The 11-person team at Freeverse, Inc. might be small, but the company has scored big with the action arcade game Wingnuts 2: Raina’s Revenge, which won the 2006 Eddy Award for Best Game and was named runner-up for the 2006 Apple Design Awards for Best Mac Game.

While the article is mostly an advertisement piece, it is an interesting read. It’s also nice for a Mac First game developer to get a bit of the spotlight.

ADC: Building WingNuts in Xcode with OpenGL

The article covers the following four game engines:

• Torque Game Engine
• Torque Game Builder
• Unity Game Engine
• PTK Game Engine

The article is a nice overview of the covered game engines, but I was a bit disappointed that it doesn’t cover any of the free or open source alternatives. It does however provide a very nice clean high-level comparison of the engines in a table format.

Pixen features layers, smart palettes, and animation among other things. It is still in Beta as the time of this writing, but feels pretty solid.

I have twenty total issues assigned to this next release, though a large portion of them are of the nice-to-have type. Depending on time, we’ll see how many of them actually make it into the release.

As part of the development going into this release, I’m putting FogBugz through its paces. So far it’s performing very nicely. I’ve been looking for an easy to use bug tracking tool and everyone seems to rave about FogBugz, so I decided it was time to give it a shot. I’ll be sure to let you know if I decide to stick with it.

Some of the cool new features include:

• Ragdoll Physics Wizard
• 1st Person Controller
• Render Textures on Materials
• Full Screen Graphics Effects