and I founded the company a couple of years ago, and since then we've been working on some Flash titles and (more recently) a couple of iPhone games.

We've just announced Scarlett and the Spark of Life to the world - it's a point-and-tap adventure game with (we hope) a kickass story. Narrative in games is probably the biggest thing we're interested in, so it's been awesome creating and developing a cool cast of characters. You can check out more details here: http://launchingpadgames.com/games/scarlett-and-the-spark-of-life

Very keen to get other Welly-based people together for a drink! Or, you know, anyone happy to travel to Welly. Will make a post about it now, in fact...

Good luck with your games, everyone!

Hey Tristan, great to see you guys on here - would love to hear more about Launching Pad projects - retrospectives and in-development! : ). Trip to Welly sounds like fun!

Hello PlayMaker fellows! 

I'm Patrick and I'm an illustrator/concept artist/graphic designer, pretty much anything that involves with drawings I guess. As most of you are, I'm also a big fan of video games and it could be the whole turning point in my life that I wanted to become an artist. 

I was introduced to this website from Damien since I'm part of Pixelati, and I'm in the beginning stage which I'm more than willing to learn and involve any creativities out there. I would love to know everyone through PlayMaker and I can't wait to share our stuff about video games in general!

Damien - yes, keep encouraging us to NOT be forum lurkers! We'd love to write up some more detailed stuff about development etc.

Planning on getting Wgtn folks together next Thursday, so you're more than welcome to fly down for that if you'd like. ;)

Apparently I never did this...

I'm Tim, I'm an animator and one third of Mukpuddy.

I'm also part of Pixelati and the lead artist on Dangerballs. 

That's all I can think to say right now. So I'll keep it short :)

Guess I should jump in here too:

I'm Hamish - a game geek in Auckland. I'm working as a 3D artist/producer on Primal Carnage (www.primalcarnage.com). I also write for Game Console magazine (gotta love them free games!). Not really sure what else to say...

Hi everyone!

My name is Juha Kangas and I'm moving to Auckland in November to make some games!

I'm currently working at Starbreeze Studios in Sweden where I've been for about 2 years, but I have been doing some hobby stuff on the side like;

Backworld

A game that me and my friend made for a TIGSource competition but are still developing into something more "final". Here's a recent presentation, by the way, from gamejam NoMoreSweden if anyone is interested: part1 part2

and

Lightyears

A game that I made for IGF, I wasn't very happy with it in the end but at least I finished it!

Have some other stuff more or less on low burn. I've been working mainly with XNA, but since I'm a crappy programmer I've started to use Unity which is just an amazing piece of software.

 

Favorite games are Flower, World of Goo, Portal, Patapon and Super Mario Bros. 3. I think...probably forgot some. My guilty pleasure is Final Fantasy games.

 

What else...my biggest interest besides games is free-diving, which I hope to do a lot over there. Currently my favorite music is Bill Callahan and Arcade Fire...I change music taste pretty often so I don't have any long running favorites.

Favorite movies are Old Boy (the hammer fight scene is so awesome, gives me goosebumps every time),  Kung Pow (easily the movie that I quote the most), In Bruges, City of God. Favorite books are City of Thieves and Hitchhikers Guide.

 

Ok, that was pretty lengthy. I really look forward to coming over there and perhaps join you guys for some gamejams etc!

Welcome Juha! Love the look of Backworld... (Tim, check it out) Please keep us posted on that one. Have you played Limbo on Xbox Arcade yet?

City of Thieves... the FF book with Ian Livingstone's awesome artwork? If that's the one you're talking about that was one of my faves back in the day too xD. City of God / Cidade De Deus is one of my favourite movies - incredible cinematography, structure, story, etc.

Thanks for giving us some info on yourself - don't be a stranger and we'll look forward to seeing you at the AGW Meetups when you get here! :)

Thanks Damien!

Unfortunately I haven't played Limbo yet, but I definitely will eventually. The looks of Backworld will actually change I'm afraid even though we sort of like this style. The art was created by others for the competition that we were in and anyone could use it, but we want to do something of our own now.

The City of Thieves I'm talking about is a novel by David Benioff...I don't think that's the one you're thinking of. :)