The Edinburgh Interactive Festival showcases the continued popularity, growth and influence of video games and brings together the games industry’s key decision makers.

Games publishing, hardware and development alongside Government, TV, film, press and other entertainment industries as well as students seeking to work within the creative industries are all represented.

David Yarnton, Managing Director/General Manager of Nintendo UK, said: “We’re very proud to continue our support of EIF for the third year running. Edinburgh Interactive Festival raises our industry’s profile into the wider cultural arena and celebrates the input, talent and creativity from all with a common interest in video games.”

The Edinburgh Interactive Festival 2008 will take place from Sunday 10th to Tuesday 12th August in the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.

Registrations are open at the EIF2008 Website.

Register before Tuesday 1st July 2008 - £120 (ex VAT)
Register on or after Tuesday 1st July 2008 - £149 (ex VAT)
Scottish based developers and companies - £99 (ex VAT)
Students - £75 (ex VAT)

Fair enough, 3DStudio Max 2009 has been out for a little while, but today was the first time that I’ve opened a little MaxScript in order to do some scripting. Imagine my surprise when I discover that somebody at Autodesk has actually invested some time in making the MaxScript IDE whizzy!

Bless that programmer! For feast your eyes at what he has done:

1. Handy tab bar for handling multiple documents. Woo!
2. Pointless grey vertical line to show you where your tab indents are. Wow!
3. Syntax highlighting that actually works without you having to refresh all the time. Whee!
4. A status bar with stuff you probably never need to worry about on it. Gosh!
5. Those collapsable between-the-bracey buttons that you have in Visual Studio to make really long code, shorter. Neat!
6. Line numbers to make you feel a bit more like a programmer. Yay!

So there we have it! A comprehensive list of all the reasons why you should upgrade to Max2009 immediately!*

*note: it’s entirely possible that some of these features were in Max2008.

Version 1.5 of S2Engine, Profenix Studio’s PC game and virtual reality engine, is now available. Priced at €135 for the ‘Basic’ edition with the ‘Pro’ and ‘Full’ versions available soon, this latest version features (amongst other things):

• • OPENGL 2.0 support
• • New shaders for water, detail bumpmaps, reflections, alpha blending, texture coords animation, etc.
• • New easy Script language syntax
• • Improved support for GUI
• • Terrain editing/painting/sculpting/rendering support
• • Hidden Surface Removal system revisited for next-gen games
• • Mesh with more than one material support
• • COLLADA file support for static meshes with multimaterials
• • Mesh Instancing and hierarchical mesh grouping

Looks nice, doesn’t it?

For a complete list of features, pop over to Profenix’s webpage here.

TIGSource have started what is quite possibly the greatest make-a-game competition of all time.

You have to fire up the random game name generator, hit ‘next’ a few times until you get a name that’s sufficiently stupid, and then… make that game.

If as many people enter the competition as the concept deserves, then we can expect a whole heap of utterly brilliant games released in the next month or so. Or possibly they’ll be the worst games of all time. Either way, they’ll have amazing names!

I like the sound of ‘Spectacular Bongo - The Quickening’ or maybe ‘The Muppets Sandwich Football’. Go here, and make them immediately!

Microsoft have announced that they’re opening up Xbox360 to User Generated Content, which presumably means more dross than you can shake a stick at.

Expect to sift through no end of rubbishy Breakout clones and an over-abundance of cornflower blue, all in an attempt to find the occasional gem.

Like bobbing for apples in a bucket of raw sewage. Can’t wait.

Press Release!

Yep, seriously folks. Students across the world will soon be able to get their grubby little mits on XNA 2.0, Visual Studio 2008 (professional), Windows Server 2003, and Microsoft Expression Studio all completely free! They call it DreamSpark!

Currently rolling out across the US, UK, Canada, China and most of Europe, all you need to do is sign in, get yourself verified as a student (the system is linked to organisations that can confirm status), and then download away!

Almost too good to be true really. More information here (including an interview with Mr. Gates).

Oh, Peter…

Whenever will you learn to just be a little bit more ’ssssssh’ when you’re writing games until you’re putting the sticky labels on the damned things?

“In the six years since Black & White, [the developers] have been working improving the great things that underpinned that game, and now they are getting pretty close to something that is very significant. It’s a very big thing. A new franchise and as close to something revolutionary as I have ever seen. And we’re close to announcing it.

If you think back to the one thing about Black & White that was most fascinating, you’d have to say it was that creature that learned behavior and seemed, for a certain glimpse, to be alive. Imagine if you could take that and multiply it by a billion…”

I’m no expert, but AI a billion times biggerer sounds like an awfully big AI to me…

David Edery (that’s him on the left), Worldwide Games Portfolio Planner for Xbox Live Arcade, has written a great piece on his blog entitled “How to Increase Trial, Improve Conversion Rate, and Sell More Games“.

There’s some great advice on there, and it’s definitely worth a read if you’re about to release your Earth-shattering Indie demo onto the public in the near future.

Who says a trial needs to end at an arbitrary point (i.e. end of level or after 60 minutes?) Why not, after an enjoyable sequence of gameplay events, end with a major cliffhanger (i.e. immediately before battling a particularly cool boss, instead of afterwards?)

To be honest, I’ve had this tactic used on me when I’ve been pitched games for XBLA. One developer cut off his prototype just as a massive (and really cool-looking!) boss creature appeared on the horizon. For all I know, the subsequent battle may have been a bore, but my imagination was already spinning with possibilities. That trick can be played on potential customers, not just portfolio managers.

Read the full article here!

… is Out Now!

If you’re using XNA you can now upgrade FOR FREE to the newer, more spangly version. Assuming you’re not too scared that doing so will screw up your current project like me, that is.

Here’s a list of the new stuff to tinker with and enjoy.

If like every other sensible-minded person on the planet you’ve fallen head-over-heels in love with Portal, you’ll be wanting to read this amazing and informative interview with writer Erik Wolpaw over at RockPaperShotgun:

“In defense of games, I want to point out that the writing in plays, including everything by August Strindberg and The Lion King, is 100% pure crap. So we’re doing better than they are even though they have the benefit of mostly not being about space marines.”

Personally, I can’t get enough of Portal. It has a simplicity and pureness to its narrative the likes of BioShock could only dream of…