[PIGMI] Tafe games...

[Joel Blackwell]

I visited West Coast Tafe when their previous student game project was 
shown, and I did again this time. So, I thought I'd do another 
micro-review of the event for Pigmi.... albeit a bit late.

This time around the game was called Eclipse. The students got up 
one-by-one and discussed several things about it, and that was fairly 
interesting. Some of the students were great at explaining their project 
(especially their project lead) while others looked as though they were 
going to literally die from stress. So, kinda the same as a Pigmi meet ;)

The game itself was a nice effort. Compared to the previous two games, 
Eclipse was a much more in-depth project. This time around there was 
spell and creature casting, some nicely detailed environments, and some 
really well designed creatures, some of which were incredibly cute! It 
was also nice to see some attention had be paid to sound, which was 
sorely neglected in previous projects. The game had some decent music, 
as well as some nice voice work.

Obviously not everything was perfect- the game was a long way from being 
more than a prototype and extremely rough in a number of areas, but it 
was great seeing the evolution of student game projects at West Coast 
Tafe. I have no doubt next project will be a very interesting thing to 
see. And, I have to hand it to Tanya (and Phil, who I met) for 
organising a bunch of inexperienced students over a five or so month 
period into a game development team. That must always be a challenge.

If you're ever able to attend these events, I highly recommend them. 
They're always encouraging.

-Joel