The Game Development Lab in Hagenberg is now an official member of the Sony Playstation Portable Academic Development Network. The Glab has its very own PSP development kit and the first projects are currently underway. This is a landmark event for the Digital Media program, as it will allow students to develop their own games for the PSP console.

The Lounge

The winner in the category “Games” of this year’s mediengala is the Adobe Flash based game “The Lounge” by Philipp Horwath and Christopher Tazreiter. After receiving their Media Cube, both were understandably happy since there had not been any clear favorite among the five nominated games and competition was tough: A classic board game called “Mammon”, the online multiplayer game “BugAttack”, an interactive AI-based simulation named “War of the Worms” and the interactive puppet simluator “Dedo del Titulo”.

The Lounge puts one to three players in the roles of a waiter and two barkeepers. The waiter uses the mouse to assign new visitors to a free spot at the bar while the barkeeps have to use the keyboard to keep the customers happy by fulfilling their needs for drinks.

Christopher Tazreiter and Phillip Horwath

Here is what the jury said:

“The project shows that the fun factor is one of the most important elements of a game. The game requires a high level of level of concentration, ability and teamwork in order not to chase away the customers but send them home totally satisfied.”

Congratulations to Christopher and Philipp on their success! A big thanks also to the other four nominated projects. Thanks to them we can proudly show a broad variety of games that are of a high standard and  make competitions such as these possible in the first place.

Play The Lounge!

The campus in Hagenberg will be represented by two groups, one from the course Mobile Computing and the other from the Digital Media game development major.
Our lab will present , a multiplayer strategy game developed by three students (and currently at heavy beta testing) and our component-based game engine . The system of Cogaen represents an approach of teaching continuous game development in class. The system is developed further by various student projects and also used as a basis for games developed in the courses.

Interested? Visit us at the YO!Tech fair, June 24, 2008 from 9 am to 2 pm at the Aula der Wissenschaften, Wollzeile 27a, 1010 Vienna. Find our stand (FH OOE Logo) at the map included in this article.

The Delta Strike team has just recently released a Public Beta of their Multiplayer Online Real-Time Strategy Game and is now supported by a strong community platform: http://community.deltastrike.org/.

The GLab would like to invite gamers to register with the Delta Strike Community and participate in the ongoing Public Beta Test of the first browser-based, fully featured strategy game.

The first Beta Test Stress Test Session is scheduled for Sunday, June 15th, 2008 at 7PM (i.e. 19:00) when testers from all over the world will meet in the game in the Delta Strike Lobby.

The game can be downloaded from http://download.deltastrike.org/, along with the manual, which is a highly recommended resource prior to playing Delta Strike. Alternatively, the game can also be played by simply opening a new browser tab and typing in http://play.deltastrike.org/ to play Delta Strike immediately.

Delta Strike was developed by Digital Media Students Andrzej Kozlowski, Michael Plank and Alexander Seifert as a one-year project during their studies and is consistently being refined, made possible by the excellent feedback provided by beta testers. Therefore, we would like to invite you to be part of the Public Beta Test @ the Delta Strike Community – join the fun!

A new version of the racing game Tile Racer (version 0.7) was released last week and is currently available for download. The game was developed by Digital Media graduates Jochen Leopold and Adam Gokcezade during their studies and is continually being improved. The current version features a fully customizable input system (joystick, keyboard, etc.) and lightmapping for terrain and track objects. Both Windows and Linux packages are available on the project page.

You can take a look at BugAttack! on our or on the offical website at www.bugattack.net.