It was a surprise, then, when Activision announced its indie game competition. And sure enough, indie developers were skeptical about the company’s intentions, and have dug into its rules and speculated about the company’s intent across the web
Laird Malamed, senior vice president of development at Activision, is the “unofficial champion” of the competition within the company.

Aware of developers’ skepticism, he explains the competition to Gamasutra in this interview — which addresses the corporation’s intent with the contest, and what’s in store for those developers who eventually win.

This includes issues such as who owns the rights to games which are entered into the competition, why such a huge corporation is taking an interest in indies, and why the contest doesn’t allow games that have previously been publicly revealed to enter, among other hot-button issues.

Why is it important for a big company like Activision to get into indie games?

Laird Malamed: We launched the indie game competition at Activision for two reasons.

One, it’s a celebration of our own roots; Activision was founded by people who worked at places like Atari back in the late ’70s and early ’80s. One of the driving factors for that formation was the game makers were not getting the recognition from the big companies that the time. They were seeing their games sell phenomenally well, but they were not getting known, not participating in that success. From the very beginning, Activision was based on celebrating the game makers as creative and artistic people.

The second reason, which ties back into that, is that for a lot of the great games that have come out over the last few years, a lot of the talent started out making their own games. I would not put myself into the category of “great talent”, but what did I do when I learned to program? I made games. That got me passionate about making them and led to having a really cool career.

We want to foster that continued spirit of game making, and one of the ways to do that is to provide some money for the prize winners, that they can support their game, they can make a game with it, they can supplement money they already have and make a bigger game. They can use it however they feel fit.

So we really do it for two reasons: our history is in celebrating game makers, and being driven by game makers; and that we see that there is a ton of talent that develops every day, and is putting games out on a whole bunch of different platforms.

You’ve said you’re the “unofficial champion” of this. How did you get involved in the indie competition?

LM: Absolutely. I am the unofficial champion of this and other things like it. I had a strong streak of feeling responsible, [giving] back to the community, via the game community, or — I just got back from Gardena, which is South-Central L.A., speaking to a teen group, about 15 kids, in high-risk areas. They’ve gotten into this entertainment film program for the summer, and they wanted to know about video games. The people organizing it are friends of mine, and they asked me to come down and tell them a bit about video games.

And those activities, speaking at high schools, are a nurturing phase for me personally, that I really enjoy, and that goes all the way to game makers. I was a thesis advisor this past year for USC, for one of the graduate students, her external advisor, and she has just gone off to take a job at Microsoft, so I’m pretty excited about that.

This is just the next rung, from a corporate point of view, of what we can do. Let’s try to get the word out, that game makers come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes they just need a little push.

…My background is in a variety of things. I owe my uncle a great service; he took me, when I was 10, back in 1977, to play games on his mainframe at his bank. There was the classic Adventure and Netrek, which was obviously Star Trek-type stuff. There was no screen, it was a Teletype machine; you’d type into a keyboard and it would type out what you did in response, and I was hooked.

I clamored my parents for an Apple II computer, and they were like, “Well, if you learn to program, more than just playing games on it, then we’ll get you the computer.” I’m basically a self-taught programmer, and that led to an engineering undergraduate degree, then film school. I was in the film industry for a number of years before coming to Activision to get back to my roots, what had excited me. I’ve been here for about 15 and a half years now.

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Torque X is designed from the ground up to harness the power of XNA. Written entirely in C#, the result is an extremely powerful and flexible 2D & 3D game engine. You can code in C#, then run your game in Windows or on your own retail XBox 360 using XNA Game Studio 3.1 and XNA Creator’s Club. Torque X is loaded with systems that make debugging, journaling game events and testing features much easier than with XNA Game Studio 3.1 alone.

Torque X also features a robust set of editors that allow for quick and easy development of compelling game worlds.

Deploy to Xbox 360
Torque X is built on XNA for deployment on PC and the Xbox 360. Reach millions of Xbox 360 owners by creating your game with Torque X and posting it on the XNA Community Games Channel for anyone to play.

