#stirfired

[willxia1]

Lifting our way into the weekend, HK Style . ========================= @KowloonCafe.Com.Au @SydneyChinatown E012 XO Sauce with Pork Chop Stir Fried Instant Noodles ========================= . . #NoodleLifting #LiftingNoodles #Weekend #HKStyle #ChinatownSydney #SydneyChinatown #Chinatown #ILoveSydney #OishiiBoys . . . . . . . . . . #XOSauce #XO #PorkChop #Pork #Chop #StirFired #InstantNoodles #InstantNoodle #Noodles (at Kowloon, Hong Kong) https://www.instagram.com/p/B5MtauTFZew/?igshid=1hhf2tqt1zofh

[kratobb]

Should not have but no choices #breakfast #streetfood #thaifood #foodporn #foodie #garlicpork #stirfired #veggie #covid_19 #omicronvariant #socialdistancing #snowbeach #cabbage #yum (at Bangkok Thailand) https://www.instagram.com/p/CYQIEetvbCm/?utm_medium=tumblr

[decadentmiraclecomputer]

Simple but good เนื้อวากิวนุ่มๆ เส้นพาสต้าเหนียวหนุบ #Delicious #Beef #Pasta #Garlic #StirFired (at Copper Buffet) https://www.instagram.com/p/Buv4G25hMEn/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=t5zye179tpi6

[risachantag]

Sorry for this life-stuff post being so late in coming, I was going to write about it early in the year, but it just didn’t seem like the time when Covid 19 hit. So mid last year, Stirfire Studios shut down. I’d worked there as lead artist, then creative director for 7 years. It was a small, close-knit team and I owe them so much for putting their trust in me as an artist. I’m super proud of the games we made together, and just gutted with how things fell apart. Surviving as an indie dev team is just so much harder in the current environment.

Early this year, the liquidation went ahead. It’s been good to have some closure. The good news is I was able to get ownership of the games that were my original IP. 

So almost eight years since signing over the rights to Freedom Fall... I actually own it again, which feels bizarre but good! I also now own Symphony of the Machine on Steam (though not on PS4, because *complicated Sony things*). I also have the rights to two more games that were my concepts but never finished, would love to do things with those one day. =)

Right now I’m balancing freelance work (games, illustration, graphic design), my online store and just giving myself some time to heal and figure out what’s next. I still love making games and have a couple of projects on the go.

The rest of the team’s doing okay, employed elsewhere and mostly still in roles related to game dev or teaching, which is great to see. John Robertson/Robbotron has ownership of The Dark Room, which is just as it should be (he’s also doing Twitch streaming these days, in case you’d ever like to be yelled at by Mr Dark Room in person).

[yamashitarules]

[lady-of-lyon]

Stirfry! Starfry! Stirfire!

One pretty cool alien

[caribbeanfooddiary]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Caribbean Cooking (@caribbean_cooking)

Quick and easy meal, Stir Fry Shrimp😍 #foodie #cooking #foodphotography #foodie #fooddaily #foodstagram #cookbook #cookingporn #cookingfoodporn #shrimp #rice #avacodo #stirfired #stiredfriedshrimp #yummy #notcaribbeanbutitssomethingtasty https://www.instagram.com/p/BtW7LMtBo9z/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=xjty0avkgujz

[jasonnally]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhc6iWcu52Q) Gameplay Preview for the NEW PlayStation VR Game Symphony Of The Machine by Stirfire Studios OUT NOW. Please enjoy my Gameplay Preview here on Nalyo Gaming  Please let me know what you think in the comment section below the video and click those LIKE & SUBSCRIBE buttons if you really liked the game or video.. Thanks for your support. 

[bagogames]

Symphony of the Machine Review - Under the Weather

http://www.bagogames.com/symphony-machine-review-weather/

[decadentmiraclecomputer]

กลางวันนี้เรากินข้าวกล่อง #Throwback #LunchBox #Foodstall​ #Foodporn #StirFired #CrispyPork #Basil #Spicy

[risachantag]

Hi peeps~ sorry it’s been a while since I’ve been updating regularly. These last couple of months have been full of major life things, like moving house and getting ready to ship a game! I’ve been working with Stirfire Studios to get our VR game, Symphony of the Machine all ready for release. It’s a relaxing puzzle game where you set up laser puzzles to change the weather and bring the land back to life. Releasing on 25th of April... just a few days to go!

Oh! Also, next weekend I’ll be in Sydney for GX with some of the Stirfire Team showing the game, so do come and say hi if you’re there!

