On July 19th, 2010, I attended the June/July GamePub event. This was my first time attending a GameCamp event and what I discovered was that Edmonton has a diverse and talented game development scene. The turn out was good, about 20 people, and the room was filled with a good balance of creative types, coders, professionals, indies and students. I took some time to work the room and find out what some people were working on, and was thrilled to see the presentations by Fluik Entertainment, 3DI, and Ian Stubbington. GameCamp was hosted by Logan Foster from Max Gaming.

I have recently become slightly obsessed with Empire Avenue. This is no secret. I find it's a great way to promote Knaves Online: I get to play a game and promote my own game at the same time, it's win-win.

When Empire Avenue (EA) announced they were launching an API I was excited because it let me play the game in my own way, with my own tools. I set out to build a desktop notifier for EA... In fairly short order I had something good, that could become great. If you play Empire Avenue I urge you to try it out and send me some feedback on what you'd like to see added!

This story starts with a game, and ends with a chocolate bar and an adventure.

First off, the game:

Empire Avenue is a strange and addictive phenomenon. A thousand people and organizations have flocked to the site to start buying and selling shares in each other, and it's still just in beta.

Some web projects are a true nightmare. This wasn't one of them. I am always happy to do a Joomla deployment, so when Blues International Ltd. came to me and wanted a simple redesign with a simple admin interface, I jumped at the chance.

The Blues site requirements were simple, they wanted their site to be blue and black and they wanted it to be easy to navigate. All I needed to do was build a clean interface and deploy the server. It didn't hurt that the project was for one of Edmonton's great summer festivals.