World Editor
Torque X’s World Editor provides an entire suite of WYSIWYG tools for designing and editing a game or simulated environment. The World Editor is fully integrated with the Torque runtime and provides full access to all Torque subsystems allowing for:

• Object placement and manipulation
• Property inspection and editing
• Asset importation and management
• Component assignment
• Sound and video
• Performance profiling
• No compile time
• Flexible LOD system (3D only)
• Light instancing, placement, and manipulation(3D only)
• Vast terrains (3D only)
• Particle Effects (2D only)
• Tile manipulation (2D only)

Graphics
Torque X features both a 2D and a 3D rendering system. The 2D rendering features all the common 2D rendering techniques and is perfectly suited to achieving a custom, original-looking style.

The 3D renderer features modern techniques found in today’s top games including:

• Per-pixel dynamic lighting
• Normal & parallax occlusion mapping
• Various models of shading
• Volumetric fog and light
• Powerful particle systems: fire, smoke, explosions
• Extensible set of shaders (HLSL)
• Post processing
• Refraction
• Blurring

Terrain (3D Only)
Import height fields generated in Torque 3D or L3DT. Fogging, lightmaps and detail textures are all included as part of the engine.

Asset Pipeline Torque X provides support for all major 3rd party art tools including 3DS Max, Maya, Houdini, Blender, XSI, Lightwave and Photoshop. Import your models using the XNA importer (.x, .fbx) or convert your COLLADA files to DTS. You can create material definitions, assign components and specify object types all from within the World Editor.

Components
Torque X is built with a component architecture and exposes the assignment of stock and custom components to objects easily within the editor. This allows for rapid game development and gives the power to the coder to expose game play elements so the designer can tweak them within the editor.

Scripting
Create your game in C#, the mother language of .NET and industry standard. C# was designed to provide flexibility of C and C++ with built-in pointer manipulation so you can avoid common bugs and memory leaks.

Physics
In the 2D engine physics are modeled after real-world Newtonian physics. Apply inertia, linear velocity, angular velocity, friction, restitution, relaxation, damping or a number of other physical attributes to your object and watch it handle interactive collision with great scaling.

The 3D engine features an abstracted C# phyics API for use with other major 3rd party physics libraries. Out of the box it supports rigid body physics, a basic vehicle implementation and some particle system physics.

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SMD_3D Interactive has released the latest beta of Qmidi 3 Music Composer, soon to be followed by the full version. Written in DarkBASIC Professional, this application lets you load and save Midi files, and edit them in a host of different ways. It is adequately featured to create game music loops using pasting and dragging of notes around the canvas, along with full track editing and more. The video demonstrates the creation of a music loop using the application, which is fully detailed in the forums, where you will also find download links.

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This Package include:

FPS Creator

FPS Creator is an easy to use game maker. You’ll have a shooter game made in minutes and you can expand it with extra model packs.

FPSC Model Pack 1

Modern Day style objects and characters for FPS Creator.

FPSC Model Pack 3

This pack contains 526 new assets for your FPS Creator games.

FPSC Model Pack 7

Expand the default sci-fi and world war II libraries with this segment pack. After installation you have extra mesh segments available that provide exciting new possibilities. Create broken walkways, curved ledges, varying angled ramps and more.

FPSC Model Pack 11

Outdoor pack

FPSC Model Pack 12

The sci fi pack is will help you make atmospheric looking sci fi themed scenes

FPSC Model Pack 13

Pack 13 is a village themed pack.

FPSC Model Pack 14

The wild west pack contains 8 buildings to recreate a wild west FPS game.

FPSC Model Pack 15

The ruins pack contains 17 worn and broken down building models.

FPSC Model Pack 25

Viking themed pack.

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DarkBASIC Professional is the most advanced games development package built on the BASIC language currently available. No other package out there makes it as easy to incorporate all of the special features and effects you see in todays games and no other package natively offers the benefits of Microsofts DirectX 9 technology.

NVIDIA and ATI’s powerful new graphics cards have inspired us to support both Pixel and Vertex shaders. You have full and direct control of these awesome hardware effects from within DarkBASIC Professional. Pixel Shaders are used to alter lighting and surface effects that replace artificial, computerized looks with materials and surfaces that mimic reality.

All games created with DarkBASIC Professional are License and Royalty free.
All games can be distributed as a stand alone executable.

