“Ever wanted to make a game?”

Perhaps the answer to that question has crossed your mind before. Perhaps you’ve dreamed of one day becoming a game developer, creating popular and important videogames for PC, consoles, handhelds and mobile. Perhaps you’ve even got a few ideas and a fair bit of talent to make this dream a reality.

But wait. You live in South Africa. How are you ever going to get into game development and join a studio, or even form a studio of your own, if you don’t have the support of other like-minded and talented individuals?

Easy.

Join a local South African game development community, take part and learn most everything you need to know about creating games with your peers.

And visit rAge 2011.

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Have you heard about Dragooo? It’s a new iPhone game created by South African game development outfit Tasty Poison Games, where you’re invited to adopt a virtual pet dragon of your very own, and feed, nurture, train and customise it to be the best little dragon it can be!

Once you’ve trained up your little guy and he’s fully grown, you’re able to fly him through the underground caverns of Mount Kahmi using the iPhone’s accelerometer to guide him through challenging courses and best your own time.

As you can see in the screenshots and the in-game footage below, Dragooo looks incredible for an iPhone game, with all kinds of awesome effects and great stylised art direction.

Wonderful!

You can watch Dragooo in action in a gameplay video below, which gives us some looks at the little dude waddling around, getting fed and flying through caverns:

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Last year I wrote an article for videogame industry trade site Gamasutra entitled ‘The South African Game Development Scene: Past Present and Future,’ which attempted to look at the history of game development in the country and surmise how an industry may rise and move forward here.

The article was based on interviews conducted with a diverse, influential and talented group of developers both from and based in South Africa, but a lot of the responses were unfortunately not included due to the nature of the piece, so in an effort to share this potential goldmine of knowledge with aspiring game developers and gaming enthusiasts, I decided to start posting the interviews here on El33tonline, in full, continuing today with part six, and an interview with Naughty Dog’s Judd Simantov (you can read part one, part two, part three, part four and part five at your leisure).

Judd Simantov is the Art Technical Lead at Naughty Dog Inc., having moved from South Africa in October 2004 at the age of 22 to use his specific skill sets related to 3D animation, modelling and technical scripting, and to pursue a career in the field of videogames.

Initially, Simantov’s focus was purely on animation and digital visual arts, working on CG movie shorts and animated advertisements, before being offered a job opportunity at Naughty Dog in Los Angeles, California. Feeling frustrated by the lack of opportunity in South Africa to utilise his unique animation technology skills, Simantov took the job at Naughty Dog and is now responsible for the developer’s character and animation pipeline, as well as the development of the technologies driving the animation.

Simantov has held presentations related to his work at Naughty Dog at Game Developers Conference (GDC) events every year from 2007 up to and including 2010 (excluding 2009, to my knowledge), and has helped the team at Naughty Dog create and ship both Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and the recent industry-crushing, multiple award-winning Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.

Simantov also co-created the 3D art plug-in and related website, CGMuscle. To find out what he does in his spare time (when he has it), you should definitely visit Simantov’s personal blog over here, and check out the range of artistic endeavours he busies himself with.

Let’s begin this fascinating and highly inspiring interview with Judd Simantov:

Continue reading The Lost South African Game Developer Interviews Part 6: Judd Simantov.

Last year I wrote an article for videogame industry trade site Gamasutra entitled ‘The South African Game Development Scene: Past Present and Future,’ which attempted to look at the history of game development in South Africa and surmise how an industry may rise and move forward here.

The article was based on interviews conducted with a diverse, influential and talented group of developers both from and based in South Africa, but a lot of the responses were unfortunately not included due to the nature of the piece, so in an effort to share this potential goldmine of knowledge with aspiring game developers and gaming enthusiasts both here and abroad, I decided to start posting the interviews here on El33tonline, in full, continuing today with part four, and an interview with Jacques Krige (you can read part one, part two and part three as the mood takes you).

Jacques Krige (known as ‘Korax’ in the online development community) is the leader of South African game development community SAGameDev, owner of technology company Business Gateway, and founder of Excentrax Games.

As a self-taught programmer, level designer and game developer, Krige cut his teeth programming business applications and began working with level creation tools for a variety of id Software and Raven Software-developed games, as well as programming the NewHexen mod for Raven Software’s Hexen II.

More recently, Krige took over ownership of the South African game development community website, SAGameDev, and has continued work on upgrading the site, while taking an interesting approach to forming his own game development studio, Excentrax Games, by first creating and running a successful internet technology company, Business Gateway, to fund the games he and his studio will create in the future.

Currently, Krige and Excentrax Games are working with Unreal Engine 3 technology (after working with a variety of other technologies, including Microsoft’s XNA) to create their first game as a studio.

Let’s begin the interview:

Continue reading The Lost South African Game Developer Interviews Part 4: Jacques Krige.