The winners of the uDevGame 2002 Mac game development contest were announced last night in an awards ceremony broadcast live on The Gamesome Mac, the weekly Mac gaming radio show.

Carlos Camacho, editor-in-chief of iDevGames (which sponsors the uDevGame contest), joined Gamesome Mac hosts Sean Smith and Omaha sternberg in announcing the winners and runners-up:

Best Sound and Music
Raptor
Black Shades (runner-up)

Best Polish
The Belt
AstroSquid (runner-up)

Best Originality
Kiki the Nanobot
Black Cube (runner-up)

Best Graphics
Kiki the Nanobot
Headache! (runner-up)

Best Gameplay
MAFFia
Galder (runner-up)

Best Overall Game
Kiki the Nanobot
The Belt (runner-up)

Games, source code, developer post-mortem reports, and complete credits are all available at iDevGames.com, and an archive of the uDevGame 2002 awards broadcast will be available at The Gamesome Mac's web page.

uDevGame 2002

iDevGames (add to watch list)

After another successful year, Mac gaming websource iDevGames has wrapped up the second annual uDevGame contest. The contest, designed to encourage and showcase game programming on the Mac, rewards individuals who can throw together a home-made game of any type in two months. Once the games are completed, each entry is made available for download, where members of the public can cast their vote and vote for individual entries based on several characteristics. At the end of the judging period, votes are tabulated, and the winning entries are awarded prizes donated by prominent individuals or companies in the Mac gaming industry.

This year the contest saw forty games entered into competition, from simple card and puzzle games to elaborate 3D environment games and first person shooters. iDevGames editor-in-chief Carlos Camacho, along with radio personalities Sean Smith and Omaha Sternberg, announced the winners Monday night on the weekly internet radio show The Gamesome Mac.
In an effort to honour the many designers, programmers, graphics gurus and sound engineers who poured their blood, sweat, and tears into this year’s uDevGame contest, Inside Mac Games news reporters Mike Apps, Jean-Luc Dinsdale and Galen Wiley have taken on the task of plunging deep into all of the forty entries, emerging with a hand-picked list of each of their favorite three.

IMG's uDevGame Picks of the Litter

Click to enlarge

Coderus Ltd, best known to Mac gamers for their DirectX API porting product MacDX (used in games like WipeOut 2097 and KickOff 2002), has recently announced an alliance with MicroAPL Ltd that will help in making porting DirectX code over to the Mac even easier.

The focus of the alliance concerns source code containing any 80x86 assembler code. Simply put, developers can utilize MicroAPL's PortAsm/86 product to automatically translate and rewrite 80x86 assembler code in native PowerPC assembler code. As noted in the press release, "PortAsm's glue mechanism makes it easy to switch between functions written in assembler and C."

Coderus's CEO Mark Thomas had these words:

Since we released MacDX, porting of titles has become a lot easier, but there are always problematic areas which can delay a project. One such area is optimized assembly function calls. Presently most developers have to rewrite these functions by hand, which can be complex and time consuming. We are very happy to be working with MicroAPL to make their PortAsm product available to do this work automatically.

Coderus - MacDX

MicroAPL

Virtual Programming (add to watch list)

WipeOut 2097 (add to watch list)

Click to enlarge

Gamespot recently posted some information on the upcoming free expansions to Bioware's 3D RPG, Neverwinter Nights. For those unfamiliar with the game, Neverwinter Nights is Bioware's latest Dungeons and Dragons based RPG that features a brand new game engine and powerful module creation tools. Gamespot recently got a chance to talk to some of the folks at Bioware about these two upcoming expansions in two separate interviews. The first expansion, entitled Shadows of Undrentide, is being co-produced by Floodgate.

Here’s a snippet from the first interview:

GS: What does the title "Shadows of Undrentide" refer to?

Rick Ernst: In the Forgotten Realms there was once a nation of powerful wizards called Netheril. So great was Netherese magic that they lived in massive cities that would float through the air. Unchecked ambition destroyed their civilization and sent their cities crashing into the ground (doesn't it always?). Generations later the ruined cities are still filled with powerful magics and fell beasts. Undrentide is one of these cities.

Here’s a snippet from the second interview:

GameSpot: We weren't surprised by your announcement of the Shadows of Undrentide expansion for Neverwinter Nights. But we're a bit confused about why you would announce another, unnamed expansion at the same time. Can you enlighten us?

Ray Muzyka: Like our publisher Infogrames, at BioWare we have long-term plans to support our Neverwinter fan community with the BioWare Live/Community Team, and the two expansion packs we've announced are part of this plan. The first expansion pack is being developed in collaboration with another developer (FloodGate), and we have also been working on an expansion pack that is in development solely at BioWare, planned for release months after the FloodGate expansion. We wanted to let our fans know about both expansions at the same time because the features of both are very cool. We're excited about both expansions, and we wanted to let our fans know about the long-term plans for the franchise.

GS: So, how come you don't have a name for the project yet? What are you calling it internally?

Greg Zeschuk: We do have some ideas for names of our upcoming expansion, but the reason we haven't disclosed anything yet on the name is we have yet to settle on one. We have a very tricky name for the internal expansion pack--for now, we're calling it XP2! We like it because it sounds high-tech and mysterious.

First Neverwinter Nights Expansion

Second Neverwinter Nights Expansion

BioWare (add to watch list)

MacSoft (add to watch list)

Neverwinter Nights (add to watch list)

Buy Neverwinter Nights

Search for other Mac games news stories or browse our Mac Games News Archive.