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Make your own first person shooter games

Prepare to enter the exciting world of game making, as you create entire worlds from your imagination and populate them with anything you want. Add in your very own squad to fight by your side or go it alone. Make fun games with stories unique to you and features never before seen in a computer game, from pick-ups that give you a million lives to an opponent who can fill a room with boiling acid – and why not, it’s your game, your rules!

FPS Creator X10 is the world’s first DirectX 10 game creator for Windows Vista/Windows 7! for the first time ever you can control the powerful features on your graphics card. Visually stunning effects including parallax relief mapping, bloom, reflection, refraction, volume soft shadows and soft particle shader effects are all under your control.

Learn skills you can take with you into the games industry, a jump start into designing games for a living, or just have a great time designing and creating games.

“It does a better job at showing off the pluses of DX10 than Crysis ever managed to do”. PC Gamer, March 2008.

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Not being a close follower of the 3D game engine market, I had gone along assuming that the technology was maturing and that everybody had settled on one game engine or another — most likely one really expensive one and one free one. Then I got a note from Leadwerks telling me that they had something that is quite nice and isn’t too expensive and deserves a second look. And, of course, I was the perfect reviewer for the job given that I have written about 100 lines of C++ in the past ten years and I have never done anything in 3D.

So suffice it to say that this review will be done from the perspective of a 3D programming noob. Leadwerks is implemented as a few DLLs and is designed from the ground-up not to be “married” to a particular language. So, unlike game engines that are themselves virtual machines that execute their own script which talks to their own rendering  pipeline, Leadwerks is a standalone OpenGL-based engine that can be controlled by anything that can talk to a DLL. And this is certainly nothing new, although it seems like most engines nowadays like to take the other approach, making your code something that’s talked to by the engine rather than the other way around. And there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. The chief advantage of Leadwerks’ approach is that it can be talked to by anything that can talk to a DLL — even languages that don’t exist yet.

Leadwerks has downloadable bindings to C++, C#, Lua, and BlitzMax. Leadwerks installs with a script editor and interpreter for LUA, and it looks like you are urged to use Lua as the “internal” script language for controlling things like how the models behave, and you can use the other languages to handle the more “big picture” items.

The C++ and C# bindings are handled via Visual C++ or C# Express Edition, and the Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition installer is included with the installation. I did not see any mention of Visual C++ or C# 2010 in the documentation, but I think it is an obvious conclusion that they are working on it. In addition to their video tutorials on their excellent wiki here, they include a small standalone “wizard” that sets up a default project for you.

Figure 1: Leadwerks’ standalone project building wizard

Mind you, this gizmo does not do much more than copy some default project templates into the folder of your choosing and launch Visual C++ or BlitzMax, but it handily takes care of the “how do I get started” problem that is always a bit daunting to people getting started. The default is a little rotating cube with bitmap texture, lighting, camera, and cast shadow. It’s not much, but it’s certainly enough to get you playing around with a project.

Figure 2: The rotating cube from the “wizard-ed” demo (click for a full-size image)

What You Get

In addition to the Wizard and the engine DLLs, the Leadwerks installation includes the following tools:

The Leadwerks Editor – A scene compositing tool that lets you assemble a scene from props that you import. The Editor also spawns the Script Editor, which is Leadwerks’ mini-IDE for Lua scripts. Included are a plenty of sample scripts, some of which are fairly sophisticated like this little car script which I am using to drive around a lumpy non-textured landscape that I spent all of about 30 seconds constructing.

Figure 3: A Lua-scripted jeep driving around on a landscape I made in the Leadwerks Editor. The jeep is fully interactive, with the arrows controlling the driving and the mouse controlling the gun turret on the roof.

The Script Editor is a fairly barebones IDE for Lua. Lua can be used to script individual models (as you saw with my jeep above) or the entire game. As it stands, you will probably want a better scripting environment than this if you plan to write any large scale applications in Lua with Leadwerks, as the script editor is not much more than syntax coloring and a “run” button.

Figure 4: The Leadwerks Script Editor

The Model Viewer is a tool that lets you view and examine the attributes of models. The Leadwerks Model Viewer supports Collada, Autodesk FBX, and Game Model Format (GMF) files.