[yamashitarules]

[swancon]

Guest Getsuyobi: Marianne de Pierres (Doomcon - Swancon 37 - Swancon 2012)

Author (1961 - present)

Marianne de Pierres is an Australian science fiction author. Born in Western Australia, she did her undergraduate studies at Curtin University in Perth and later studied a Postgraduate Certificate of Arts in Writing, Editing and Publishing at the University of Queensland. In 2018 she will complet her PhD in creative Writing from the University of Queensland. 

She has been actively involved in promoting Speculative Fiction in Australia and is the co-founder of the Vision Writers Group, and ROR – wRiters on the Rise, a critiquing group for professional writers. She was also involved in the early planning stage of Clarion South.

The greater body of her work has seen publication in the UK and Australia. In 2004, her series of novels with the protagonist Parrish Plessis, a postapocalyptic bodyguard and bounty hunter, was published in the United Kingdom through Orbit Books and in 2005 in the United States through Roc Books. The novels in this series include Nylon Angel, Code Noir, and Crash Deluxe and have been adapted into a role-playing game. Her second series, Sentients of Orion comprises four books: Dark Space, Chaos Space, Mirror Space and Transformation Space, published in the United Kingdom through Orbit Books. Transformation Space won an Aurealis Award for Best SF novel in 2011. 

In 2008 de Pierres began writing humorous crime under the pseudonym Marianne Delacourt. To date there are four novel novels in the Tara Sharp series: Sharp Shooter, Sharp Turn, Too Sharp and Sharp Edge. The first novel, Sharp Shooter received a Davitt Award in 2010 for Best Crime novel by an Australian woman.

Her young adult series, Night Creatures (Burn Bright, Angel Arias and Shine Light) was published by Random House, Australia. It featured a collaboration with Australian indie singer, Yunyu, who wrote songs to accompany the release of first two books.

In 2014, Angry Robot Books published her Peacemaker urban fantasy, crime, Western series. The book has since been optioned for game adaptation by Stirfire Studios. (source)

Website

Facebook

Twitter

[gamedadmatt]

I’ve Left Stirfire, so What’s Next?

After working with Stirfire Studios for 4 years, I announced my resignation last week. 2018 has been massively challenging for numerous reasons, and it had a huge impact on my physical and emotional wellbeing. My self confidence took a hit, and my desire to work in games was shot. There was a time that I honestly considered whether I even wanted to work in games anymore, and went and started looking at maybe studying psychology or counselling (my career of choice before I’d got into game development).

That’s why I made the decision to move on, and try something new for a while. Working in games, I’ve been putting money away every pay so that I have something to fall back on while I work by myself (and pay other people from - more on that later). You never know when things might fall apart and you need that safety net to break your fall. For me, it was more a matter of needing to rebuild myself and fashion a future for myself out of this industry, and I couldn’t do that while working for another company that I had little power to change from within.

So I decided 2019 is going to be a fresh start with a clean slate. I’m not leaving the games industry. I’m sticking around, and have a goal: be the change I want to see. And that takes a few forms. Be the sort of developer I’d want to work with. Run the kind of company I’d want to be a part of. Provide the kind of help I wish I had

This year has been an incredibly bad year for game developers, with stories of crunch, studio closures that nobody was prepared for, unpaid hours, and the news that Australian studios were seeing people paid below minimum wage. I can’t change these things for my community (especially not that last point), but I can work and operate in such a way to try and better things for myself and those I work with. And there’s a few ways I want to tackle that.

I’M MAKING A GAME

There’s nothing groundbreaking about going off to make a game, except for the fact that despite everything I’m still making games.

Leaving a games studio to go out and make a game by yourself is kinda like deciding to leave a well armed group of Zombie Apocalypse survivors to make a go of it on your own instead. The outlook isn’t great, really. Games are highly competitive and hit-based and I’m not willing to bank everything on making some groundbreaking title with my first effort straight out of 4 years of employment.

The game idea that I’ve had rattling around in my head for ages now is like this itch that I know I won’t be able to ignore. I really want to get it out and make it a reality. I’m fairly confident it’s a unique concept that should be fun for people to play, and it’s the sort of thing I feel pretty good about being able to make from start to finish mostly by myself.

I’ve already got plans for taking the idea to kickstarter once I have it more fleshed out, and I’m crossing my fingers in the meantime that Western Australia gets some state funding for videogames that I can take advantage of. And then at that point, I will start looking about dragging in other people to work with me on it on a more consistent basis.

As for what the idea is, there’s not much I want to say about it just yet except that once I have something in a prototype form, I’ll start talking about it openly. It is a narrative driven game though - something that I can build on my own, without much emphasis on the art or programming. And no, it’s not going to just be a Twine game. It’s a bit more involved mechanically.

