Student Explorer Grant for games - up to S$50,000 funding

MIT has a call for a proposal out. Details as follows:

Turn your ideas into a business venture!

Presented by the SMART Innovation Centre

Do you have an exciting game or web application? Do you want to be an entrepreneur? The Explorer Grant will assist individual students or groups of students explore further development and commercialization of innovative games and web applications originated by them. The Explorer Grant will provide up to S$50,000 in funding to develop commercial prototypes, evaluate go-to-market strategies so that your game or web application can be licensed to an existing company or form the basis of a start-up company.

The Explorer Grant recipients will also be provided with business expertise, guidance on intellectual property, and networking opportunities with the Singapore and international venture capital community.

Important Dates

• 14 September 2009: Grant submission opens
• 30 October 2009: Grant closes, 5pm (Singapore time)
• 30 January 2010: Award Grant

Eligibility
Full time undergraduate or graduate students at:

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Nanyang Technological University
• National University of Singapore
• Singapore Management University
• Nanyang Polytechnic
• Ngee Ann Polytechnic
• Republic Polytechnic
• Singapore Polytechnic
• Temasek Polytechnic
• Other Singapore institutes and recent graduates can be considered

You must identify a faculty member at your institute to act as a Faculty Mentor.

You can work in student teams or individuals. If working as a team, a team leader must be identified. Teams from multiple institutes/universities can be formed.

Submission Process
The proposal must be submitted electronically to explorergrants@smart.mit.edu by 30th October, 2009, 5pm, Singapore time.

Grant application form is available at http://web.mit.edu/smart/explorer

For inquiries about the grant program, contact Howard Califano at howard.califano@smart.mit.edu or visit our website at http://web.mit.edu/smart/innovationcentre for more information.

QA Tester Positions Open at MIT Gambit Game Lab

MIT Gambit Game Lab is looking for game testers, with goodies to boot! Let me know if you're involved and you might even get CCA points for it!

The Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab is a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the government of Singapore.

Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab is inviting students to be Quality Assurance testers for their games. These testing sessions would help expose students to the development processes of the game industry, and give them valuable feedback on how to improve their games. All students selected for the sessions will receive tokens of appreciation, which include movie tickets and other vouchers.

Students can register for the game testing sessions at http://tiny.cc/gambitplaytesting.

DIT GD Graduate's work post-mortem on Game Developer Magazine's Career Guide

If you have time, take a look at

http://gamedeveloper.texterity.com/gamedeveloper/2009fall/

Game Developer Magazine's annual Career Guide has featured Law Kok Chung's teams' Akrasia, the game made during his attachment at MIT-Gambit labs in Boston, USA. See page 22 onwards.

You can download a copy for offline reading as well.

Achievements Unlocked!

Just yesterday during my XNA Game Studio class, a student asked me if we could include achievements in his Xbox 360 XNA game... yes, you know what he was thinking... 2 million gazillion gamer points!

Unfortunately, no. That's not possible with community games... yet. :)

That brought back fond memories of a spoof of metagaming late 2008.

So, you wanna be a Game Designer?

Read this article on what it takes to become a game designer in the real world.

Article: Making a Better Community Game

Xbox LIVE Community Games are a great place for budding game developers to show their talents, but very often, their games fall short in sales.

Ryan Langley's article on how to make our games better is a must read for XNA developers.

How to draw Transparent Objects?

Someone asked me recently how to draw transparent 3D Objects in XNA.

Shawn Hargreaves has a good blog entry that describes the different approaches you can take, and the steps to do so in XNA.