If the last format sounds unfamiliar, that’s not surprising, as it is Leadwerks’ own binary textured mesh format which is intended to closely model the way graphics cards want to deal with meshes, thus minimizing load times. Converters are available for Collada, Autodesk, Wavefront OBJ, and a couple other minor formats. In addition, they have an exporter written in MAXScript so you can create meshes for Leadwerks in 3ds Max without an intermediate step.

Figure 5: The Model Viewer. This is not an editor and is basically intended to show you how your newly-created GMF-format models will look as rendered by the engine itself.

The Material Editor is a tool that lets you composite together procedural shaders in the MAT format. MAT, like GMF, is a Leadwerks-authored format for shaders. Similarly, DDS is their format for textures. The Material Editor is a fairly simple tool that lets you build shader files that you can then read directly into your Leadwerks content.

Figure 6: The Material Editor showing off a lumpy stone material, same as the one used in the wizard-generated application of Figure 2.

Finally, there is a very handy update utility that checks the Leadwerks site and updates your installation to the latest. I am seeing this kind of thing more and more in applications nowadays, and I am very happy it’s there. Saves me from having to wait for the developers to tell me that there is a new version N.0001 that I can download and reinstall in its entirety.

Figure 7: The Leadwerks updater updating some of the installed bits. You may notice that it failed to install one update, which is an update to the updater itself. Not sure how they are going to tackle that little chicken-egg problem.

About the only game engine bit that I have not mentioned yet is sound. Leadwerks supports sound in WAV and OGG format, and they use OpenAL internally to handle sound. All of these sound like quite reasonable choices short of making a Leadwerks sound format, as the formats are patent-unencumbered and are supported by plenty of free tools like Audacity.

Putting it all together

Okay, we have scenes and models and materials and sounds and scripting and C++ project wizards. Does that mean we have a game? Well, we certainly have all the parts necessary to make a game. Of course, getting over that final hurdle from having all the component parts to something playable is where the learning curve really comes in. It is a bit like having an acre of land, a hammer, a saw, a pot of nails and a truckload of lumber. While you have all the bits necessary to build a house, you do not have a house yet. And educating yourself in the finest nail-driving techniques will not get you all the way there.

Figure 8: One of the cooler C++ tutorials included with Leadwerks. A few dozen barrels doing that physics thang.

While all the hand-holding in the world will not get you a game, Leadwerks does do its best to show you how to use the tools. Specifically they give you:

1. The aforementioned project-building wizard.
2. Ten installed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to build scenes, load models, play sounds, etc.
3. A couple-dozen more tutorials on their documentation wiki
4. Lots of people in the same boat as you on their support forum

Leadwerks is not a single “do everything” walled-garden tool like Flash. And this is both bad and good. While Flash gives you virtually everything you need, from drawing to scripting to debugging to packaging and deployment in one EXE file, it also limits you in the tools you can use. If you want to use a different editor or compiler or whatever, you most likely have some kind of ugly grafted-on thing. Leadwerks is designed to merge into many existing programming workflows, even ones that I thought were walled-gardens themselves, like BlitzMax.

But this amount of freedom means you have a bigger learning curve. And a project pipeline to develop. And scripting languages to choose. And modelers to find. This isn’t a tool that you will be using to slap together games in record time, but it is a tool that you will be using to make high quality Windows games for a low price.

And yes I said “high quality Windows games”. While the Mac version is apparently scheduled for some time in the future, this is currently a Windows-only tool, both for development and deployment. So keep that in mind.

The Price

The price, frankly, is terrific. It is $199. Unlike other stuff out there, there are not any pricing tiers, and there won’t be anyone out there with their hand out when your project deploys commercially or sells more than 10,000 copies or gets sold to a bigger company.

Mind you, it’s not a complete programming system and is not everything you need to deploy a complete game, but if you are on a tight budget, you can get everything else free. Visual C++ (or C#) Express is free. Blender 3D is free. Audacity is free. The Gimp is free. Whether or not the free tools will eliminate your need for the top-shelf stuff is a question that only experience can answer, but as far as the capabilities of the engine itself goes, $199 is pretty good.

