Stephen Knightly's blog

 The excellent AnimFX conference for Gamers, Animation and Visual Effects industries is back by popular demand.  It's in Wellington (at Te Papa and Museum Hotel) from 5-7 November, with optional Master Classes including a Gaming one on the Thursday.

It's a good mix of international speakers and local stars from Weta, Parkroad Post and Sidhe.  

It's $590 for a two-day pass. More details at: http://www.animfxnz.com/index.php

The PlayMaker portal is a community site dedicated to game development in New Zealand.

Established by Pixelati and GameMold after meeting via the Auckland Game Works Meetup that AGW runs, the PlayMaker portal's purpose is to provide an active and engaged social site offering information, support and community to established and up-and-coming developers - both professionals and hobbyists. There's a good level of conversation going on there already, so check it out.

Besides the obligatory forums, the PlayMaker portal has its own group Twitter of sorts in the form of The Wire; Members and Groups functions with dedicated calendars and forums for companies and informal teams to interact; tag-based categorisation, and detailed member profiles with links to individual Twitter feeds.  There is an Auckland Game Works group in the community too, so if you join Playmaker join our group too.

July's Auckland Game Developers Meetup has taken a serious gaming twist - with two games for health presenting their projects.

They're both professionally funded projects, based on academically-rigourous designs, but with gaming principles added on top.

Maru Nihoniho of Metia Interactive will talk aboutthe Sparx e-therapy game.  This is a 3D fantasy world 'serious game' designed to teach young people self-help skills for depression. The game was developed for the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences of the University of Auckland and funded by the Ministry of Health New Zealand.

Brightmind Labs fuses gaming principles with Cognitive Behavioural Theraphy to get results for kids with mental health issues. Their first game FriendQuest helps kids on the austistic spectrum better recognise emotions.

For the full agenda check out http://www.agw.org.nz/meeting

 At June's Auckland Game Developers Meetup, Jeff Nusz of www.custom-logic.com shared some of his flash games.

I described some of them as 'art games', which may not be totally accurate. They're all very playable and fun, definately well themed but most don't take the obvious route.  They're not as arty as experimental games by the likes of Daniel Benmergui at www.ludomancy.com. 

Here are links to the games Jeff showed:

Sprout
http://www.kongregate.com/games/customlogic/sprout

Anika's Odyssey: Land of the Taniwha
http://www.anikasodyssey.com/

Kaleidoscope Reef
http://www.kaleidoscopereef.com

Waiting for Go Bus
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/486095/

At our June Game Developers' Meetup our guest speaker was Kevin Toms: creator of the original Football Manager game; responsible for an entire genre of computer game; seller of over 2m game units; former Founder, Chairman and Managing Director of Addictive Games.

A copy of Kevin's presentation is now up on his blog. It's just the slides so you'll miss some of the humour, Kevin's good nature and you won't be able to tell how tall he is (very).