Just wanted to announce that Dark Omen Games, a collaborative little game studio that now has about 5 members including myself, has a new website/blog.

Here we will post any games we are developing under the DOG banner, as well as anything else appropriate. You can find the site at http://www.mquandt.com/dog, and hopefully soon that will become a proper domain. (Once we get our old one back)

The NXE is finally out! The next time you switch on your Xbox (if you haven’t already), you will be prompted to update.

So now I must say, welcome to the NXE. I successfully got it from the second round of the preview program, and have been enjoying it since. It is a great change that really gives a new breath of life to the Xbox 360.

Whilst I was sitting on twitter and watching my friends login and gain the download tonight, I wrote up a small widget for BlogEngine.Net that displays your GamerCard, provided by MyGamerCard.Net.

If you want it for your own blog, you can download it from here. Instructions are in the archive.

(Or from my Skydrive)

On another note, A Kingdom for Keflings was released for Arcade, which takes advantage of the avatars you create when you download the NXE.

Just in time for developers to polish their games for Community Games, XNA Game Studio 3.0 has been released. There are numerous changes, however the most important ones are:

• XNA Game Studio 3.0 now supports Visual Studio 2008 (all editions), however it does not support VS2005 anymore, so ensure you upgrade!
• Friend Invites over Live – Add the ability to let players invite their friends on the Xbox/G4W Live network.
• Automatic Asset compression – this one is obvious
• New Media system – now you can add MP3 files to your content folder and play them using the new Media namespace.
• Zune support
• One Click installation for Windows games

Remember, if you live in the USA and some parts of Europe, Xbox Live Community Games will be released with the New Xbox Experience on the 19th of November.

Download XNA Game Studio 3.0 today!

Update: From the updated FAQ:

“Creators Club Premium members in the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland and Spain will be able to sell their games. We'll be adding support for other regions later in 2009 and beyond but these are the only countries where XNA is enabled to pay their residents.”

After a 12 hour long countdown on the Bungie website today, Bungie has released a teaser trailer for their next project, which is set in the Halo Universe.

The teaser trailer, entitled ‘Keep it Clean’ is very vague on details, however the keen eye will notice that it is in New Mombasa, the city destroyed in the beginning of Halo 2, and the fact that this game is still a part of Halo 3.

The trailer opens to cameras showing an evacuated New Mombasa. Then it cuts to some drop pods falling in the outer atmosphere.  The streets are deserted, as shown by the camera ‘Lubamba’ and there is a space elevator in the distance, as shown by camera ‘Mbaraki’. The camera cuts to thousands of drop pods falling in the distance, and focuses on a small group, before a large explosion (presumably the warp in Halo 2) occurs, destroying the city.

The AI and cameras reboot to show a destroyed city, however when the camera Mbaraki reappears, you see a single drop pod falling towards the city. It cuts to Halo 3, before showing the pod from a different angle, as it smashes past the camera. Then it cuts to black  and reads: “Prepare to drop”, before jerking around a bit more and reading Bungie, then showing the standard Xbox 360 clip.

Here are some more screenshots from the video. Note the entire trailer is pre-rendered, click on the thumbnails to get a hi-res version of the screenshot.

You can view the trailer for yourself, just head on over to Bungie.net and download it in either Quicktime or WMV, Small Medium or Large.

So TechED Sydney is over and I now have the time to post about the big announcement for students that came out of the event. On Tuesday Microsoft held TechEd Student Day, a free day for students to come along and sit in on a series of presentations geared towards students, TechEd style.

Aside from that, every University student who attended the University half of the day received 4 DVDs full of free software, ready for use. Now if you could not attend this event, do not fret, this is all available for you as well (if you are a student), however you need to download it for yourself.

Head to https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/ and Sign In with your Windows Live ID, and then verify your student status and you can get your keys and downloads for all the software listed. This includes:

• Visual Studio 2008 Pro
• Visual Studio 2005 Pro
• Windows Server 2003 Standard
• SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition
• Microsoft Expression Studio
• 12 Month XNA Creators Club Trial
• XNA Game Studio 2.0
• Virtual PC 2007 (Great for use with Windows Server 2003)

Grab the downloads, grab the keys, and start making cool things with this free software. Anything you make can be distributed with a non-commercial license, so get to it!

The game enjoyed an ‘early’ release in Australia, I picked it up last week and had loads of fun! For those who do not know, Spore is the latest game from the genius game designer that is Will Wright. Here he has taken his Sim style of games, where you create more than you destroy, and expanded it more than ever.

Now you can create life from the cellular stage, modifying your creature through some really intuitive and powerful tools before you get to the tribal stage where the game turns into a little version of Populous. (Also created by a game design genius, in this case, Peter Molyneux)

The game is lot of fun and I would recommend it to everyone, however I do have some issues with the DRM the game uses to fight piracy. Electronic Arts decided to use Securom to ‘protect’ the game after a large amount of backlash came from their idea to have people activate every 10 days. Now the game activates upon installation, however there are a limited number of activations possible before you have to contact customer support to reset your counter. In my opinion this does more to hurt the legitimate consumer than it does the pirates, as the scheme has already been cracked.

Those issues aside, the game runs great and is lots of fun. On the technical side the game makes heavy use of procedural generation, for textures, models, music and animations. The use of procedural generation allows people to share their creations using a small file that weighs in at less than 100kb. (In most cases 20-30kb)

Maxis have also developed an innovative way of sharing the content. Inside your ‘My Documents\My Spore Creations’ folder, you will fine png files that are 128x128 and contain an image of the creation. This is actually all the data the game needs to generate the creature/ship/vehicle etc. To share this, you simply give the png to others and they put it in their folder, and it is ready for use. The bonus of this is that because it also contains the thumbnail, you can easily create a small gallery for people to browse.

Pretty cool. Wordle generates word clouds from text provided, or RSS feeds. This one for example came from my blog homepage.

It is free, just visit http://wordle.net/ to make one of your own. They use a Java applet to generate the image, and you can customise many aspects of it.