The team's ongoing research led to the creation of a spin-off company called MindHabits. The company's Trainer game recently won Telefilm Canada�s Great Canadian Video Game Competition. The distinction has earned the company $800,000 from Telefilm to be matched with private funding for a total of $1.3 million to support the commercialization of the game. The resulting product is scheduled for release this month and is available through the company�s website, www.mindhabits.com.

Do you teach Canadian History or want to learn more about it? If so you'll want to have a look at HistoriCanada, a new serious game based on the award-winning, best-seller Sid Meier's Civilization III.

Gamers can play as either the English, French, Ojibwe, Huron, Mohawk, Algonquin, Montagnais, Mi'kmaq or Abenaki. The first episode focuses on the years between 1525 and 1763 and two more episodes are expected to be released in the coming months, taking players to the year 1896, through Confederation and the expansion to the West.

While players will have the option to rewrite history and take the country in a new direction, the game developers say that understanding the real history will enable players to be more successful. Historical resources including the Canadian Encyclopedia are built into the software. For more information click here.

The Future Play conference focuses on three main themes. The first theme, future game development, addresses academic research and emerging industry trends in the area of game technology and game design. The second theme, future game impacts and applications, includes academic research and emerging industry trends focused on designing games for learning, for gender, for serious purposes, and to impact society. Finally, the third theme, future game talent, is designed to provide a number of industry and academic perspectives on the knowledge, skills, and attitude it takes to excel in the games industry. For more info click here.

Workshop Overview:
Serious Games is a moniker that is applied to a variety of interactive experiences that focus on factual places, events and things. These games range from simple video based learning products to fully player-immersed simulators. What the entertainment gaming market has done is lower the cost of entry for a variety of game genres (First-person perspective, Real-time strategy, Massively Multiplayer, Vehicle Simulations, etc.) to enter the learning and training sector.

Featuring both Alberta-based and outside Alberta pioneers in this burgeoning sector of skills training, this important workshop will bring together those who are seeking the solutions that Serious Games can bring to their organization, and those who are capable of developing those solutions.

Our goal is to bring together government representatives, client industry representatives, research institutions and solution providers. This workshop will feature presentations from 3 companies who are currently able to share examples of serious games being used today by various industries in Canada and the United States.

For more details visit http://www.digitalalberta.com/workshops/seriousgames/

So you want to put together a serious game, you are on a budget, and the skills and expertise needed to harness a 3D engine are out of reach, now what?

We'll if what you're doing doesn't require a true 3D environment and could be implemented quite nicely in 2D, given a bit of thought, then Flash might just be what you're looking for.

Now a lot of you out there now about Flash, it's been around for quite a while now. But what a lot of you out there may not realize, is that Flash has evolved considerably over the past 10 years, and goes far beyond the animated banners and annoying web page introductions of yesteryear.

In fact, Flash can be used to build some pretty advanced online applications and games at this stage in the game, and with the release of Flex 2 and the coming release of Flash 9, things will only continue to get better.

So what can Flash 8 do for you and your game? We'll I'm here to share a bit of the insight and experience that I have gained over the past 8 years that I have spent working with Flash. I hope you find the discussion that follows both interesting and informative.

OOP (Object Oriented Programming)

Flash and it's underlying scripting language ActionScript has been capable of supporting object oriented programming for a while now.

So what, you may remark. Well if you are not familiar with the realm of programming, this way of doing things can save time, reduce complexity, permit collaboration and enable you to update,expand and improve your applications/games with a minimum of frustration and agony, if done appropriately.

One of the big deals of adopting this approach for you Flash based games, are that all the code gets placed in external files, that are easy to locate and update.

One of the nightmares that can happen on larger scale Flash projects is having to deal with code that in spread out just about anywhere and everywhere in a game or app.

The power of OOP really starts to pay off on larger scale applications and games, so you'll want to give it serious consideration.

External Content

Flash allows you to bring in all sorts of interesting external content at run time including swfs, jpgs, gifs, pngs, mp3s, xml and video. One of the benefits of this is that file sizes can be kept smaller and that content can be easy updated or changed by people who may not necessary have much skill or knowledge with Flash.

