Energize IT - June 16, 2007

TOJam was proud to be part of Energize IT - Microsoft's free, yearly IT geek pump-up. The year, they had a special GameCamp / XNA afternoon. MS was looking for members of the community to speak about their experience with XNA during this portion. Since a few teams chose to use XNA for their TOJam games, we had all the members Microsoft wanted! Huge thanks to Mark Zielinski, who single handedly organized the entire GameCamp. Thanks Mark!

In total, 5 TOJam teams presented their games. The presentations lasted 10 minutes each. The teams demoed their games briefly, and highlighted the C# / XNA code that made it all possible. There were roughly 200 people in the room, all angry.

Rob Loach spoke first about his experience creating TOBam. Supporting 4 controllers, loading in a huge 2048 x 2048 background texture, and increasing the number of planes posed no problems. In fact, Rob had a harder time with the laptop/projector connection than he ever did with XNA :)

Up next was TOJam organizer Rob Segal who presented Benny Hinn's Bible Blast For Cash. While the game uses Torque Game Builder, GarageGames is creating TorqueX for XBOX 360 games. TorqueX is essentially an easy scripting language powered by C# and XNA underneath the hood. Rob focussed on the power of the TGB design environment. The ease in which he modified the levels was impressive. Rob stressed that his game was not an indictment of religion - just the man.

Energize IT cont.

Fluid games (Daniel Piacampo, Mark Cautillo) gave a smooooth talk about their game Emergency Response Team. You should see these two present, it's like "Coding with the Stars". They made things look so easy, I'm thinking about abandoning VB6.

Team Adrenaline (Adrian Ma, Jeffrey Ma) proved HillBilly's are always a good idea with Tomorrah's Grub. Jeffrey mentioned that before the event, he had only ever used Java. Despite this, he found C# XNA was easy to learn. Jeff wins the supra ultra genius award. The team talked about the AI that empowered the enemy farmers, the integration of the physics engine, and a *bonus* particle engine added JUST for the presentation. While the particle engine crashed at just the wrong time, they had a screenshot proving just how good things would have looked.

The last TOJam presentation was by Team Procrastination (Ahad Habibulla, Andre Martelli, Darren O'Shea) and their mighty Mohawk Warrior (game page still being created). These guys have a charming, funny, laid-back style - and you just want to hug Ahad. Team Procrastination brought an XBOX360 to the Jam, and had their game working on it. The drawback is they also brought "Gears of War". End result? They only spent 8 hours (rather than 3 days) on their game. Given the fact the game is actually playable, that's unbelievable.

HUGE THANKS to all the teams that presented at Energize IT. You make us WEEP WITH PRIDE!