It’s a story about an artificial intelligence that is the only sentient life left on earth. I’ll leave it at that for now!

BUT A GAME NEEDS A STUDIO?

Now, “studio” I use as a loose term here. Right now, it’s only me working on this game, and I intend on keeping it that way until I have some plan on how I am going to reimburse other people for their time. I have savings I can draw from and intend on using to pay people occasionally for very brief stints as contractors or consultants on my project, because that money also needs to be used to pay myself. So that means it’s a limited scope that I have to try and achieve on my own.

Sure, I could go out and start pulling in people and saying “here’s this really cool game idea I have, come work on it with me!” But when I am unable to pay them, what sort of message does that send? It’s massively important to me that skilled people be reimbursed for their time. And as much as I might like the idea, I can’t expect people to live off of a good idea. Even if it might feel good having equal ownership of it.

That’s why I’ve been working on some studio values. I want to from day one be projecting forward the kind of studio I want to be running in future. If I were to somehow find success or the money tomorrow to pay a bunch of staff members, I’d be scrambling to establish these things. So even if I am only working on my own, it’s massively important to make these values known and hold myself to them.

After all, if I can’t hold myself to my values while I am working on my own, why should I ever be able to establish a studio caring for other people? This is one way I can improve things for those directly around me, should I start working with others (and I will, at some stage, even if only temporarily).

And speaking of caring for people…

PRODUCTION CONSULTING

The idea to do Production consulting is something I’ve been building on slowly for quite a while. When I started off with Stirfire, I’d already had some experience in managing a small team when I interned with Scitech WA. In the past 5 years I’ve seen a variety of issues that small game development teams (as in, less than 20 people) can experience. And this is only first hand. Second hand, I’ve seen so many Aussie teams suffer from a lack of production insight in a variety of horrible ways.

Even when they have money, smaller studios often struggle to balance the need for a Producer with operating the way they’ve always operated. It can be difficult for them to justify the cost of getting on a dedicated Producer when they may only be a team of 3-4. But this doesn’t mean that the Production insight isn’t valuable to them at all. They might just not be able to afford it all the time.

That’s where the idea for production consulting comes in. What I love most about being a producer is seeing teams grow and excel together, and working to their strengths as a cooperative. But sometimes all you need to do to get a team even slightly more functional is to show them what they are doing wrong, and teach them how to account for their weaknesses.

So the intent would be to embed into a team for a short period of time, and focus on whatever their goals were. Maybe they want to make sure they aren’t setting unreasonable expectations in a schedule they created. Maybe they are going to Kickstarter and want to sanity check the budget they have created to ensure that it is reasonable from and outside perspective. Or maybe it’s as simple as just ensuring they have a good methodology in place.

This idea is still in the early stages and I’m putting together the materials for it, but you can read the beginnings of my plans here. Right now my working title for the idea is “Burndowns, Not Burnouts” since that’s cute and gets across the idea. But if you or your studio are interested in having a chat, or have a problem you want to see if I can help with, please get in touch with me!

ANYTHING ELSE?

Stuff I hope I get the opportunity to do, but I’m not about to go announcing anything until I know for sure whether or not I’ll get the opportunity. But I am at least intending to get more involved in the Perth game development scene than I have been these past few years while I’ve been entrenched with Stirfire.

I’ve also not forgotten about the card game I was talking about before! But at this stage, it’s more of a side project that I’ll be doing with my partner in our free time. I’d considered making it my big focus, but for as much as I know about game development, there’s a lot I don’t know about making physical card games. There’s the potential of taking it to kickstarter, but I think it’s better placed as a fun little hobby project while I focus on the stuff I’m stronger at.

So there you have it, that’s my plans for the coming year! There’s the potential of picking up some work lecturing or such on the side to make ends meet, but my major priority is working on myself and trying to build something I can be proud of. Expect to hear from me much more often on this blog over the next 12 months!

-Matt

[symbianosgames]

I’m writing this article from the la-la-land of time’s meaninglessness caused by jet-lag, in this case that most extreme of lags caused by hopping to the other side of the world. I was in the antipode to attend GaymerX Australia as one of their “Bosses of Honor”--essentially a guest of honor.

Though my sleep schedule is shot to high hell I don’t regret a second of the long journey or my all too brief time Down Under. All Gaymer X conventions are magical, after all. They’re a place where LGBTQ gamers can come together and be simultaneously nerdy and, well, queer together in a field where we’re often told to choose between one or the other.

