As we’ve previously reported, after a significant downturn in the late 2000s the Australian game development scene has begun to rapidly grow into a capable force once more. Major hits such as Cult of the Lamb have proved that the region is more than capable of pushing out excellent games whilst the tax incentives, with over 30% in offsets available to studios with spending of over $500,000 AUD, have also been seen as a major point of support to developers in the region.
The Australian Game Developer Awards have been held since 2002 in their official form, originally by the AGDC (Australian Games Developer Conference) and come courtesy now of the IGEA (Interactive Games and Entertainment Association). The 2022 awards ceremony saw two key wins by mobile developers, that being Kinder World (Lumi Interactive) and The Oregon Trail (Gameloft), a resurrection of the famous original.
Insert lazy Men-at-Work reference here
Kinder World is an interesting beast, a game that lets players care for a house-plant in a virtual space, as well as having them complete daily mental-wellbeing exercises. It focuses on the improvement and maintenance of mental health using virtual tools. The game picked up the Excellence in Serious Games award. Meanwhile, Gameloft received both the Studio of the Year award and Excellence in Ongoing Games for their revival of The Oregon Trail series. Oregon Trail being a famous title which was originally a simulation of life on the American expansion route of the same name, distributed to many American schools in the early days of PC games.
Both of these titles represent different ends of the spectrum in the mobile game market of Australia. On one hand a sedate and even meditative experience, and on the other a game that’s infamous for it’s thrilling but stress-inducing strategic planning. This indicates a healthy development atmosphere, where Australian creators are not restricted to one or two successful genres but have a whole breadth of them which they aim to explore.
Recently, Australian developer League of Geeks proved as much as they finalised their ongoing development of RPG-title Armello, and are now developing a revival of the cult classic strategy game Solium Infernum.
