• A Creative Project Manager will reinforce our team by providing creative input, overlooking projects, and assuring quality results.
• A Game Prototyping Programmer will develop of prototypes, from start to end – while at the same time contributing to the assessment of their concepts.

A detailed description and practical information can be found here and here.

Is this something for you? Do you know anyone who may be interested in one of these positions? Get in touch through our contact form!

Less well known is the fact that Belgium also has a small but growing games industry. This didn’t go unnoticed by the financial and economical magazine Trends, as they published an article about the state of the industry.

Click to view the PDF version of the full article in Dutch.
Kudos to Trends for providing the PDF!

Since the article was written in Dutch, I’ve summarized it for you:

• The Belgian game industry has been (and still is) a lot smaller than in most neighboring countries.
• Mobile games, social games, advergames and serious games: the game industry has been diversifying during the last couple of years.
• At the same time, the Belgian game industry started to grow. From 7 companies in 2007 to 15 companies in 2011, and a few more since. This means an increase in revenue from about 1.3 million euro to about 4.5 million.
• Both in Flanders and Wallonia, there is some government support – including subsidies for specific projects and cheap loans. However, some say a tax cut for the entire Belgian game industry would be a more fair measure.

Graph based on the article. Not all companies are included in the numbers, but it does give a sense of the growth.
Note that I applied a small correction to the numbers, by distributing the revenue of the biggest player over two years, as they extended their financial year.

Here are some of the things Peter will have a closer look at:

• Fast development of race games: We’re anxious to find out more on quickly generating race tracks on the fly!
• Using sound files as input: For instance to be used in a basic lip sync algorithm, or perhaps to generate a level based on a sound file?
• Real-time multiplayer: Peter will have a look at SmartFoxS and Exit Games’ Photon Server.
• Adobe Flash animations in Unity3D: We’ve already tested Iggy (see earlier article), so uniSWF and/or Autodesk Scaleform will be next. At least… if we can get our hands on trial versions.
• Location based gameplay: Using the iPhone’s GPS and compass, we’ll create a small location based game, perhaps combined with augmented reality.
• OpenNI: Building upon PreviewLabs’ experience prototyping for the Kinect SDK, Peter will create a playable game prototype using the OpenNI SDK and share it with the community.
• Smart TVs: The platform of the future? Could be. Eager to learn something about game development on a Samsung Smart TV!
• Recreating a smartphone’s 3D path: We’ll see how far we get in reconstructing the 3D trajectory of a moving smartphone, solely based on accelerometer and gyroscope data.
• Gameplay possibilities of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI): We’ll use the NeuroSky MindWave to learn more about how measuring your brainwaves could affect gameplay.
• Dual screen gameplay: Interested by the gameplay possibilities of recent Wii U and Xbox Smartglass products, we’ll see if there’s an easy way to prototype gameplay using two screens in Unity3D.

In the coming weeks we’ll be making a blogpost for each technology we’ve researched, so stay tuned!

During the event, I’ll be taking some pictures now and then, and sharing them on our Facebook page.

There are a several solutions on the market for this, like AutoDesk’s Scaleform, UniSWF and Rad Game Tools’ Iggy. Since I wasn’t able to obtain a trial version of both Scaleform (which wasn’t yet released for Unity) and UniSWF (whose support didn’t answer to our email), I have examined Iggy in more detail.

We were quite surprised to see that Iggy gives you the freedom to program parts of your game either in Unity, or in Flash itself, using ActionScript 3. For instance, you could write a lot of actionscript code for the animation and simply dispatch input events like a key press through Iggy to the actionscript. Alternatively, you could limit the code in Flash as much as possible, and control everything from within Unity.

This sounds quite powerful, but unfortunately the process required to integrate it in a project can’t really be called user friendly. It seems that this still requires a lot of code that could as well have been hidden from the programmer’s eyes. Also on the stability side of the product, there’s still some work for Rad Game Tools – Unity crashed now and then while playing Flash animations.