Conclusion

Leadwerks gives you quite a bit for $199. I fully expected to get low-level “3D hacker” engine for that kind of money, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that I got quite a lot of utilities and hand-holding and sample projects and documentation text/videos for the money. The engine is designed to be call-able from pretty-much any language that can talk to DLLs, although Visual C++ seems to be their programming system of choice. And in the “how much IDE can you get for free” competition, the Visual Express tools are pretty unbeatable, so that’s a good choice.

As for what I would like to see, one thing would be examples of complete deploy-able install-able games done in something other than C++. The documentation states that you can build complete games in Lua or C# or BlitzMax, but it was not as obvious as it should be how to do that. While C# can make standalone executables, I presume that the Lua solution would involve building some kind of EXE bootstrap code in Visual C++ that then lets Lua take over the rest of the work of running the game. There is a lot of documentation in the Wiki, but I would like to see a bit more covering things like that.

Also, I would like to see a bit about deployment. This is, frankly, where most game engines I have seen fall short. While it is great that I can build demos of falling barrels in the Visual C++ IDE on my computer, there is a gulf between that and being to hand someone an installer that puts all that stuff on his computer so he can see falling barrels himself. Visual C++ used to come with a nice little document telling you what the various distributable runtime DLLs were, which ones you should install with your project, and where those DLLs should be installed. Mind you, not everybody took that advice (as evidenced by the number of MSVC DLLs that exist on my system with the debug symbols still attached), but it is good to have.

But these are minor quibbles, they are ones I bring up for other products, and the are ones that can be fixed with documentation or a little time in the support forums. They are certainly not deal breakers.

Post-conclusion

Because my little screenshots and demos above hardly do justice to the quality of Leadwerks’ renders, I decided to include some eye-candy screenshots that they sent me.

figure 9

Figure 10

Figure 11

Figure 12

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Now anyone can build their ideal game in seconds. With just one click of a mouse, you can create a uniquely playable game without needing any programming knowledge or artistic skills at all. Offering over 12 billion gaming options, The 3D Gamemaker opens up a whole new concept in gaming, providing fun for all the family.

• Instant and amazing results in seconds
• Create a variety of exciting game scenarios with over 360 pre-made scenes
• Over 500 3D objects
• Over 320 Sounds
• Save games as EXE files

Ever wanted to create your own first person shooter, running through a darkened crypt against hordes of zombies? Or how about making a fast paced racing game across an expansive icy tundra? The 3D Gamemaker gives you the power to do so with nothing more than your mouse and a healthy imagination.

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Platinum Arts Sandbox Free 3D Game Maker was voted the #5 Indie Game Of 2009 at Moddb.com!  Thank you so much to everyone whom has supported us and I think we did really well especially considering the first three winners don’t have a release.  We had to beat out over 14k projects just to get in the top 100 so thanks so much for everyone’s help and maybe next year we’ll be ranked even higher

Expect a new release of Sandbox in the next few weeks!  We’re very excited to welcome our new coder team member Graphitemaster whom has created a vehicle mode!  I’m also very excited to annouce our new forum moderator Tyche and our forum support team Arcones, Gr1m, Leo_V117, and Venima!  Very nice to have these additions to our team and we appreciate their hard work.  Hirato has also been hard at work as always and is reworking the RPG mode to much more usable!

Craving more Sandbox news?  Well now we have a new Sandbox Blog that will have a feature every Sunday, making Sunday Super Spectacular Sandbox Sunday! Update: We now have a comment system so you can comment on the news and blog!

We could really use someone to help us compile Mac builds.  If you are interested please e-mail us and/or stop into our chatroom.

Interested in playing a fun free RPG?  Damian over at The Golden Coin has released his .300 with some great features including Save Games!

Key Features Of The Upcoming Sandbox Release:
* Vehicle Mode with GTA style of being able to enter and exit vehicles.  A community member has already adapted this mode to create flyable planes!
* Widget Based User Interface aka much easier to customize
* Reworked the RPG mode including improving the minimap and being able to polymorph!
* Revised directory structure.  Maps go into their appropriate gamemode.
* In game video recording menu to easier record your Sandbox advetures!
* SMD and IQM model support
* Ask upon exit if you want to save.

* Tons of bugfixes including a workaround for that nasty ATI Graphics card crashing problem due to their bad drivers.

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