Christmas Newsletter We have been far too busy to produce our scheduled November update – so hopefully we can cram all of our latest news into this special Christmas issue. The course is keeping us incredibly busy – but the enthusiasm, dedication and involvement by the students is making it all worthwhile. Anyway, I’ll cut this intro short as I should be getting back to 8-player High-Def Project Gotham Racing!!! Sorry, I mean marking first year assignments Working Lunch TV Coverage We have recently had some fantastic TV coverage – almost 5 minutes on BBC’s ‘Working Lunch’. Rob Pittam came up to Derby and spent an afternoon in our ‘Next Generation Development Suite’. The topic of discussion was the issue of attracting more women into the games industry. Our efforts are already having positive effects on our female application numbers – who we are hoping will join us in September 2006. The item was also aired several times on the local news. Computer Games Programming Course Success The number of UCAS applications is already well up on last year’s figures. Presently we have over 100 applications fighting it out over just 25 available places. This is in spite of our increasing entry requirements and the changes in fee structure as of next year. If the course continues on its present application rate and high calibre of applicants then we may consider running a second cohort. Student Prizes As mentioned above, the standard of work produced by the first year students has been of an exceptionally high standard. This is especially true in the ‘Software Development 1’ module (taught in C#). For their final assignment of the semester, the students must produce a console or GUI based application that plays the popular board game “Pass the Pigs”. The prize for the best student in either category is a shiny new Xbox 360 and a copy of Project Gotham Racing. Gp2x In late November we took delivery of our first batch of Gp2Xs – the follow up to the popular GP32. It is a fantastic dual-ARM linuxbaase handheld machine that is incredibly easy to develop for. This could really be the next homebrew platform of choice. I will make sure I reserve one to play with over Christmas. Xbox 360 Launch News Okay – so the really BIG news is that the ‘7th Generation’ of home consoles is finally upon us. I am sure you don’t need me to tell you that the Xbox 360 launched in the UK on 2nd December. If you want to be playing on one on Christmas Day then it is likely you placed your order back in August – or hope Santa did the same. We have been incredibly fortunate to have Microsoft lend us 4 of their 360 Pod setups for an entire week – these are the promotional setups as seen in games shops across the country. Coupled with the 3 we have already secured for the department – this ensured a fantastic end to the term as reward for all the hard work our students had put in. I think they were all pleasantly surprised when they entered the room for their last practical session of the year to see 7 Xbox 360’s networked in our Next Gen room all connected to High-Def displays: 4 LCDs, a 42” plasma and our 8 foot projector. Throughout the event 8 player Perfect Dark Zero, networked Project Gotham Racing, Kameo, Condemned, King Kong, Quake 4 and even Need for Speed all proved very popular. Project Gotham Racing was the real winner with Microsoft organising a variation on Top Gear’s “Star in a reasonably priced car” with “Student in a ludicrously expensive car”. All records will show that my lap time of 1m05s was the winner of the day – until some of the students ‘begged’ to have additional lap attempts. Congratulations to the winners who received Xbox Live prizes while I walked away with a fantastic ‘theSpore.net’ biro. A huge thank-you to the “Developer Evangelist Academic Team” at Microsoft for arranging the consoles Student working on 360 launch title Kameo We are very proud to have had further television and newspaper coverage recently thanks to one of our Final Year students, David Almond, who has recently completed his year placement at Rare. Having been incredibly lucky to spend time working in their cuttingeddg R&D department, he also moved to the Kameo team – helping the push to meet the 360 launch deadline. Pre-Validation of Computer Games Modelling and Animation (CGMA) Degree The art sister degree to ‘Computer Games Programming’ is scheduled to launch in September 2006 subject to validation. The ‘Computer Games Modelling and Animation’ degree has recently completed an early pre-validation stage and received favourable feedback from the industry reviewers. There is still much to be achieved before its final validation event in March 2006. Once launched, this will also benefit the CGP students as it will allow programmers and artists to work together on joint projects and really get experience of a typical game studio setup. Recruiting New Staff We are also in the process of recruiting another specialist member of staff to the team. The Christmas edition of Edge (out 22nd December) carries the advert for the new post. Any comments /suggestions to games@derby.ac.uk Previous editions are available from our website. John