Iggy is still relatively new and still has some issues, but it’s certainly something to look out for. I may have a second look at it again in a few months from now, and also evaluate Scaleform and UniSWF if possible.

As mentioned on Ripstone’s website:

Panic! is a top-down action puzzler for PlayStation Mobile that requires quick thinking and fast reflexes. A giant alien slime monster is attacking the city! What can you do? Help a few survivors escape the city by creating blockades. Topple houses, drop bombs and throw buoys to save those about to be swallowed by the slime!

The concept for Panic! was one of several game concepts conceived during brainstorm sessions with our team and Nicolas Marinus, Managing Director at Thumbs Up.
The prototype for the game was part of a series of prototypes that have been mentioned on the projects section of our website since more than a year, and carried the working title ‘Guide The Flood’.

Since the gamescom event of 2011, Nicolas used the prototype for pitching purposes (as can be read in this customer testimonial), and later started working with Green Hill to accelerate the pitching process.

Screenshots of the prototype and game will follow soon.

Concept art for Panic!, by Stroke Studios

The person we’re looking for will be responsible for the development of a number of prototypes, from start to end. At the same time, he or she will contribute to assessing and evaluating the concepts.

It’s a full-time position with a 3 month contract, which will be likely to be extended.

More information on this position can be found in the following job description.

Applicants can get in touch trough our contact form.

Note: The position has been filled – welcome to the team, Stijn!

The main features that they’re adding in this release include an advanced character animation tool, and improved graphics (advanced shadows for mobile devices, and DirectX 11 rendering for PC games), and support for the Linux operating system.

Most of the announced features are particularly useful for the development of higher quality full games, but for rapid prototyping we have to look at the smaller features.

Among the announced features, these are the two features of which we believe that they could interesting for rapid prototyping:

• Major optimisations in UnityGUI performance and memory usage: This would also allow us to prototype more complex 2D games faster on the mobile platform, hopefully entirely removing the need to use sprite manager systems for prototyping purposes, as described in this earlier blog post.
• Dynamic fonts on all platforms with HTML-like markup: This could allow us to prototype UIs faster.
• The profiler feature will also work on mobile: This will make it faster to find performance bottlenecks – even though this would only be available for certain Android devices, perhaps they’ll extend it to iOS in the future. And profiling on Android could help detecting performance issues that are present on iOS as well.

The release date hasn’t been announced yet, and I suspect that there may be several smaller workflow improvements that make it more convenient to work with Unity.

Currently, we’re doing a trial with ActiveCollab, a web based project management solution, which allows sharing specific pieces of information (such as a prototype estimation breakdown) in an elegant manner.

In combination with ActiveCollab, we’ve been using the ActiveCollab Timer application, to allow us to continue tracking time, even when the Internet connection or ActiveCollab hosting would be down.

Due to an automatic upgrade to ActiveCollab 3.0, which happened yesterday evening, the Timer application ceased working, and some timer entries were stick in the sending queue (not visible any more in the application, nor sent and stored in the web based system). After contacting ActiveCollab Support, it seemed that there would be no way to recover the lost data.

Luckily, we’ve found that you can read this data from a file on your disk.

This is what you need to do in case you’d need to recover this lost data:

• Download SQLite Database Browser.
• Use it to open the file activeCollabTimer.db in the ~/Library/Application Support/A51/activeCollabTimer directory (Windows users can search for the activeCollabTimer.db file to locate it).
• You’ll see that the data you’re looking for is stored in the actimesubmit_time column of the actimesubmit table (as it can be seen in the screenshot).

The #FoG12 is a small game industry event, were the key players of the Dutch games industry can be met, as well as companies from other countries interested in meeting these players (such as ourselves – PreviewLabs).

There’s also a conference part to it – this time appealingly called the Creative Spirit Game Conference 2012, but I’m mainly attending for the networking opportunities.

If you’re attending the Festival of Games as well, and would like to learn more about what PreviewLabs is doing, please don’t hesitate and get in touch through our contact form!