Imagine Cup Australia : xbox 360

XNA Gamefest Presentations are now available online

ausic — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 05:19:00 GMT

Gamefest is probably the biggest game technology event on the Microsoft calendar. The 2007 conference hapened earlier this year (in the U.S, of course), and the presentations and some of the audio from speaker sessions have now been posted online for download. There's some very useful stuff here f you've been playing with XNA. The best thing is, the content's very 'accessible' - I've never been a games dev guy (I play games, and leave the hard part to the genii) and I can still understand alot of the slides.

I'd recommend checking theses slides out if you're interested in joining the Games Development category of Imagine Cup - some very useful, XNA / DirectX specific information there which could help you out with your entries quite a bit. I know there's also a number of lecturers wanting to begin teaching XNA - these materials would provide some good teaching references (in addition to the XNA curriculum that is available at the Academic Resource Centre.)

In other XNA news, Glenn Wilson has informed me that Dream Build Play will be starting up again soon. For those of you at the Melbourne Mix On Campus, the video that Glenn showed at the start of his demo were the finalist entries from 2007's Dream Build Play - the idea is essentially that a whole bunch of amateur/hobbyist games developers get together and build some fun stuff. I'll keep you posted with more details as they come in - Glenn is looking at get something nice from Australia included at Dream Build PLay in 2008, and will be looking for collaborators, so if you're interested, watch this space.

Glenn is also starting an XNA users group (it will be country wide). You can sign up for the group at www.virtualrealm.com.au. Joining user groups is a fun and easy way to share your knowledge with other but also to learn alot of stuff from other enthusiasts in your community. If you are serious about being a games developer, I'd sign up at Glenn's blog now - you really have nothing to lose.

Imagine Cup 2008 site goes live

ausic — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 08:30:00 GMT

'Allo Frenchie! The site for Imagine Cup 2008 to be held in Paris is now up at www.imaginecup.com. You can't register or access the forums yet, but you can read all about the theme for next year (sustainability), and most importantly, read about the new XBOX 360 GAMES DEVELOPMENT CATEGORY!!! Whilst the web development category has sadly been axed for Paris, I know alot of casual games developers out there who'll be thrilled with the addition of a games category they can compete in.

If you listen to one thing I say all year, it's GET STARTED ON YOUR IMAGINE CUP 2008 ENTRIES NOW! It's amazing how quick time slips away, and the best entries are the one's who have had time to thoroughly think a problem through and talk to a number of different parties before even starting development, so to increase your chances of making it to the Aussie finals (and maybe the world finals) next year, start thinking about your project now.

Eric Lam takes out 'Blog for a Box' at ReMix / Imagine Cup finals

ausic — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 05:29:00 GMT

To help generate more attention for this year's entries in Imagine Cup, I ran a 'Blog for a Box' promo at ReMix. The premise was basiclally this - ReMix attendees (truthfully) blog about this year's finalists (whether they thought they were good bad or ugly) to go in the draw to win an Xbox 360. The response was overwhelmingly positive, which is a credit to the standard of work the 3 finalist teams did.

The winner was decided based on i) providing some opinion / insight in the content they included, ii) proof that they were indeed present to watch at least some of the finals and iii) ranking in search engines and blog aggregators (we wanted to show the teams off to as many people as possible).

After all this, and reading some of the great posts people went to the effort of creating, we had a winner by a nose - Eric Lam! Eric, there's an xbox 360 in the mail for you.

The following are permalinks to a few of the other blog entries that came close to winning the Xbox:

- http://blogs.msdn.com/msozacademic/archive/2007/06/29/imagine-cup-australia-winners.aspx

- http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/andrewwhitten/archive/2007/06/26/251992.aspx

- http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2007/06/27/entry-in-programming-contest-a-sight-not-to-see

- http://the-riotact.com/?p=5250

- http://blog.dreambuilders.com.au/journal/2007/6/29/visually-impaired-computer-programming-a-dream-come-true.html

- http://apcmag.com/6514/now_the_blind_can_program_in_net

- http://edwardhooper.com/2007/06/29/imagine-cup-australian-finals/

- http://blogs.msdn.com/frankarr/archive/2007/06/27/imagine-cup-2007-winners-announced-lives-to-be-changed.aspx

- http://geekswithblogs.net/shahed/archive/2007/06/27/113523.aspx

- http://littlevoices.blogspot.com/2007/06/imagine-cup-2007.html

- http://www.ruthellison.com/2007/07/02/visual-studio-2005-accessibility/

- http://dpramudya.blogspot.com/2007/06/imagine-cup-2007-australia-winner-on.html

Nick