Aranda Morrison from Gnomic Studios spoke about developing Square Off! for Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) Marketplace. He presented a lot of great information for XBLIG developers wondering how to market their games (eg. timing is vital!):

Saxon Druce from Binary Space spoke about development of Class 3 Outbreak, a web-based flash game featuring zombies and Google Maps. He candidly touched upon a range of topics including: getting Dugg; last-minute server reconfiguration; approaches to making money from a free game; and player attention spans:

Let’s Make Games would like to join our speakers in sending out a huge “Thank you!” to local videographers Richard Kong and Benny Goodtimes for recording these talks and getting them online!

• Title: Short Talks by Perth Game Developers
• Time/Date: 5:00pm – 8:00pm, September 10, 2010
• Location: Room B202 (the theatrette), eCentral TAFE, 140 Royal Street, East Perth
• Description: Let’s Make Games has invited four local game developers (Matt Comi, Saxon Druce, Aranda Morrison, and Paul Turbett) to share their first-hand experiences developing and releasing games for various platforms (iPhone, Flash, Xbox360, Playstation 3, and PSP).

We’re very excited to have such a great line-up of speakers talking about recently released games on multiple commercial platforms. Perth game development has sure come a long way in the last few years!

Here are some links to our speakers’ games:

• Square Off! by Gnomic Studios
• Star Hammer Tactics by Black Lab Games
• Class 3 Outbreak by Binary Space
• The Incident by Big Bucket Software

Here’s the event flyer (click image for a print-ready version):

Hope to see you there!

Update: If you are on Facebook, check out the Facebook page for this event.

Update: Location updated with Room number (B202, the theatrette). We’ll be putting up signs and guiding people to the right place, but it’s nice to know the room number just in case!

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!