iDevGames

The Software Usability Research Laboratory (SURL) posted an article detailing the effect that input devices have had on Video Game Performance. The study outlined in this article covers the performance of three input devices: a mouse, a PS2 controller and a joystick.

First-person shooter (FPS) games have become increasingly popular, and the player’s ability to accurately control their weapon is very important in these games. This study assesses players’ accuracy on eliminating targets in the FPS game Star Wars Battlefront IITM using three different input devices (mouse, Playstation 2 controller, and joystick) with two different rifle types (sniper and blaster rifle). No significant performance differences were found between input devices although subjectively participants believed they peformed the worst with the joystick.

• Related link: The Effect of Input Device on Video Game Performance

To celebrate the coming new year, iPhone application developers have banded together to bring the world a little bit of holiday cheer. We’ve all heavily discounted our apps as our gift to you! These applications will be discounted heavily for at least 48 hours from Dec 31st to Jan 1st- so act fast to get these deals!

• Related link: New Year’s App Blowout

Independent game developer Kevin from Montréal, Canada has posted an article exploring the costs of starting an indie game business. Three different models of increasing cost are explored, and rough dollar amounts are estimated for each.

• Related link: The indie game developer’s start-up cost

Aleksander Grande recently wrote up a small tutorial on his blog for people who are new to Xcode, Interface Builder, and the iPhone SDK. It goes through the basics of linking an interface made in Interface Builder to View Controllers and such in Xcode. The tutorial is pretty clear and well thought out, with easy to follow instructions and plenty of screenshots as well, so if you’re struggling, go check out the tutorial.

Related Links:
• Interface Builder Tutorial

Independent game developer Josh Forde had started a blog on his attempt to learn 3D programming using the Irrlicht 3D Engine.

This will be my first major journey into 3D game programming, after a few small attempts to learn DirectX and OpenGL. Seeing as how Irrlicht is fairly easy to learn in comparison to DirectX and OpenGL, I have decided it is best for me to gain some experience in Irrlicht before making a serious attempt toward DirectX/OpenGL.

Although Josh is a PC developer, the Irrlicht Engine is available for Mac OS X, and his articles may be of interest to Mac developers curious about this open source engine.

Related Links:

• Starting 3D programming

• Irrlicht Engine

Written in pure C using OpenGL ES as the drawing API, as well as a bit of Obj-C & C++ to glue things together, SIO2 is a light and flexible 3D engine for the next generation of mobile devices. This current release includes everything required to get started:

• Realtime Rigid and Soft Body Physic ( Bullet )
• Realtime MP3 (.ogg) using OpenAL & MPEG4 playback (.ogv)
• World editor WYSIWYG ( Blender )
• Scripting language ( LUA )
• Python Exporter,
• Realtime Lighting & Particle System

• Accelerometer & multi-touch support as well as many other features…

It is build around the official iPhone SDK (2.0 and up) for Mac OS X. Video tutorials, code samples, documentations, forums etc, are available to help you create your own 3D applications for iPhone & iPod Touch. A video showing some of the features is available on YouTube.

Related Links:

• Main website

• YouTube Video

NeoEngine is a fully featured Open Source 3D game engine that you can use to power your own game creations. It is released under the GPL license, with options of acquiring commercial and support licenses. The engine is truly multiplatform, featuring OpenGL and DirectX rendering, with support for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It provides functionality for scene management, vertex and pixel shaders, skeletal animation and physics, scripting and a fully integrated tool chain. Released under an Open Source license, NeoEngine gives you full and direct access to the whole API and the source code implementation.

• Related link: NeoEngine

The Mac Gamer has posted an interview with our editor, Carlos Camacho, about the uDevGames contest. Read the full interview at The Mac Gamer (and digg it).

LÖVE is an unquestionably awesome 2D game engine, which allows rapid game development and prototyping in Lua. This project is constantly evolving and changes come and go, sometimes initiated by us and sometimes by the recommendations of others. If you have an idea on how to make the game engine better, it is greatly desired that you contact us and let us know what you think.

• Get the Universal Binary

• Get the Docs

Rita is a paint program for Mac OS X that attempts to be limitless, flexible and easy to use. Unlike traditional paint programs Rita does not restrict you to a particular image size or resolution. Instead, it uses an infinite canvas. You can make the image as big as you like and zoom in as much as you want without ever encountering any big blocky pixels.

Related Link: Rita