Last Updated: 11th February
Let me start by saying that to start a project is dead easy, anybody can do it.
But to finish it off, that's the hard part.
And the last 10% to complete the project will make your head explode
That said, I'd say that there are a couple of distinct schools of thoughts on stuff related to gaming:
- Commercial gaming
- Research gaming
My terms lah but basically there are two paths that you can choose if you want to work in a game-related field. Commercial gaming is essentially anything that can make you money or deal with money. I guess a lot of people can sort of have an idea lah kan. Homebrew or underground games can probably fit into this category as well.
Research gaming is a very, very big and fairly new field that you can go into (and a lot of fun as well). This includes stuff like interaction design, New Media (the name of the field, not media-media yang baru), social computing, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, etc etc. Basically any experimental stuff comes from here first. Erm like for example games like Killer 7 is what you see in this field. The bad thing about this field is that it is not really stable; it fluctuates a lot. One day you see people bising2 about New Media, then tomorrow senyap oledi. Or just 'silly' stuff like new research papers on a game-related topic. One subsect of this field is the popular political games section, where people create games to make a political stand (like the london bombings, or Christian games for example) and THOUSANDS of people play these games daily, so you can become very famous for "simple" games like this
I'm doing the IF90 course in QUT. Basically you'll be really good with all kinds of media technology like film la games la some tech + art stuff la etc.
Some companies that create (or publish) games in Malaysia:
GameBrains
Sherman3d
Phoenix Games
MiniMax (new one)
Gameflier
TerraICT
Dragonback Games
UnrealMind- Mobile games
If you wanna meet people from the local industry, I'd suggest you to look out for the IGDA Malaysian Chapter meeting @ Souled Out Cafe, Desa Sri Hartamas. It's not really formal meeting la, just lepak2 wan.
EVENTS:
PM me!
LOCAL GAMES EDUCATION:
Multimedia University (Cyberjaya) - Bachelor of Multimedia (BMM) Degree in Software Engineering And Game Design
Lim Kok Wing Univeristy College - Diploma in Games Design
APIIT - Higher Diploma in Computer Systems & B.Sc. (Hons) in Computing with specialism in Multimedia
COURSES AND CONFERENCES
Microsoft On-Demand Webcast series - Videogame Development: Learn to Write C# The Fun Way. This is a FREE course done in association with the world-famous DigiPen Institute, and it's FREE! You get Visual C# 2005 Express program, the source codes, and the .wmv webcasts.
GameProgramming - FREE game programming course. Class starts 24th August 2005 so register quick!
The Education Arcade's 2005 Games in Education Conference - Held in conjunction with the last 2005 E3Expo (video torrents available)
GAME DESIGN & PROGRAMMING RESOURCES
Visual Studio 2005 Express - FREE & excellent IDE for all kinds of languages
GameDev - Game programming & design big daddy site
Game Programming Wiki - VB, C, C++, .Net, Java
Jason Lam's J2ME & Gaming site
32Bits - Excellent DirectX & MFC Tutorials
Visual Basic + DirectX Multimedia Programming Resource - DirectX7,8,9 + VB
Amit's Game Programming Information - Excellent one-stop page for algorithms
Kirupa - excellent platform (Mario) game tutorial in Flash
The Board Game Designers Forum - Huge (think > 20,000) collection of Game Ideas and Board-Game Designs
Game Middleware - Great list of commercial middlewares, engines, physics as well as game surveys
GAME MODELLING & ANIMATION RESOURCES
Blender3D - Excellent FREE modelling software with video tutorials
Zbrush Central - Award-winning modelling program + big community and beginner tutorials
Digital-tutors - Some beginner video tutorials for multimedia programs such as Maya, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, etc.
SPECIALISED GAME ENGINE'S RESOURCES
DevMaster - List of game engines around the Net
Neverwinter Nights engine tutorials @ NWVault
Unreal Engine tutorials @ 3dbuzz
SexyAppFAQ - Great resources for the free, tested and reliable PopCap Games Framework
Kaneva Game Platform - The FREE toolkit (3DSMax-compatible), video tutorials and source codes
Microsoft + Valve: Coding4Fun - Half-Life 2 Mod Spot
Valve's Developer Community
Interlopers.net - 150+ Half-life 2 Engine Tutorials
Ogre3D - Commercial-grade, open-source graphics engine
Wintermute Engine - Free point&click game engine
DESIGNERS' SITES AND BLOGS
EPIC's CliffyB Blog: Check out his "How to get Hired" article!)
Kieron Gillen's Workblog: How to Abuse Game Journalists (for publicity)
ea_spouse's blog: EA: The Human Story
Grimwell's The Colonies - the MMOG that was never made
Ron Gilbert's Grumpy Gamer - from the creator of the Monkey Island series
Hideo Kojima's Hideoblog
A couple of links on game development and/or research that I can think of right now:
How did you get your start in the video game industry? - A great Gamasutra article!
IGDA Malaysian Chapter forum
Ludology - Videogame Theory & Research
WaterCoolerGames - Politics, Education, anything non-entertainment in gaming
Gamasutra - game industry news and articles
Game Development Search Engine
Eurosis and Game-On Conference
Malaysia Game Developers Community (MyGDC) - Mostly MMU students
SourceForge - Great place to find open-source programs and games and game engines
Malaysian INdependent Developers Community - For general developers, backed by Microsoft
OpenAL - Cross-platform 3D audio API
MICROSOFT'S XBOX360 XNA RESOURCES
MechCommander2 Shared Source download (~1Gb needed, 4.5Gb to install)
XNA March2006 CTP download (213Mb needed)
XNA Build Forum
I'll update this post if you guys have more links or events or stuff or whatever ask me if you guys got any questions related to game course annd I'll try to answer as much as I can & know.
This post has been edited by wKkaY: Oct 10 2014, 09:22 PM
Game Design & Programming 101, cout << "Updated 11th February" << endl;