Tag Archives: NGDC

Games, Gaming Industry, General

The year gone by, the year that is!

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I’m writing after a really long time. Approximately after a year.

Do people still read blogs? Not sure, but I’ll still write one!

It’s been a long year, lots of reasons to celebrate, and lots to think and ponder over.

The year began with a visit to the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco last year. This was my first time at GDC and it was a great experience being around creative talent from the gaming industry and learning from them. I came back to India feeling a lot more motivated to start working on good ideas.

One of my games won a Brandon Hall Gold Award for the ‘Best Use of Games and Simulations for Learning‘. Brandon Hall Awards are one the most prestigious awards in the field of learning, so winning a GOLD was quite exhilarating. The game that won an award is called ‘Develop Your Drug’ and it takes the player through an end to end development cycle of a new drug.

I became part of the NASSCOM Special Interest Group for Applied Games and got an opportunity to learn about some very interesting serious games and their best practices, specifically those from the Dutch Applied gaming industry.  My shift from the commercial gaming industry to applied games enabled me to speak about my projects at the first NASSCOM SIG Applied Games meet-up at TCS.

I started developing games with Unity. It was long overdue since my focus till recently had be the Adobe Flash and AS3 platform. But the web just made Flash the bad guy, so Unity and HTML5 is what naturally came next!

Jordan was a destination I had been planning to visit since a long time. But the plans never transpired because I had my apprehensions about visiting a country whose geographic location is in the center of the Arab Spring chaos in the Middle East. But then in an instinctive moment, I went ahead and booked myself a trip last November, and thought I’d take each day as it comes. Turns out, it was one of my best decisions and the time spent in Jordan was indeed fantastic and memorable.

I spent lesser time online and sometimes never got online. But a digital detox always does good, right?

As the New Year is running in full swing now (a month has already gone by), I have no plans set for the rest of the year. But I do intend to write more, travel some more and build some great games.

Cheers and keep reading my posts!!

Mariam

ActionScript3, Adobe, AIR on Android, Flash, Games, General, India, iOS, Nasscom GDC, Starling

At the NASSCOM Game Developers Conference

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ngdc stage

Another year of the NASSCOM Game Developer’s Conference, India has ended. Another year with a better turnout than the last! What a way to celebrate the gaming community of India.

The NASSCOM Game Developer’s Conference (NGDC as we call it) took place on the 15th and 16th of November 2013 at the JW Marriott at Pune. Located right in the hub of the Pune university area, the location is better connected than the earlier one in Pune city and probably encouraged more to attend the event.

The conference had 3 simultaneous tracks focused on Indies, Business and Technology. There were also workshops on Unity development, Game Design, Mentorship by industry experts, BYOG (Build Your Own Game) and Nasscom Gaming Awards.

I went to the event not just as a delegate but also as a speaker. As delegate I attended a lot of the indie talks. My favorite was the talk by one of the founders of Simogo. With just two people in their company, they have done some amazing games. Their postmortems were precise to each game but it was great to see their unique game mechanics.

A workshop for Unity got me introduced to working with 2D on the new Unity 4.3 platform.

Another good talk was by Martine Spaans from Gramble.com on Best Practices for Publishing Mobile Games in the Western Market. While some of the points were known from the best practices materials available online, the presentation was good with points from personal experience.

Interesting it was to attend the Crowdfunding and Kickstarter session by Pyrodactyl Games because they are a success story on Kickstarter from India for their game Unrest.

I spoke about Adobe AIR games on Multiple platforms. The presentation was basics of Adobe AIR but there was so much to share when talking it – Tools, Scout, Stage 3D, Starling, Native Extensions, Feathers UI, Away3D and it just goes on. I hope the audience (a lot of them non AIR developers) could understand it well.

The best the conference had to offer was meeting old friends, colleagues, twitter friends and networking with new people. Waiting for the event to repeat the success next year!

Mariam