Düsseldorf, 07.12.2011

Among the happy winners: PLANET-E., a real time strategy video game concept about the world’s struggle for energy from takomat. PLANET-E. will receive €40,000 ($53,300) for “connectional development”.

TAKOMAT’s CEO Guido Doublet: “Were are happy and will turn the grant into a competitive game design to attract investors and publishers.”
TAKOMAT’s CEO and creative director Daniel Schwarz adds: “We  do believe in video games that reflect reality, because the players’ action will reflect reality in the game and in real life. And we do believe in gamers that first save a virtual world before saving our real world.”

Cologne and Munich, Good policy and good games – all going together well.
The Bavarian State Government is connecting to the people of Bavaria by using an online video game for communication of the government’s core policy principles. To make policy tangible and playable, the Bavarian State Government assigns TAKOMAT to develop the online video game for 1st half 2012.

TAKOMAT is happy to announce the development start of MTA-2012, a new generation serious-game for recruiting Medical Technicians (MTA) for todays gaming young generation.

The work of a Medical Technicians (MTA) is a pre-condition for a working health system. From risk-detection in medical prevention to technical diagnosis, MTAs are irreplaceable modules. We urgently need more MTAs! So, recruiting among youngsters is the challenge! But how can teenagers decide whether they are talented and motivated for these responsible and challenging appeal? By MTA-2012, an online-game that is a virtual traineeship for tomorrows MTA. This idea of exploiting video games for recruiting among the the generation video games, persuaded the German Association of Medical Technical Assistants(DVTA) to commission TAKOMAT for the development of MTA-2012 for launch in mid 2012.

Daniel Schwarz (Managing takomat) held on 30.9.2011 for the series of events "mediaeducation of the future (Bimz)" of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT, a workshop on takomat's award-winning design of good games. This two day event (September 29 to 30) in Erfurt on IMDT the "Teaching and Learning with digital games" is. In a workshop withteachers the power play was presented for instruction. In a lecture presented results fromtakomat Daniel Schwarz's research and development and the design and production process oftakomat's learning games before.

Further reading:
www.idmt.fraunhofer.de/de/veranstaltungen/workshop_bimz.html

PHENOME is our middleware for innovative real-time 3D-character animation in games. It is a real-time synthesizer for emotional character behaviour including face and body animations.

Game Developers who use the VISION ENGINE by HAVOK can now let their game characters talk, look, act and show emotions with facial expressions and body language in real-time with PHENOME.

For the game experience PHENOME offers a better fusion of storytelling and interactivity while reducing costs and time in the production and development process.

Main Features of PHENOME integrated in the VISION ENGINE:

• Facial expression mixer and sequencer
• Semi-automatic lip-sync generation
• Automatic gaze animation(eyes, head)
• TTS engine interface(example cerevoice TTS engine) for animation(e.g. lip-sync) for text to animation
• Sound engine interface(the examples use the Vision Engine sound Plug-in) for animation
• Installing the phenome SDK, compiling and running the first example within 6 minutes
• Many examples provided