ZA Game Dev Article Analysis (Sunday Times)

So my usual routine of going on twitter with my Blackberry led me to a Star article Shoddy Quality Article used a picture of @dislekcia -Game Designer/Programmer/Collaborator of Space Hack, Desktop Dungeons, Monochrome amongst other.- So he is a rather awesome guy in terms of ZA Game Dev, since he runs one of the two communities, namely Game.Dev. The article instead focuses on AD Game Programming Courses, and Learn 3D.

Before this article I thought that the media tribunal is an absolutely horrid thing, I still do. I just think we need better articles than this. The article outlines that there are three types of Game Development. Professional, Indie, and Casual. I'm not even going into how flawed this is. But in my books a casual game developer is a hobbiest who makes games for the fun of it. Not really worrying about the selling of the game, thus giving us awesome freeware games. Indie developers focus on platforms such as iPhone, Android, XBLIG, and XBLA.

Moving on the two companies referred to in the article. Learn 3D offers Autodesk courses. So learning Maya, 3Ds Max. They also seem to be planning on doing a game development course soon. AD Game Programming Courses, seems to focus on a bunch of short lessons on how to make games, and from their demo screens it's in XNA. Not shower on the parade. But if you want to program just learn how, there are loads of tutorials on the net. If you want to program XNA then get a book. And start making games, join a game development community. And if you want a job, either get really awesome or get a degree, or both.

South Africa actually has game development on the international level just look at Luma Arcade. We might not be a country developing AAA title but there are reasons for that. We are still a growing game development industry barely even a generation old. If you want the actually story of what ZA Game Dev looks like Awesome Gamasutra Article

The conclusion is simple. We have Game Development in ZA. We have awesome Developers, we have an actual history of the industry in this country. The Star really should have done some proper investigating for that article.

Why School has Failed

Well first off the blog isn't dead. Secondly after going through the South African Outcomes Based Education (OBE) system. My education looked like this I had a 70 something percent average and had never worked at all. You see there is a problem with that.

The fact of the matter is that something that is in turn more normal, tertiary education standards, is now something that is somewhat difficult. It went from the number of subjects in a year to more than that in a semester. And while I know of other degrees that require as much, if not less, effort then was required for me to pass high school these degrees much like high school do not advance you as a person.

The culmination of this flawed system is that the new South African government implemented a flawed system to fix apparent flaws in society. But the education system itself was fine, not perfect but at least better than OBE.

Thus I leave with this proposition. Let not high school be viewed as the final stop in the journey, but as another step in the journey that is life.

For as it is with universities (colleges for you Americans) the end all you have is a piece of paper saying you apparently know something. It doesn't say what you can actually do.

Number13 ARG

So for those of you who do not know what an ARG is. Wiki it. It stands for Alternate Reality Game, not Argentina.

So the Number13 ARG is the first ARG in South Africa. And it so happened to occur at the University of Pretoria (TUKS) which I seem to go to a lot, don't ask me why. The ARG began by the hacking of the university Multimedia website. A link to a strange website was found, and down the rabbit hole we went.

The basis behind the ARG was that someguy (better known to the players as Kael) sister or girlfriend. Was kidnapped by stone masons for the ritual of a virgin sacrifice. I suppose at the point of virgin sacrifice the sister makes more sense so she is his sister.

Kael sends the players around on a bunch or arbitrary quests to save his sister. Since a never ending quest to save his girlfriend would be lame. So off we go solving encrypted puzzles with recording devices, hard riddles and since most people doing this were studying Computer Science. Laptops.

(On the note of laptops I might at the humorous part of me not having a single programming compiler IDE or anything on my now stolen laptop since I couldn't have been bothered to re-installed when i was getting my lovely new netbook)

So now we run around campus and discover the scary amount of stone mason stuff on campus. We also learn that Kael doesn't really want to save his sister since he only wants clever people running around doing stuff, In the end his sister in fact died in the ritual and we consumed her body make of delicious snackage and soft drink.

Not bad for something that lasted from the 14th of April to the 13th of May.

If you want more info try:
http://www.number13.co.za/ (The mysterious website)
http://num13.pbworks.com/ (The player wiki)
http://www.dreamfoundry.co.za/archives/1299 (A blog by someone who isn't me)