Mount Royal Game Society, Dirty Rectangles and Babycastles present
THE PRINCE OF ARCADE
indie games showcase & party.

 

> look_
You see a joyovial congregather of scintilliant video-games, resplendiferous in their arcoats.

> get beverage_
You take up a fluottle of alcoluminous beverage and slake a thirst accrued over two long days of intense pensiveness about video-games.

> listen music_
This rocks!

> play games_
The viewportal brings you to another world. You have a transcendental experience and emerge a changed person.

 

> get info_

Tuesday, November 9, 2010, 8pm
at Eastern Bloc, 7240 rue Clark, Montreal, QC
$10 ($5 with a MIGS conference pass)

More announcements about this coming soon. Stay tuned!

A call for help! Daylight hours are disappearing rapidly, and only you can save them! Actually, that’s false, as daily hours of sunlight are a function of the Earth’s axial tilt and the planet’s revolution about the Sun, and thus totally beyond our control. Allow us to propose instead a gathering of minds, games, and brews to distract us from the whims of astronomical happenstance: it’s time for another MEETUP!

WHEN: Wednesday, October 6, 7:00 pm

WHERE: Brasserie Artisanale l’Amère à Boire, 2049 rue Saint-Denis, 3rd floor

WHO: As always, musicians, artists, designers, coders, and everyone who loves to play and discuss and make videogames are welcome.

SPECIAL GUEST(S): This month, we’re very excited to have Jonathan Lavigne with us to talk about his experience as designer of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game. Part postmortem, part dev rant, we can pretty much guarantee that it will be the most excellent thing you have ever experienced for free.*

 

The Montreal International Game Summit (MIGS) is coming up on November 8 and 9, and the Mount Royal Game Society is teaming up with sister groups from Canada and the US to get our party on and showcase some awesome games and projects from within our communities. Do you have something you’d like to see showcased at the event? If so, get in touch — we’d love to hear from you. More details forthcoming shortly, so watch this space!

Check out our recap of last month’s meeting.

More info on Mount Royal Game Society…

Crankshaft Games (www.crankshaftgames.com, @crankshaftgames) is a Montreal team of indie game developers that brought you the award-winning Half-Life 2 mod Eternal Silence. Currently, Crankshaft games is focusing on their next title, Party of Sin, to be released on Xbox Live Indie Games.

We had the chance to ask Alexander Galasso and his team a few questions.

NextMontreal: When and how did Crankshaft Games get started?
Crankshaft Games: Crankshaft Games was originally started as a modding community for the Source engine. There were about 30 members who contributed to the development of our first title Eternal Silence, a multiplayer space and FPS hybrid. Eternal Silence formed a nice community and eventually released for free on Steam. The project lead of Eternal Silence, Daniel Menard, wanted to branch off into different genres. He started Party of Sin as Crankshaft’s follow up title. Crankshaft continues to support the development of Eternal Silence while working on Party of Sin. [...]

Read the full interview on NextMontreal.com…

This was their 4th monthly meetup, and even with the high Montreal heat, the 3rd floor was packed. Good thing we had beer!

Thanks to Nick and Stephen for planning the event!

Stephen demonstrated a few game creation tools for people wanted to create games but aren’t programmers. The first one was a Windows 3.1 application called Klik & Play (running under the DOSBox emulator). The point and click interface is pretty intuitive and even comes with stock images to play with. He created a test game “awkward diner” involving an animated man and a woman and some tables.

Stephen then showed us a similar and more recent tool, Construct which is open-source. It doesn’t have included images to play with, but it does have some built-it sprite behaviors and special effects (shaders, blending). He easily made a happy face move across the screen and have it loop around the screen when it reaches the edge, with no programming required.

The rest of the evening was a mix of indie game demos that people wanted to share and discussing with other aspiring developers.

The first game showed was called Non-Human, a 2D side scroller, based on an old NES cartridge Action-52. It seems to have been built using the Game Maker tool (correct me if I’m wrong).

From then on, discussion was loud that I couldn’t hear the other game titles. There was an space-retro-RTS that looked pretty cool, and a 3D Tron light cycle kind of game.

A few indie developer friends, Jonathan and Jean-Francois:

Well that’s it for this month’s meeting. I’m looking forward to the next one! We’ll let you know when we have more details of when and where it will take place.

(Also posted on NextMontreal.com)

Slowly but surely, September is creeping up on us, ready to sucker-punch the summer wind right out of out lungs. We say: to heck with that! Let’s ring the month in with awesome friends, good beer, and excellent indie games! Cranky ol’ September will have no choice but to crack a smile and join in the merriment. Yes: it is time for a MEETUP.

WHEN: Wednesday, September 1, 7:00 pm

WHERE: Brasserie Artisanale l’Amère à Boire, 2049 rue Saint-Denis, 3rd floor

WHO: Anyone interested in creating games! As always, musicians, artists, designers, coders, and aspiring game-makers of all feathers are welcome!

This month, we’ll be doing a demo of some accessible but powerful game creation utilities. There are plenty of great tools for making games that don’t require any prior programming knowledge — perfect if you’re burning to make a game on your own but don’t know how to start, or are just curious to get your feet wet. Approaches, alternatives and secret cheat codes will also be discussed. Let’s get game-makin’!

More info on Mount Royal Game Society…

The editors of Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra invite readers to participate in the annual Game Developer Salary Survey, the only statistical study of game industry salaries and benefits across the years. The information provided will help inform the entire game development community.

Now, for the first time, the survey also includes indie and contract developers, no longer only reporting statistics for full-time employees of established companies. In separate data sets, we’ll present the earnings of independent developers, alongside other related statistics.

Meanwhile, the survey will retain its year-on-year comparison of salaries, benefits, and home-owning statistics across North America and Europe.
The survey takes approximately 7 minutes to complete, and will run until Friday, February 19th. The results will be published in the April 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine, and further expanded in a forthcoming Game Developer Research report.

[…]

From Gamasutra:

For its GDC 2010 edition in San Francisco, game business networking event Game Connection will introduce its Level Up promotion, granting free admission to five independent studios.

Game Connection, a "speed dating event for business-focused game makers," occurs every year in Lyon, France and in San Francisco, California concurrently with Game Developers Conference, but until this year its Level Up program was only conducted for the Lyon edition. This year’s event runs March 8-10 in San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

Until January 25, Game Connection organizers will be taking applications at the official site from independent studios less than two years old. Selected studios will receive a full access pass (worth roughly $6,500), including a private meeting room. The program is open only to first-time Game Connection attendees. […]

Read the full story Gamasutra.

Happy New Year everyone! I’ve spent the last few weeks putting this video together. It’s my take on Rinkuhero’s classic 100 Game Maker Games in 10 Minutes video. All the games included were either made or completed in 2009, and I’ve restricted it to a maximum of 2 games per developer.

[…]

This video isn’t intended as a Top 100, rather I wanted to show a cross section of the types of games that were built in Game Maker this year. The inclusions are based on my own opinions; I have no doubts that your own set of games will vary from my own. I made this video not only to reminisce about the games I included, but to encourage thought about the games I have missed.

Here is the YouTube video, after the break:

Are any local  game developers using Game Maker for development or prototyping?

More info on Game Maker:

Game Maker allows you to make exciting computer games, without the need to write a single line of code. Using easy to learn drag-and-drop actions, you can create professional looking games within very little time. You can make games with: