On tuesday 17th June 2008, NMK are running a Writing for Games event in central London (exact venue to be confirmed).

As NMK say on their site, “Writing for games is an often-overlooked career path, but it’s a great opportunity for writers who want to flex their creative muscles. It can involve plot development, script-writing, copywriting, dialogue creation, project documentation, humour writing, characterisation and character development and a load of other elements that exercise a writer’s abilities.”

Featuring a line up of impressive speakers including Steve Ince of Broken Sword fame, the event should be fascinating for anyone interested in pursuing a career in games writing.

Tickets are currently priced at £25, although a discounted price of £15 is available to freelancers, students, unemployed, companies with fewer than 10 employees and not-for-profit organisations.

More information can be found at NMK’s website.

The 16th CGEmpire Music Competition is kindly sponsored by Peter and Giorgio, the creators and owners of SampleModeling.

The winner will receive a copy of The Trumpet (which retails for $240), a VSTi of unparalleled realism and usability!

The challenge this time is to compose The Darklord theme, and the deadline for entries is Sunday 22nd of June 23:59 London time.

For more information, please visit the Competition Thread.

Uh oh.

The BBC is reporting that there’s talks of making downloadable video and videogames need a full-on BBFC rating too.

While that’s probably actually fair enough, it raises some concerns for those of us who make downloadable content for the web.

From The BBC Website:

Age ratings for downloaded video content and video games are to be introduced in the UK.

Overseen by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), the scheme will see certificates appear on websites, via set-top boxes and portable players.

Mr Johnson said the scheme, called BBFC.online, was not an attempt to censor the internet, nor to regulated online video gaming.

Mr Cooke said the BBFC continued to work with the games industry’s self-regulatory body Pegi to find solutions to classifying the burgeoning range of online gaming.

“We don’t need to set up in rivalry with Pegi online. We can work cooperatively,” he said.

Without providing specifics, Mr Johnson said the BBFC expected all the leading content providers and aggregators to sign up to the scheme in the coming weeks and months.

Quite how it’s all going to work is anyone’s guess, but paying to have your game rated seems a tad too likely, even if it is currently ‘voluntary’. It’s possibly a problem on the horizon for Indie Developers who typically can’t even afford new shoelaces.

Uh oh. Watch this space.

Round #16 of our pixel challenge, ColourThis, kicks off today. The rules are simple - you are provided with an outline and all you have to do is colour it, making anything you like out of it. The more creative and original the design the better, and the winner is chosen for the creativity of their entry rather than their pixel skills.

The winner of the last round provides the outline and chooses the winner of the next.

The challenge this time is…

…can you make this outline into anything other than a turtle? So download this image, rotate it, flip it, colour it in, and then submit it in this thread!

Congratulations to MashPotato for winning the last ColourThis round with her excellent “Large Lady doing Aerobics” entry:

Check out previous winners here!

Hearty congratulations go to mirrored for winning the 15th CGEmpire Music Competition with his entry ‘The Long Way Home‘.

For his troubles, mirrored takes home a copy of Stormdrum 2 which retails at $495, courtesy of Eastwest/Quantum Leap.

The challenge for this month’s competition was to compose a theme to accompany the following premise:

…The heroes kept on walking, the wind blowing restless. Soon the terrain changed. The sparse trees, which until then provided some kind of shelter, gave place to rocks. As they climbed the mountain the sun got hidden by deep clouds, and the wind changed to rain first and then to snow. The slowed down but never stopped. Every obstacle they overcame, they were not short of courage. Finally they reached the top of the mountains, stood there for only a brief moment, to catch their breathes and then took the path down, to the other side. At the bottom, the snow gave way to the everlasting greens and the familiar smell was reassuring enough. They were home!

Congratulations to all who took part for all-round excellent entries! You can listen to all the music competition entries here!

After the recent success of LEGO-themed games (and with LEGO Indy and LEGO Batman just around the corner) I couldn’t help but get slightly excited about hearing of an upcoming ZOIDS game (For XBox360 no less)!

Imagine it! Goodie blue ZOIDS marching against the unstoppable forces of the evil red ZOIDS with the battery powered really big and impressive ones that your mates owned (and you were really jealous of because you only had the slightly smaller wind up versions) leading the charge. Assembling new ZOIDS from the wreckage on the battlefield as you go, little gold and silver plastic people at the helm… crickey, it’d be completely awesome.

