One of my favorite all time games is finally out on the Wii! Cave Story is now available for 1200 Wii Points on the Wii Ware store.

Cave Story is a retro styled shooter/platformer in the vain of Metroid or Megaman. The keyword is “charming”. Kotaku does a good job of describing what’s so great about Cave Story.

While the inspiration from games such as Metroid and Mega Man is readily evident, Cave Story never feels like a derivative of those classics. Instead, its combination of retro graphics and old-school platforming mechanics feels like more like a refinement, taking elements from those beloved titles and smoothing out the rough edges.

It was originally created as a freeware PC title by Studio Pixel (who is actually one dude, Daisuke Amaya). It has since been ported by Nicalis to the Wii. Everyone should just pick this up, Pixel deserves all the money we can give him.

Now, more pretty art by Pixel!

Wild Pockets Gallery publishing was just released. What’s Wild Pockets? It’s a Web-based 3d game development platform. You can create your game, publish it, and sell it all in one place. Now they just made it easier. To demonstrate, I’ll post a model I just exported into the engine below (you’ll of course need the Wildpockets plugin to view this):

You can see the brain I made for Dr. Laser! The gallery publishing makes it that much easier to publish and show off content. By just clicking the checkbox in the new exporter, wildpockets.com will build you a gallery page and a model viewer for your model.

For the 2010 Global Game Jam my team, R², created “¡Dr. Láser! ¿Adorará Ella un robot?”. You can play it at HERE.

Can you hide your true, cold, robot self? Can you fight the urge to laser all human beings? Can you impress your girlfriend’s parents?

R² Consists of:

• Producer - Nick McClay
• Programmer - Matt Delucas
• Art/ Illustration - Brandon Bittner
• Audio - Bryan Ceberio
• Design/ 3D - Dan Dwire

Special thanks to Wildpockets, especially Ian Volkwein and Alex Smedberg, Christine Barnes, the ETC, and a very special thanks to Grant McClay for the awesome guitar music.

I guess this is the big news Epic has been hyping for the past few weeks. The Unreal 3 engine is now free to license for noncommercial and educational use. Plus, if you want to license for a commercial project, it’s just 99 bucks! This is the latest version of the engine used to make games like Gears of War 2, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and Shadow Complex. Personally, I can’t wait to dig in.

It’s the most recent edit of my demo reel! Available in HD (follow the link below).

YouTube - Dan Dwire Demo Reel v1.2 (HD720).

Overall, I’m really impressed with Youtube’s HD video. It loads pretty fast and it looks like it streams with less horrible artifacting that the old Youtube stuff.

A new video is up in the projects section.

This is a demo video of a game made entirely in Unreal 3’s Kismet system. A start-to-finish tutorial video should follow at some point in the future.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

My first set of Unreal 3 tutorials is live. This set goes over importing custom vehicles into Unreal 3.

I just got my new portfolio site working!
dot com

Check out the projects section for games, contact for my resume and bio, and the tutorials section for different tutorials.