So I got a magazine in the mail yesterday, gameSTATE. It’s all glossy and shiny, basically your typical Future Publishing mag. (It *is* published by Future).
There was a free subscription card attached, and the only survey questions on it are:
Do you use middleware?
If yes, what do you use?
Are you looking to evaluate any tools and middleware in the next 6 months?
If so, what?
There’s the first clue that something is amiss.
The first ad is for Renderware. Not that surprising, they advertise in any gaming mag, but still, the second clue.
The main article is about how to make sure your game development studio doesn’t go down the tubes, and one suggestion is to make sure games ship on time and on budget. By using something like, oh, the Renderware Studio middleware.
The second article is a “tech overview” of.. Renderware Studio.
The ad after that is for Havok’s Karma physics. Which plugs into.. Renderware Studio.
Now an article on the top 20 industry players. One of them is David Lau-Kee. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to find out which company he’s the president of.
One of the “Ten Commandments of Videogame Design” is Thou Shalt Prototype and Prototype early. Good advice, sure. How do you do it? “Remove your head from the clouds for a moment and consider a middleware solution”.
Now a look at Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, which makes use of Criterion’s popular Renderware.
For an article preparing us for the grand opening of the official gameSTATE forum, the question is pitched “Does middleware mean cloned games or smoother development?”
Then finally, we can look at this actual thread from the forums. I wonder what middleware solution “Konami’s soccer games” and “Vice City” use?
Oh, gameSTATE is also a registered trademark of Criterion Software Ltd.
- SiW
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