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Call For Submissions: Game Development Tools Book

Jeff Ward — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 14:36:16 +0000

I thought I would bring to the community’s attention this new book on Game Development Tools that’s looking for submissions. Here’s the call:

We invite you to submit a proposal for an innovative article to be included in a forthcoming book, Game Development Tools, which will be edited by Marwan Y. Ansari and published by A. K. Peters. We expect to publish the volume in time for GDC 2011.

We are open to any tools articles that you feel would make a valuable contribution to this book.

Some topics that would be of interest include:

Content Pipeline tools (creation, streamlining, management)

Graphics/Rendering tools

Profiling tools

Collada import/export/inspection

Sound tools

In-Game debugging tools

Memory management & analysis

Console tools (single and cross platform)

This list is not meant to be exclusive and other topics are welcome.

The schedule for the book is as follows:

June 30th – All proposals in.
July 15th – Final list of accepted authors are informed and begin articles.
August 15th – First draft in to editor
September 15th – Drafts sent to other book authors for peer review
October 15th – Final articles in to editor
November 30th – Final articles to publisher (A K Peters)
GDC 2011 – Book is released.

Please send proposals to marwan at www.gamedevelopmenttools.com.

Regardless of whether Toolsmiths readers get into the book, it sounds like it could be great.

Election Results

Jeff Ward — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:16:50 +0000

The votes have been counted and the results are in for the new IGDA Tools SIG chair, which is me! Late last week, Raquel let everyone know the results of the election on the mailing list and asked if I had a few words to share with the membership. Below are my comments sent to the list which hopefully explains my positions on where I see the SIG going over the next year. I mention it in the post, but I want to reiterate that I cannot do this alone. If the Tools SIG is going to succeed, we need to foster the collaboration of all of its members. I think this blog is a good start for that, but we have a long way to go.

I’d like to thank everyone who voted for me, and I’m looking forward to talking on the responsibilities as SIG Chair. I am positive that this year will be full of new advancements and initiatives for the SIG. Over the next few years, I’m hoping that we’ll be able to leverage the experience of our members into many tangible benefits for the community. Whether this takes the form of books, white papers, surveys, open source tools and frameworks, or even just increased awareness of the benefits of a good tools team, I want the SIG to be on the forefront of driving the state of tools and tools development forward in the industry.

But this is obviously not something I can tackle alone. One of the first things I’d like to do is create a SIG leadership: a set of individuals who are interested in taking on leadership roles, heading up small project teams and initiatives, and being evangelists for the SIG itself. In my mind, my position as SIG chair will only be to help these people really get organized and working, and keep the daily politics and maintenance of the SIG out of their way. If this sounds like a good position to you, please let me know, and what projects you might want to see take off.

All of this, however, is open for discussion. If you have any ideas on how the SIG can improve, please don’t keep silent. If you can, please try to make it out to the GDC Round Table so we can start some face to face discussion about the direction of the SIG over the coming year, and find some volunteers who will be interested in tackling the hard projects.

2009 Game Development Tools Survey

Dan Goodman — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:00:18 +0000

For those that don’t already know, my company has put together a game development tools survey. This survey has been up since the end of last year. It’s different from Mark DeLoura’s survey, as ours focuses more on the attitudes and issues related to internally developed tools as well as middleware. I believe that once we know the issues that developers are facing and make them public, we’ll be able to make improvements. Our current plan is to end this survey in April and release the results. What we’ve seen so far is pretty telling, but I won’t give away our preliminary results yet. We still need more game devloper opinions, so please take the game development tools survey here:

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/73762/2009-game-development-tools-survey

Thanks for your help improving the way people make games.

Middleware Survey

Jeff Ward — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 19:15:34 +0000

Mark DeLoura, probably known most famously as the creator of the excellent book series Game Programming Gems, is conducting a survey on game industry middleware. And what is middleware than one giant tool right? From his blog post:

After some discussions with game engine middleware manufacturers, I decided to post a couple of surveys to see if I could get the pulse of what game developers are thinking.

There are two different surveys, one for technologists and one for producers, and I encourage everyone to go over and give Mark a piece of your mind. Or at least some data for him to work with.

On a somewhat unrelated note, the Tools SIG will probably run it’s own survey in the future, and it will be one of the things on the table at the GDC talk next month.