Game.Dev

With rAge coming up, Game.Dev is deep in the throes of organising our schedule, stand and surprises (because it's really all about surprises) for the expo. This means that we're in desperate need of sponsors for both large and small things, ranging from the stand (which is gracefully being part-sponsored by Luma, who will have their game playable in the stand) to posters, t-shirts and countless fiddly bits that any successful conference/expo/shindig needs.

If you're interested in sponsoring Game.Dev and helping to grow game development in South Africa (or know of anyone who might be) please contact dislekcia at gmail.com.

  In less begging and far more awesome news: Dev.Mag issue 15 has been out for a week now, containing a local developer's international employment success story, the latest in the history of I-Imagine and a slew of helpful articles for new and old developers alike.  

The interest in Competition 15 has been phenomenal, everyone seemed to be in all-out crunch towards the end of July and it shows. Mindset and Game.Dev will now begin the judging process and we'll know when the results will be ready to be announced by the end of next week.

In other news, the old NAG forums have been replaced by spiffy new fora and with Comp 15 ending, we can finally move over to our new forums ! The old forum will still remain up for a while (at a different URL, so some of your old links won't work anymore) to enable us to pull off the excellent content generated by the community, but please don't rely on it being there forever.

Congrats to all who entered Comp 15 and I hope to see you all (and more new faces) on the new forum! 

We're already starting to plan for the utter hugeness that is going to be rAge 2007. This year we're aiming even higher than last year's workshop-filled, event-driven stand and hope to snare yet more people with the flashing lights and huge paychecks that is local game development in a nutshell ;)

There's even a writeup of last year to whet your appetite.

Two more articles have made their way onto the site too, check them out: 

• Game Maker: The Power of Inheritance - Covers inheritance and GM and how it can be used to make your life easier and your games finished even quicker.
  
• Game.Dev Competitions 1-5 - A quick overview of the first 5 Game.Dev competitions that got this community going.
  

Our community-run e-zine, Dev.Mag , has just put issue 14 up on the web. It's a stunning issue, with a strong focus on getting new developers interested and up to speed. Everything from ground-up tutorials in Blender (free 3D graphics package) to design articles, post-mortems and local development history. Check it out, you won't be disappointed.

The Dev.Mag website has also been revamped and is looking slick and stylish. Great work guys!

In similar news, this month's PC Format magazine is sporting a new section related to game development, courtesy of the folks over at SAGameDev. It's early days yet and the first article sets a scene that's aimed more at the stalwart C++ engine coder, but we'll be watching to see how it evolves. We wish the SAGD guys luck, writing regularly for a magazine can be difficult and mentally draining, which is exactly why you should give them (and Dev.Mag - and us) as much feedback on our articles as possible.

Seriously. Drop an email Dev.Mag's way already...