This year Global Game Jam (GGJ) game development hackathon was held for the 10th time in the world and for the second time in Armenia. GGJ is not a competition, it has no winners. Instead, it encourages open cooperation of participants, experimentation and innovation. It was held on January 26-28, as usual, during the last weekend of January. In Armenia it was held at American University of Armenia. The organizers of GGJ Armenia were Noor Games, AUA EPIC and UITE. This year the registrations were about twice more. As organizers, we were thinking how to make the event more exciting and effective this time. And we came up with several new ideas that we applied to the evet: We have invited experienced and well known specialists of Armenian game development industry to participate in the event as mentors. They had to help the jammers in the stage of game idea brainstorming as well as during the implementation of their ideas. Therefore, we had game designers, artists, 3D modelers and programmers as mentors. We have organized several tech talks right before the event started. This was a new element to stimulate knowledge sharing. Another reason for these talks was that we knew that this year we were having very experienced programmers who were participating in the event for the first time…
Noor Games is proud to be awarded a certificate of tax compliance by the State Revenue Committee of Armenia. As of 28th of March, 2017, we are among the 76 firms that have passed a thorough examination and monitoring by the committee and are declared to meet the highest standards. This initiative by the RA government was launched in the beginning of 2017 and is aimed at further encouraging taxpayers to comply with all the taxation regulations. It involves publicising the information about the companies that have submitted to tax and customs authorities financial reports and data in a timeframe required by law and have had no breaches or liabilities to the state budget. Moreover, the Central Bank of Armenia will apply beneficial conditions for use of banking services for the certified companies. Dedicated to raising the bars in all aspects of our work, we are always looking forward for any opportunity for aiding in building the trust in Armenian companies in the international market. We are convinced that by chasing excellence and paying attention to details regardless of the occupation and activity, local companies will be able to make a huge impact on the reputation of our home country and aid in it’s development. We at Noor Games intend to continue our efforts in building a successful business based…
“Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.” ― Aristotle Why did we train? Have you ever run a hiring cycle and all candidates appeared to have some important skill missing for your position? We have been there too and we are presenting our solution to you. For us at Noor Games learning is a constant process. It is one of the cornerstones of our company philosophy. We were planning to start regular courses for future game developers at some point during the growth of the company. The intent was to pass the knowledge we collected through our experience to the newer generation, so that they could start their careers with a much higher level of expertise than we did years ago. The main reason for that was our desire to contribute to the information technologies sector of Armenia. While these we considered to be just future plans, we were facing a very urgent issue, and the only way of solving it was to start the trainings immediately. That issue was hiring. To satisfy the growing demand of workforce for the projects we were working on we undertook a hiring cycle. For months we interviewed developers of various expertise and backgrounds with the main focus on C++ developers. We realized that the young and motivated did not have the minimum…
Global Game Jam is one of the biggest international hackathons dedicated to the development of digital and non-digital games. The main objective is to create a game on a given topic within 48 hours. The theme is unveiled only on the day of the event. Participants can use any technology. We have learned about Global Game Jam from our friend Ara Shirinyan, who is a game designer in the USA. The idea was very motivating and we have decided to organize a Global Game Jam Hackathon in Armenia. It was a responsible decision because Global Game Jam 2017 was going to be held for the first time in Armenia. So, we have started to look for a place where we could hold this event. Here we came across with the first obstacle. We have done a lot of research and one of the first organizations who has quickly agreed to cooperate and share with us its experience and resources, was Union of Information Technology Enterprises (UITE). Two days before the event, we have found out that we were having problems with internet and heating. Aram Keryan – the operations manager of Entrepreneurship and Product Innovation Center (EPIC) of American University of Armenia (AUA) has kindly agreed to join us as an organizer and provide with comfortable space and all the…
We are one of the pioneers in the world and the first team in Armenia, who has started developing games using Cocos2d-x 3. We have started with Cocos2d-x in 2013 when it was still in 3.0 alpha version. There were no tutorials, no books no forum coverage of the new API and there was no community available for help either. All the resources were from Cocos2d-x 2, the older version of the engine, and after the major revision of the API code snippets usually were not even compiling.
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