IGDA Monthly Meetup for November ‘09 Report

(Written by Caroline Dy, reposted from here.)

IGDA Manila’s first monthly meetup last night at Mag:Net High Street was, in my opinion, a big success. We had around 20 attendees coming from Kuju, Gameloft, Boomzap, and Anino Entertainment, as well as freelancers, game enthusiasts and hobbyist developers. A big shout out to Mr. Sony Valdez who came all the way from Baguio just to attend the meetup (Shame on you guys who live much closer and didn’t attend! j/k, please attend next month!)

Julius Cebreros, our speaker of the night, gave a very entertaining postmortem on the game he created for the Biomodd project. For those of you unfamiliar with Biomodd, here’s the description of the project from their site (alternatively, just click on the link):

Biomodd is an interactive and collaborative art project that integrates nature and technology. One of aims of the project is to create an art installation in which different forms of plant life coexist with a fully functioning computer system. This system is built almost entirely from recycled computers, and plant growth is stimulated by the excess heat of the working electronics. Visitors can interact with the art installation by playing a multiplayer computer game that runs on this hybrid system.

I can tell you all about his presentation as best as I can remember it, but upon further research, I’ve discovered that the game development process was pretty heavily documented on their site. You can read it at http://www.biomodd.net/game-development-subteam-wiki where it will be better explained. What I personally found most interesting about the game itself is it’s integration to Twitter. According to their blog, the game “will tweet about the people who logged in to play the game and also their game progress”. It will also recognize key words in @ mentions that can affect the game world. I find the ability to control a game remotely via Twitter to be highly entertaining, mostly because of the potential massive damage I can render to the game world/the ability to fuck up someone else’s gaming experience in the comfort of my living room.

The Twitter integration also ties in nicely with the objectives of the project of making it community/cooperation based. (OT: I am beginning to wonder if the BangonPinoy hashtag project, had it been tied to a game, would be more fun and fulfilling for Tweeters/Tweeple/Twitterers/whatever.) The Twitter account of the Biomodd game is, apparently, still active as I write this. You can check and follow the account at http://twitter.com/maria_makiling.

For those of you who’ve missed last night’s postmortem, Julius has an online version of his talk at his blog.

Next month, IGDA Manila Chairguy Ryan Sumo will be talking about life as a freelance game developer and Chester Ocampo will be sharing with us some insights to his creative process (announcing it now so he can’t back out) so don’t miss it!

P.S. Sorry for the lack of pictures of the actual event, I forgot to bring my camera.