Global Game Jam is an international event in which game developers create games within 48 hours. Due to space constraints this year, the Perth site was invitation only. It will also be the last game jam run by Different Methods. We’d like to thank Simon for running these events over the last few years (we know how much work it is to run events!), and we’ll try to keep them going.

This year, the theme was “extinction” and teams at the Perth site produced six games. Please check them out and leave some comments:

• Go Go Robot
• It’s lonely being alive (video, play online)
• Laggy Dash
• Plenty of Fish (play online)
• The Worm Turns (video)
• Troncraft

You can see these games and more at the Global Game Jam 2011 projects page.

Congratulations to all participants! We’ve been so inspired that we will be running monthly challenges to encourage local game developers to practice and hone their game-making skills. Actually, we’ve been planning that for a while and… well, more on that soon.

If you haven’t heard about Global Game Jam, the 2011 keynote provides some insight into the event:

Update: Just realised that a picture is missing from the montage. Fixing it now! Fixed!

There are game developers in Perth? Really?
That game was developed here?

As a community, it can be pretty disheartening to feel so invisible. Shipping a game is a huge achievement that should be recognised, and our local game developers should be celebrated like the stars they are!

That why Let’s Make Games maintains an directory of local game developers and keeps a record of locally developed games. If you haven’t yet seen our Games and Developers pages, check them out (and send us a profile if something is missing!).

We’ve just added the following developers:

• Super Furious Software
• Silver Lightning Software
• Big Bucket Software

And the following game:

• The Incident

Thanks to the developers for sending through profiles and bringing their game releases to our attention. As we’re purely volunteer-run, it sometimes takes a while before profiles appear online, so please be patient if you send one through (it will appear on the site eventually!)

This bring our total listings to 27 games and 17 developers. Not too shabby for an apparently small industry!

Thanks to everyone who submitted profiles for games developed in Perth. They’re now up and listed on our brand-spanking new Games page!

Everything has kinda just been dropped in there at the moment and everything has to be manually updated (although we do have some offline scripts to generate pages based on the survey results).

We considered putting in a database or wiki initially, but a database backend would require more setup and testing, and a wiki can easily turn into a inconsistent mess if it doesn’t have a critical mass of contributors!

We’ll work on improving both the game and developer directories as they grow.

Let us know if you find any errors or mistakes! Thanks!

Just a reminder that we are currently running three surveys:

1. Community (Scene): For everyone involved in games in Perth!
2. Developer: Former and current game developers, submit a profile!
3. Game: Provide us with information on games that you have worked on!

We hope that prolific local game developers will take some time to submit multiple responses to the developer and game surveys (assuming that they have worked at various companies and on various games, even if those companies are no longer around).

So how are the surveys going? Our estimates place the current response levels at:

All those responses and we still want more!

If you have yet to respond, please consider the following:

• If you previously experienced some technical issues (the dreaded “you have already completed this survey” bug), please give it another go. We’ve patched the server software and everything should be peachy now.
• Maybe you have worked on a game, but figure that someone else who worked on it will submit a profile (so you don’t have to). Well, they may be thinking the same thing! If we get multiple submissions for the same game, we will merge the results (resulting in an ever BETTER profile!)
• Maybe you feel that your game was: made a long time ago, not that great, unworthy of a listing… who cares anyway… sigh. Well, WE CARE! We want to know all about it and when you are a rich and famous game developer you’ll want to relive the old times!

By simply responding, you could join the ranks of these great local developers:

• Black Lab Games
• Kruger Heavy Industries
• Sandbox
• Gnomic Studios
• Binary Space
• Sam Zeid
• Sofia Varano
• Different Methods

Moreover, you could see your work featured alongside these great games:

• RocketFuse
• Star Hammer Tactics
• Eets: Hunger It’s Emotional (Mac)
• Interzone Futebol
• Adrenaline Snowboarding
• Square Off
• Halogen
• Zombie Outbreak Simulator
• Class 3 Outbreak
• Reveri.es Virtual World
• Codename – Edmonster (gosh, top secret project with no link!)

In summary: Every response we get helps us paint a more complete picture of game development here in Perth. Our past, present, and future becomes more clear with everyone bit of information you submit! So please, keep those responses coming!

The report contains a summary of results from the recent industry survey (conducted in early March 2009), and details a number of practical directives that we will be pursuing to help ensure sustainability and growth of the local games industry.

We hope that you find the report interesting, that it provides some insight into the current state of the Perth games industry, and that it highlights some issues that must be addressed if we are to capitalise on local talent.

Please feel free to leave comments here, and to send detailed feedback via the contact form. We would especially like to hear from you if you are in the Perth games industry, but did not participate in the survey. We will be announcing a mixer event within the next few days and encourage everyone to attend!

Finally, we’d like to express our deep appreciation to Jack Casey for the feature image on the front cover and to Paul Turbett from Black Lab Games for the foreword.

Update: Fixed a few links in the report. Thanks to Josh Stewart for reporting these errors.
Update: Corrected graph and grammar in Current Involvement section. Thanks to Simon Boxer for reporting these errors.