Nick.

WiiSpray looks awesome. It’s a digital spray-can art application built using Adobe Flash and WiiFlash and offering a special spray-can wii-remote housing.

Here’s an image of the custom wii-remote housing:

And here is the latest teaser video (for version 2):

WiiSpray Teaser from Martin Lihs on Vimeo.

OneTwenty is pleased to present its next event. 😀

Details:

• Title: Indie Games Scene: Showcase and Mixer
• Time/Date: 7:30pm – 10:00pm, Tuesday April 14 2009
• Location: The Velvet Lounge, 639 Beaufort Street, Mount Lawley
• Description: Making games? Bring them along and show them off! Like games? Have a drink and check out the local scene! Entry is free, but please note that this is a licensed venue (no entry to persons under 18 years).

Here’s a flyer that you may see around town over the next week:

A .pdf version is also available for download in case you would like to print and distribute flyers (it’s crazy fun times)!

We felt that a lot of people in the local games industry wanted to have regular casual events, so we’ve scheduled in two events and we will continue with fortnightly drinks (every other Tuesday night; sometimes coinciding with bigger events) if these go well.

We hope to see you all there and I’d like to extend a huge thanks to Minh for organising the venue and advertising!

Note: If you are on facebook, you can confirm your attendance on the facebook events page.

I finally finished the Perth Games Industry Community Profile for Let’s Make Games.

It was a lot more work than I expected, and it’s unfortunate that a lot of that was wrestling with software. Here’s a list of issues that I ran into:

• I had to recreate charts because Lime Survey only generates them in .png format (so they aren’t scalable or suitable for printing). Generating SVG charts would be a nice feature.
• I created all art as plain coloured vector shapes since Inkscape‘s export to pdf via cairo doesn’t handle patterns or gradients well.
• Open Office Writer makes it incredibly difficult to not put numbers on the opening pages, so some workaround were required.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m ungrateful for the wealth of free software that allowed me to conduct this survey and produce this report in the first place. I’m just being plain about shortcomings and areas for improvement.

Simon, henceforth to be known as AWESIMON, called yesterday to let me know that he has secured a venue for our planned “travel diaries” Art Exhibition. Yay!

I’ll need to confirm with Simawesome, but I gather that it will be held at Headquarters (YMCA) in Leederville during May 1-7.

Here’s a preview of my planned works with explainatory text pixelated out:

We’re meeting this weekend to work on a flyer, and I’ll post a few “artist statement” style snippets to this blog over the next few weeks. OMG! I’m so excitement my grammar fail!

It’s not a cat:

via Videosift Videograter (must be an April Fool’s thing).

I helped Minh a little bit today with some events organisation.

Those in the Perth “scene” will know that IGDA and PIGMI have run most of the games industry social events over the last year. There’s generally some sort of event every 3-4 months and it’s always great to catch up with people.

Aside from these social events, there are also more interactive events such as GameJam and Nullarbor, and commercial events such as GO3 Expo. I’d imagine there’s also a fair demographic overlap with other geek culture events such as WaiCon and Supanova.

Unfortunately, even with all this events action in Perth, there’s still no “same place, same time” sort of social event. To fill that gap, we (OneTwenty) will be organising regular meetups for people in the games industry: every other Tuesday at the Velvet Lounge.

We would like to coordinate with other organisations (especially IGDA and PIGMI) as much as possible, and we are happy to have events run (at the same venue) before or after these regular meetups. We’ll also working with GameTraders Carillon to run larger events at other venues.

Watch our for details on the first event (Tuesday, April 14) soon. It will be advertised in various places (including Xpress magazine) and we need at least 40 people to make it worthwhile (that shouldn’t be a problem right?!).

I hit into a bit of a roadblock moving forward with the Let’s Make Games community profile document (summarising results of the recent survey) and website.

Basically, I was spending too much time trying to get all the visuals just right and it was compromising my timeline. On top of that, I had other things to work on and my timeboxes were all starting to be affected.

Here’s a quick mosaic of a few of the different variations for the community profile document (thanks to Simon for a bunch of the vector art and design number 4, and sorry for bothering you will endless creative changes!):

Um… ignore the last one. I probably could have stopped at number 3, or even just been more measured early on.

I felt myself on the verge of throwing way more time into this cover and then writing a new WordPress theme for the homepage. Neither of these activities are really necessary, and would both take a fair amount of time.

This reminded me of the Cult of Done Manifesto by Bre Pettis and Kio Stark and I decided to just get on with it (and other things). I just need a little reminder every now and then as it’s easy to fall into bad habits.

I’ve generally been pretty good at just “getting things done” regularly (as my blogging probably attests). It feels great! 😀

The Dreamhost mail server I’m assigned to has been down for over 24 hours… and it’s still down! Luckily, I have mail forwarding setup so that everything is mirrored to my gmail account (and that is still working).

It seems that every time I setup a new service on Dreamhost, it mysteriously goes down. When I initially setup letsmakegames.org, the webserver went down for a few hours. This time I had just setup a new email address.

Rather than saying “I hope it’s not me“, I’ll stick with “I hope this doesn’t happen again“. It make me disinclined to use shared hosting.

Update: Almost 36 hours and no resolution!

Update: Finally working after approximately 39 hours!

At last week’s Game Developers’ Conference (GDC), Chris Eden from Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) announced the Sony “Pub Fund”, a scheme in which Sony will guarantee royalties to match the development budget for Playstation Network (PSN) exclusive games.

The first company to benefit from this program is doublesix for their new title, Burn Zombie Burn.

This is apparantly a global scheme aimed at increasing the number of titles on PSN and it looks like great news for consumers and developers (provided the game downloads don’t use too much bandwidth). Personally, I’m a big fan of the Playstation platform, and I prefer downloadable games over games on physical media.

Game developers can request more information by contacting Sony’s development relations team at: devrel-scea@playstation.sony.com.

So, has anyone from Perth contacted them yet? I’m going to send an email later this week.

Information via gameindustry.biz, IGN, and various other sources.