Liam Esler and Joshua Meadows brought the GX franchise to Australia just two years ago, but sadly 2017’s was (at least for now) the last one. Citing the cost and strain of running the convention, where everyone from top to bottom is an unpaid volunteer engaged in complex event-management, Esler and Meadows said their emotional goodbyes to several hundred attendees who flocked from all over Australia and New Zealand. But, Esler said forcefully at the opening ceremonies, “this isn’t a funeral, it’s a celebration.” Thus he set the tone for our big gay geeky party, and celebrate we did.

  My main role in the convention was to give its opening keynote. Conscious of the event’s finality, I wanted to give a send-off to the mostly ANZ crowd that would resonate with them. Among them were many local game developers as well as people aspiring to become devs. One of them was an endearing young trans woman, an IT professional from Sydney, for whom this GX Aus was her first time going outside as her true self. What could I say that would stir her spirit and reassure her during these troubled times?

As regular readers of my column know, I’ve taken a keen interest in Australia’s game industry (and hope to take a closer, proper look at New Zealand’s sometime in the next year). It’s a unique scene for how indie-dominated it is. Its very existence gives me hope for the industry’s future. For all its imperfections and all the attendant drama and status-jockeying that accompany any artistic community, there’s something special about it, and I want it to keep going.

I spoke about the importance of gaming as an art form, with an eye towards reassuring this politically-minded audience that game development was not a waste of time in our turbulent age.

Losing GaymerX Aus was a blow to this community, certainly. Many Australian gaming luminaries, indie darlings, and up-and-comers turned out to sponsor the convention, demo there, or just wish GXers well. Though much of what I said felt obvious to me, like any variant on the words “I love you,” they deserve to said loudly and clearly rather than left to lie in the furrows of implication.

There’s a lot I wish I had said, though. Even though I tailored my speech to an Australian audience by peppering it with references to local events, I should’ve gone a step further and spoken about my other hobby-horse: representation of Australian culture in Aussie games. To date there are so many games made in the country that give no hint of their origins, or that tell any of the wild and colorful stories that pockmark the continent.

In 1992, then Prime Minister Paul Keating gave a short, blistering speech to the Australian House of Representatives about what he thunderingly called “that awful cultural cringe… that held us back for nearly a generation.” The phrase--which denotes a certain Australian inferiority complex relative to British and American culture--didn’t originate with him, but he gave it a powerful new spin, casting it as a force that threatened to hold the country in a stagnant, neutral position, forever inward-looking and nostalgic but woefully unprepared for the coming century.

In my many conversations with Australian game developers, the cultural cringe often comes up in discussions about the themes of Aussie games and why so few are self-consciously or proudly Australian. But there is a magic to the “lucky country” that its residents are prone to underestimate. Far from being toxic to international sales, Australian culture and its exotic locales can generate interest far afield.

Certainly the stereotypical paraphernalia of Australia, from the accent to the fauna to its vistas, exercises a powerful grip on foreign imaginations. But more complex matters can find interested audiences abroad as well, I reckon. Contemporary issues in Australia--from immigration, to housing prices, to indigenous rights, to urban sprawl--are broadly relatable, even as they tell a locally unique story.

In the twilight of GaymerX Aus, I’m comforted by the endurance of all the devs there. Giant Ant, Stirfire Studios, League of Geeks, Flat Earth Games, and all the indies great and small who turned out. There are also games coming down the pike that are uniquely Australian, which I covered recently, and others that are already available--like Miss Fisher and the Deathly Maze, which gives us the Melburnian flapper super sleuth in action on iOS.

But it certainly can’t begin and end here. Videogames are uniquely placed to tell moving stories about Australia’s early days as a penal colony, for instance--origins that are often effaced by a collective search for more respectable tale of how the nation came into being. We have the book, Robert Hughes immortal “The Fatal Shore,” but where’s the game that brings it all to life with a vivid story that you’re intimately involved in? This is but one of several rich veins to be mined in the nation’s history.

It’s not all “cringe” to get over, though. For many artists on the continent, there’s an understanding that real success comes with appealing to Europe and America (and for games, perhaps China as well). There’s a similar, equally tragic situation in Canada where artists in every industry know that something considered “too-Canadian” will be a hard sell in those all-important markets. There’s hard won wisdom in the Australian games community that I don’t mean to gainsay with my words. But I entertain a, perhaps, naive hope. If nothing else, it is because I have so much faith in the places I’ve been, and the history I’ve learned, to dazzle, inspire, madden, and move audiences everywhere.

A nation’s art bares its soul. For a country blessed with so robust and unrestrained a gamedev scene, it’s past time for it to let it all hang out.

Katherine Cross is a Ph.D student in sociology who researches anti-social behavior online, and a gaming critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications.