Unite 09, a conference devoted to the Unity 3D game engine, runs this week in San Francisco. While i would have loved to have attended, the home fires currently command my complete attention. The good news is that Unity is taking the show on the road, with a little help from Unity 3D distributor dimeRocker. [...] Keep Reading

The Vortex Competition is a game design contest run by Bill Marshall, one of the minds behind the Toronto International Film Festival, his wife Sari Ruda, and assorted others. The website claims (spuriously) that this is the fifth anniversary of the competition. According to the site itself, the competition has only been run twice before, [...] Keep Reading

i was reaching the end of a Unity3D tutorial series called Unity JumpStart by TheLorax, when the author casually mentioned a fantastic tool called SFXR. I am the Lorax – I speak for the three dees SFXR is a little gizmo that generates 8-bit-style sound effects along a number of common video game-related themes. All [...] Keep Reading

PROBLEM: The SOUND_COMPLETE event is not triggered when your sound finishes playing. SOLUTION: There are a few different reasons why this problem may occur, but here’s how it played out in my project: When you’re listening for a SOUND_COMPLETE event, you work with two Classes: Sound and SoundChannel. The event listener goes on the SoundChannel [...] Keep Reading

Last night, i felt very honoured to be included in a panel discussion at the October IGDA Toronto Chapter meeting. The meeting saw a really great turn-out – a standing room only crowd! The topic was “Running an Ontario Game Studio: From Start-Up to Sustainability”. (Why “Ontario”, specifically? There was some discussion about tax incentives, [...] Keep Reading