A small victory for Netbeans Game Builder

I scored myself a cool iPod Nano by demoing NetBeans 6.0 Game Builder :)

The story is as follows:

While working on Cotopia I've realized that the tools available to game developers are pretty limited in the Mobile Java area. There were some attempts at Game API support in an older Nokia toolset, but overall the tools were either pretty crappy or didn't integrate with MIDP API easily enough.

In the beautiful world of open source there was nothing more natural than to write a tool for myself - a NetBeans Mobility Pack plugin called "Game Builder". It is part of NetBeans 6.0 Beta 1 which you can download from here:

http://www.netbeans.org/community/releases/60/index.html

and here are some screen-shots of how the tool works:

http://wiki.netbeans.info/wiki/view/CreatingJavaMEGamesWithGameBuilder

Local Sydney JUG (Java User Group) had a "Lightning Talks" event during which around a dozen speakers had 5 minutes to talk about a Java related subject, then audience voted for their favorite talk. There aew some pretty cool prizes available to the top 3 speakers (some donated by another cool open source company - Atlassian, some by JetBrains, and some usual give-away stuff from Sun). The main prize (in my eyes) was Apple TV, then there were 3 IntelliJ Idea licenses, and iPod Nano.

I didn't get the first place - that was taken by a presented who (i swear) must be a stand-up comedian :) and he without hesitation chose the Apple TV. I got 2nd place (must work on being more funny dammit) and I chose the iPod, I did think about the Idea licenses for a bit but NetBeans 6.0 is just getting so good that I probably wouldn't make much use of them.

It is my hope that soon I'll be able to use Game Builder to create a bigger and better multiplayer game (RPG style) for Cotopia and take our community to the next level.