Making a Video Game in 48 Hours

Global Game Jam Jan. 30th - Feb. 1st 2009

Reporting live from the journalism building at UGA, in the New Media Suite, with little to no sleep and running on energy drinks! The Athens chapter of GGDA (Georgia Game Developers Association) is participating in the Global Game Jam, put on by the International Game Developers Association. Global Game Jam is a competition for with over 50 participating teams in 23 countries to make a fully functional video game in 48 hours.

The competition started at 5:00 pm yesterday afternoon with our guidelines for our game. We through around about 4 ideas and after about 2 hours, we focused on one awesome game. What's my task, you ask? The music is being composed by yours truly, along with another awesome music and sound engineer, Dan Wentworth.  We spent all night throwing around musical themes and ideas for the different levels for the game and finished 3 themes this afternoon! This is seriously some fun shit I'm doing, can't wait till we can show it off to the world.

The 48 hours ends tomorrow at 5:00 pm (just in time for the Super Bowl:) and we still have a couple more themes and sound effects to work on, so I will keep you updated until then. Until then, check us out streaming live here and click on Athens, GA. Maybe you catch a glimpse of me! Very Big Brother-esque;) 

iTunes Plus Will Offer DRM Free Music

The last Macworld ever was held yesterday and Apple made many announcements about updates with their software, but probably the most exciting news was their iTunes update.

iTunes, which is the world's largest and best-selling music library, has sold over 6 billion songs since it opened in April of 2003. Since then, songs went for .99 cents a piece, but now Apple is introducing new pricing tiers this April: $.69, $.99, and $1.29. It was also announced that most songs will be priced for $.69. 

The next announcement was an iTunes update called iTunes Plus. What does this mean? Brace yourself... DRM FREE MUSIC! Starting today with a partnership including all of the major record labels, Apple will offer 8 million songs DRM free and will be adding 2 million by the end of the quarter, totaling to 10+ million songs that will be DRM free.

The last bit of info will be refreshing to all iPhone users (hehe)! It's been annoying that I can't buy music off on iTunes on my iPhone unless I am connected to an area WIFI because most of the time I am on the Edge network. No fancy 3G for me:( But not anymore! Starting today, iPhone and iPod Touch users will be able to preview and download music on iTunes using WIFI and 3G networks.

These are some impressive announcements for iTunes, making it much more appealing to download music legally, but it still bears the question. Are you still going to bootleg your music?