Independant Game Developer book

I’m looking for feedback:

Readers who don’t religiously follow my twitter are likely unaware of the current discussion surrounding a ‘Homebrew/Indie Game Development’ book.

Ever since my first foray into programming with ClickTeam Klik N’ Play back in ‘99, I’ve just stumbled into situations where I’m surrounded by independent game developers. Over the years I’ve grown a great respect for what they do, and admittedly a little jealousy for what some have achieved with dedication (*cough* James Silva *cough*); I was never really that ‘into’ game programming, just programming in general, after all making apps can often be far simpler than creating an entire game with little reward for your hard graft.

I’m thinking its about time to give back a little to those who give so much, and all just for the love of it.

For the past 3 months (give or take) I’ve been spending most of my time researching console development and much of that time was concentrated on finding out as much as humanly possible about Developer Kits (SDK’s, DevKits), which are the cool magical boxes from which awesomeness springs (video games mostly). The difficulty being the sparse information available without a publishing deal and various non disclosure agreements (NDA’s) being signed.

So the book idea is basically a compilation of all the information I’ve gathered, and will continue to gather, about how independant developers can get the tools required to develop games on the Xbox360, Wii, PS3 and so on. Of course, I’d likely want to interview independant publishers who’ve survived and continue to develop indie games.

So what I’m looking for is feedback from people, I’m totally at concept phase now, so I’m taking on board all opinions people have. Please contact me with your comments or suggestions using the forms on this website.

AMD releases socially responsible SDK

GamaSutra reports that AMD has released a toolkit for game developers to develop games which are social-issues oriented. The toolkit, ‘Let the Games Begin: A Toolkit 4 Making Social Issue Games’ proposes to enable game developers games on subjects such as energy consumption, poverty, health, and environment issues.

You can find more about the toolkit at the Games for Change (G4C) website there is also an interactive flash version of the toolkit available.