An understanding of history, civilisation, human nature and economic are some of the essential knowledge for game designers, and for those interested in RTS or war-games, “A Short History of War”, a free online book touching on the various aspects of warfare throughout history (from as anicent as Sumer, no less!), will defintely find it helpful!

A new Resources Vault has been added to the site’s content! This is where we hope to offer you with tutorials, source code for games, sprite arts, music and other essentials for game design and game development. And to go with the launch of the Resource Vault, we have our first Game Maker game for download, ZeroX, a vertical shooting game for download! Check it out!

The Rojak Insititue is amauter game development studio consisting of Singaporeans and Malaysians; so hey yes, there are people out there making games! If you are into Japanense anime and visual-novel styled doujin-games, be sure to check them out!

The IGDA.SSC and the NUS Games Development Group are once again holding another round of Game Design and Development workshop in prepartion for the 24 hours CONTRAST game competition! If you have missed it in July, here’s your chance again. The workshops cover all the fundmental aspects of game development - design, game art and development. Check out the posters below for more information!

Here are some photographs from Strife and Steel, a board game in testing done by eh, yours truly. If you are interested in testing the game, do let me know via email!

The world of gaming is wonderful! So it’s the world of making games too!

Throughout the month of June the iGDA.SSC held about 5 coaching workshops on XNA and software engineering for games. Here are the screenshots of what were done; we’ll release those games as Open Source when they ready!

Hamilton Graph Game

The first gme is the Hamilton Graph Game (obligatory Wikiepida link) where you have to spot a Hamiton Path and click on the nodes to solve the puzzle.

Up next is a Sudoku game in XNA. The designer has even implemented a pencil tool where you can jot down the numbers 1 to 9 for reference.

Sudoku in XNA

One of the important aspect of the workshop is not just program a 2D game in XNA, but also to explore the concept of agile development and software engineering. Over the next few weeks example snippets from the source code will be used to demonstrate those principles, so stay tuned!

The time has come for all good game designers and developers to unleash their creativity. The CONTRAST Game Competition will be held on 12th September, and the main theme is environment. Of course, there will be many sub-themes to add spices to the design, so be prepared! Here’s a poster for you to pass around.

On other news, Mikoishi is holding an animation competition for their Dropcast game; using characters from their DS game, you have to come up with an entertaining, ass-kicking and awe-inspiring 2 minute animation. Budding animators, here is your chance!