Picture the crushing disappointment as I discover that not only was the amazingly simple plot mechanic of good blue ZOIDS vs. evil red ZOIDS a feature of the European toys only, there’s been a whole new range of ZOIDS in the meantime and it’s all gone a bit gung-ho we’re trying to be serious-ey and therefore, a bit rubbish.

It’s all “The Guylos Empire” (rubbish name) versus “The Republic of Helic” (also rubbish) now.

This is GORE, The Lord Protector of the Blue ZOIDS. He’s not in the new game. Instead we have the likes of…

…D-Bison of the Helic Republic (rubbish name). Look, it’s all weathered and rusty like it’s an actual machine or something instead of a little plastic toy. Boo!

Oh okay, it’s not really Obi-Wan Kenobi it’s Jon ‘Log’ Blyth of ‘The Law of the Playground’ book fame but look, there’s a definite Ewan McGregor vibe going on with his hair, beard, and the brown it-could-almost-be-a-cloak t-shirt…

I have a baaaad feeling about this.

So while we know that the Interweb has literally been throttled by GTA related fever these last few weeks, I’d make room for this little number regardless of which side of the GTA love/hate fence you sit on. Cos it’s funny and that.

Watch the video here!

It’s called “The Lord of the Rings: Conquest”, and it’s basically a new Star Wars: Battlefront game with all the Star Wars-y bits taken out, orcs and elves thrown in, and the name changed. Sound exciting? No? That’s probably because I’ve made it sound a bit naff whereas IGN made it sound really really cool.

Woo! Looks nice!

Apparently you’ll be able to choose to play any battle from the books and films (as well as some completely made up ones) and fight as pretty much any role. So be an elf archer defending Helm’s Deep, for example. Sweet, eh? Still no? Oh heck, I’ll just quote a bit of what Eurogamer said instead, and then you can pop over to IGN and read all about it properly.

The best bit about The Lord of the Rings: Conquest is that it lets you be almost everyone from Middle-Earth, including the baddies. You can expect to be Cave-trolls, Oliphaunts, Ents, Balrogs, and even the Witch King, Saruman and Sauron himself.

There is an entire evil campaign waiting to be unlocked after you finish the good story, and it begins with you as a Ringwraith capturing Frodo and delivering the Ring to Sauron.

You can play both campaigns with up to four friends online or in split-screen, or just hop into eight-player competitive battles.

Oh, and it’s for PC, PS3, and XBox360.

Proper article at IGN.

Can anything better the Cherry Bakewell Tart U.F.O from last round? Is that even possible? Well, this morning we received a new contender from the world of commericial games development.

As Nickenstien (games programmer - I would say ‘extraordinaire’, but that would be a bit of a lie) puts it, “As of this morning, I have on my desk a fantastic organism that can mimic ANYTHING EVER!”.

Oh really? Brave words indeed, sir, brave words. Well, shall we take a look?

It’s a dinosaur!

Hey, wow! That’s actually pretty good! It’s got a little eye and everything.

The money shot!

That’s quite literally the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen! Unfortunately, Nick’s called it, “The Xenomorph Alien from Aliens eating some Chavs” when it’s quite clearly the dinosaur again.

Also a Jester’s hat?

No, see you’re ruining it now. That’s just the dinosaur again but on a different bit of paper. It’s also a boxing kangaroo apparently but I can’t be arsed to upload that picture - just turn your head 90 degrees and imagine a boxing glove drawn on the obligatory background.

Nick concludes, “This astonishing chameleonic life-form was discovered by me today when it was cunningly disguised as a Walkers Sensations Thai Sweet Chilli crisp!”

So, final score? Well, I’m almost certain that the dinosaur pictures were enough to clinch victory… but oh noes! he’s forced the joke too much and ruined it, bringing the final score down to…

7.23/10 - A good score, but not quite good enough.

What a challenge! How do you turn some of the most iconic and well-designed videogame characters of all time into 3D equivalents without compromising the style?

Capcom show us how:

Stylish!

Facial Animation!

Dramatic!

Yep, it all just goes to prove that it’s not the size of the tool it’s how you wield it. All we’ve got here are polygons, normal maps, some textures, and lighting - just like every other PS3 and XBox360 game - but with an added extra pinch of talent. Actually, lots of talent.

Source: Eurogamer