Chris Burke

Earlier today students at the University of Texas showed off their indie projects at the first UT Austin Game Development Showcase. I got a chance to play all the games and spoke with Gendai Games founder and CEO Michael Agustin. Impressions and interview after the jump.

Upon arriving, attendees were set loose to test out any of the nine games the students developed this semester. The titles ranged from Source-based Accidental Assassin, where players are tasked with “accidentally” killing one of three evil scientists by dropping a moose’s head on them or making them really angry, to the side-scrolling shoot-em-up Lambo (yeah, that’s a lamb version of Rambo), to an iPhone game called Wiggles where you navigate your fish through a hook-filled pond by tilting the iPhone and shaking it to wiggle away when you get snagged.

Lambo!

Save for Accidental Assassin, all the games on display were developed using Gendai Games’ upcoming GameSalad platform. The sheer variety of games was impressive, but even more surprising was learning that the size of development teams ranged from only one to three people with little or no programming experience.

GameSalad allows indie developers to skip the coding by doing everything visually. Different sections of the game can be worked on independently and in real-time by dragging and dropping game assets and modifying behaviors and scripts. Completed games can then be published on the iPhone or on the web through GameSalad. Currently, development can only be done on Mac OS X, but a Windows version is already in the works.

Working in GameSalad

Now in Beta, the folks at Gendai Games are still refining the GameSalad platform and the submission process. Speaking to Gendai Games CEO Michael Agustin, I learned about the platform’s current state,

Agustin: “We’re trying to find out what’s the best way to submit games, so we’re using our own games as the beta test. By the time we release it other folks won’t have the same troubles.”

GD: What’s the current status at Gendai regarding investors?

“Games are traditionally funded by publishers, so it’s a slightly different model. What we’re trying to do is create a model in which our customers can support us.”

GD: Will we see you at GDC Austin?

Agustin: “A few of us have applied to speak, and there’s an iPhone game summit so we’ve applied to speak there.”

The University of Texas, host of this development showcase, has historically been reluctant to implement a real game-development curriculum, despite the industry’s strong presence in Texas and the state’s economic incentives for developers. I asked Agustin, a UT alum and one of the instructors for the Game Development class, why schools like UT still don’t offer degrees in game design:

“A lot of it is due to the nature of the University of Texas. So, the mechanisms that allow Guildhall and the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon, as well as USC’s program, usually there’s the case where there’s a system in the program that allows interdisciplinary departments to get funding and to get their own support structure, whereas UT are very set in their traditional departments. We’ve tried the class in the Computer Science department twice and in the Radio-Television-Film department twice. And I think there’s always politics that get involved when people hear ‘Oh hey, Game Design, that has to be mixed with social media or it has to be mixed with interactive media or it has to be mixed with X.’ But ideally what we’d like to see is folks from the game industry getting involved, teaching classes, helping design coursework.”

From what I saw, GameSalad has a lot of potential. Judging by iPhone game sales, there’s already a big market for inexpensive independent games, and once Apple’s approval system becomes smoother it’ll be up to developers to run with it. Ultimately GameSalad may be poised to do for games what YouTube has done for video.