Sockets and Networking/Media Abilities

Sockets permit Flash to retain a continuous and open connection to a server. With normal HTTP requests, you make a connection to the web server, send or request the info you want and then more less hang up right away. With sockets, the connection can remain open, permitting two way communication of data back and forth. If you're considering multilayer games, then sockets are going to be of interest to you. You'll also want to have a look at Flash Media Server and an interesting open source project called Red 5.

XML

XML is a way of structuring and describing information and shows up just about everywhere nowadays. XML is a great structure for getting info into and out of Flash. Flash is very proficient with working with XML and will continue to get even better with dealing with XML in version 9.

Audio

What's a game without sound? We'll Flash has you covered. Although you can work with wav and aif files, mp3 is really where things are at with regards to Flash audio. Audio can be downloaded or streamed for play back and the release of Flash 9 will only continue to improve on Flash's impressive sound abilities.

Rapid Prototyping

If you need to put together a prototype, and time is of the essences, you'll be hard pressed to find and easier and more cost effective tool than Flash to make it happen.

Large Community

There is a global Flash community out there that consists of tens if not hundreds of thousands of followers. What this means for you and your game is that if you need to seek out help and expertise for putting together you game, you will most likely find it. One thing to keep in mind is that the experience and skill varies greatly across this community, so do your homework, ask questions and make sure you find the right person(s) for the job.

Inexpensive

Once you've purchased the Flash IDE, you're pretty much good to go. If you are really into audio or video, you'll probably have some pretty serious tools that specialize it these areas, but aside from this, you have pretty much everything you need tool wise to build a game.

Wide Reach

Flash has been around for over 10 years now. We are now on version 8 and version 9 won't be long. Flash has the highest penetration rate for a plug-in on the Internet. What this means is that the vast majority of computers out there in the world are already Flash capable, so your going to get pretty good reach for you online games.

Video

Flash's video capabilities keep getting better and better with each new release. Flash can deal with quite a variety of video formats both internally and externally. Flash Video or FLV format is Flash's new favorite format for working with video, and with the release of Flash 8, Flash now supports alpha video channels, cue points and a host of other new features and components enabling some new and very exciting possibilities.

Web/Downloadable Games

Flash is probably the dominant platform for online casual games, but you might be surprised that you can also publish standalone applications for PC, Mac and Linux, allowing for the possibility of downloadable games too.

Animation

Flash began it's life as a killer animation tool for online content. If animation and graphics are important to your game, than Flash won't let you down.

Collision Detection

Determining when things collide is an important task in many games. Flash native ability to detect collisions using hitTest is ok, and there are quite a few clever developers out there who have found even better ways to make this happen.

Physics

Although most game engines have some sort of built in physics engine, you will find that Flash does not. Not to let this news rain on our parade, if you have access to a decent programmer, this can be overcome. There have also been attempts to put together physics engines specifically for Flash, one of the most prominent right now is http://flashfisix.com/.

3D

Although Flash was not originally designed to do real-time 3D, that never seems to stop the clever masses of Flash developers out there. Check out http://www.papervision3d.org/ for a little inspiration. Perhaps we'll be seeing more 3D support in future versions of Flash.

Summary

The bottom line is that if you are looking for a very cost effective way to get a Serious Game built, and you don't require 3D to get it done, Flash might just be what the doctor ordered.

Alice teaches kids programming concepts and methodology via programming interactive 3D graphics. Another neat possibility is a product that used to be called KPL or Kids Programming Language. The product is now called Phrogram.

KPL/Phrogram makes it easy for kids to learn computer programming. Phrogram makes it fun, too, by making it especially easy to program computer games, with cool graphics and sound. Phrogram is not just for games , it can be used for teaching many different subjects. Phrogram's emphasis on games is based on the belief that learning is best when learning is fun.

Lots of other options exist too, including Flash/ActionScript, Java, C# and VB. I think the options above have taken into account a very important truth whoever, if you can make programming fun, kids will want to learn about it.

Kids Programming Language
Phrogram
Alice