Houston Game Dev
Houston VR Pioneers User Group
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Houston VR Pioneers Meetup at Hal-PC
Since back in April Houston Virtual Reality Pioneers, or HVRP, has met up 4 times to discuss the current state of VR and Oculus Rift. The last two meet-ups have been held at the long standing Hal-PC or Houston Area League of PC Users. While the space had ample seating in a large area for interested parties, the place was just doomed by time.
However the meeting was such a huge success for HVRP and Eric Liga, aka DocOculus, that the group has sought out a new location. We are happy to say that the new location is going to be at TX-RX Labs, Houston’s Hacker Space which we have covered many times in past articles. Where Hal-PC would give you a feeling from a 1970’s early 80’s set of Halt and Catch Fire , TX-RX labs offers everything from 3D Printing to Build your own Drone Classes!
TX-RX Labs – New Location for the HVRP meetup!
There has been a significant delay in the shipping of the new DK2 developer kits, however there should be many of the DK1s and loads of demos for you to enjoy. If you haven’t experienced Oculus, and you would like to get a hands on demo come on down. Also we will be there with Houston Game Dev stickers!
Click Here for the Houston VR Pioneers Meet Up Page
Come on down and get involved!
…eof..
PAX coming to Texas!
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Pax South San Antonio
The beautiful city of San Antionio has been selected to host the new PAX ! The Penny Arcade eXpo (PAX) is a series of gaming festivals around the world and will bring in gamers and developers to show the latest and greatest games while celebrating gaming culture. Boasting wonderful river walks surrounded by hotels in walking distance to the convention hall with fantastic entertainment! With less than 5 minutes walk from most river walk hotels, visitors will be able to experience the historic Alamo, IMAX, great food and shopping Malls. San Antonio will make a fantastic place for a lively PAX convention!
For more on the official announcement head on over to our friends at gameFanatics to read the official press release and all their PAX coverage:
Pax South official – click to read Press Release
We love a good road trip and couldn’t be more excited to visit PAX South along with all the other attending developers and gamers next year!
!
GameBuilder Studio
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GameBuilder Allows users with little to no experience put together a game through a visual interface.
A large amount of people versed in Flash animation will appreciate something such as GameBulder Studio which makes it fairly easy to get up and get started. I was fortunate to be able to ask Houston Software Developer, Lavon Woods, of GameBuilder Studio some questions.
Can you explain more about GameBuilder Studio and how it can be of interest to developers in Houston that want to get started with game logic and visual design?
GameBuilder Studio is a visual game creation tool built to make it easier for creative professionals and aspiring game builders to create and deploy their cross-platform 2D games everywhere. It is a multilayer-ed tool comprised of a visual interface top layer and generated code layer. So if you are a designer and you want to bring your game ideas to life you can create your assets in Photoshop or flash and bring everything to life in GameBuilder Studio just using a drag and drop workflow. If you are a developer you can leverage GameBuilder Studio the same way and/or add any custom code for a custom UI layer or networking code to the underlying generated AS3 project that is created when you build your game. If you are coming from the AS3/flash community you will most likely feel at home right away as GBs is built on the popular cross-platform Adobe AIR SDK for cross-platform deployment to iOS, Android, Browser via flash, and now the Ouya console.
What games on the mobile markets are currently using this system?
There is an iPad game called Hungry Hero that is currently on the iPad store. We have re-created it in GameBuilder Studio as a proof of concept. The project source is available for free and we created a 14+ video tutorial series on how to create it as well.
We are working with a production studio on a multimillion dollar animated film to bring an online multiplayer kids game (Star Guardians) to market built with GBs.
early shot of Star Guardians built with GameBuilder Studio
We are also working on an in-house mobile title that I can’t talk much about at the moment. But GBs is now at the point where the beta has been opened up to everyone and needs game developers/designers to give the tool a try and create something cool.
What is the current level of support provided by?
We try to support everyone via email as much as possible, but priority email and Skype support is given to our paying customers. There is also a community driven support forum available at http://support.gamebuilderstudio.com where users can post bugs and issues they may run into and get help from each other. There is a tutorial section, engine documentation, and a video tutorials page as additional learning resources for those that would like to increase their knowledge on the platform.
The product looks very interesting so far! Anything else you would like to ad?
GameBuilder is now nearing a feature complete v1.0 launch. Now is the phase of our growth where we will be producing titles with the GameBuilder platform and partnering with other developers to push the limits of the tool. It is no easy task to undertake something of this magnitude going up against the big boys without any significant outside financing. It has been bootstrapped for the last 4 years and starting to raise some eyebrows. The excited users that send in messages like this:
“When I saw this application I about spat my spaghettios all over the monitor. I’m like “wow…seriously? Why doesn’t everrryyyyybody know about this thing?” ” – Anonymous GBs user
let me know its really tapped into something.
Thank you very much for taking the time to tell us about GameBuilder Studio!
No problem. I am building GBs because of my love for games and wanting to share the possibilities of what can be built into games today with more than just developers. I hope people can appreciate all the hard work that has gone into the tool thus far, can see the vision for what it has the potential to become, and give it a try. You will be surprised at how easy yet powerful it is.
TRY IT NOW for the great price of Free!!