April 2013
1 post
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Intro Video For Sir, You Are Being Hunted →
I cannot wait for this amazing looking game from Jim Rossignol and his team over at Big Robot.
March 2013
16 posts
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Anyone can replace me →
Richard Hofmeier, creator of the IGF 2013 award-winning Cart Life, said in his acceptance speech that with the tools that are available now anyone could replace him. Anyone could make great games.
Then to prove his point he converted his Cart Life booth on the IFG show floor into a booth displaying Porpentine’s Howling Dogs instead, even spray painting over Cart LIfe’s logo.
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Is ethical free-to-play impossible? →
Vlambeer thinks that by refusing to take any more of my money after the first $3, they are occupying a moral high ground that F2P developers have, for the most part, abandoned in pursuit of profit. I think that this is nonsense.
Be sure to read the comments section here as well.
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Fairness, Discovery & Spelunky →
Spelunky, of my favorite games in recent years, is also one of game designer Jon Shafer’s recent favorites. In this great article from his game design blog he sums up why unfairness is one of the keys to Spelunky’s successful design.
In spite of the first impression it gives off as a twitch game, the quality Spelunky rewards most is patience. Take a methodical approach to every...
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Reddit as a truly alternative development system →
Reddit lacks [an] algorithm, but it has communities that are extremely good at tearing apart content and analyzing ideas.
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"Our increasing inability to recommend or warn... →
John Walker writing for Rock Paper Shotgun argues against pre-ordering games.
Times are a-changing. Clearly. But not always in the most logical way. Throughout the 90s it was the case that games reviews appeared on the thinly sliced lifeless corpses of fallen trees, usually about two weeks before the game came out. Now, with the lightning-fast reflexes of the internet, a major AAA blockbuster...
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Mojang Launching Minecraft Realms →
Mojang have announced their plans to start a new subscription-based private server model. They are even toying with the idea of allowing certain mods to run on these servers.
Mods then created with this tool would in theory always work with the game. If that comes to pass, he said, the developers could start hand-picking the most popular mods and add them to Realms for free. The team is also...
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What Exactly is a Steam Box? →
Nice piece from James Plafke on a confusing issue.
The potential seems to be that Valve’s Steam Box won’t be a product but a brand, which doesn’t make it that much different from any other piece of hardware in the PC gaming space.
Wouldn’t Valve be smarter to take a page from Apple and now even Microsoft and build both the software and the hardware for their own device?
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Valve's Business Grew 50% in the last year →
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The Ball is in Gabe's Court →
Xi3’s CEO Jason A. Sullivan sheds some light on one of the reasons behind the growing divide between Valve’s vision of a Steam Box and Xi3’s Piston.
“Contrary to Valve’s vision, Xi3 believes that the way to take this to market today is to do so with a Windows OS at the core, coupled with the ability to not just get to one platform/store for games, but to get access to...
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The Opposite of Fail →
FTL: Faster Than Light continues to be one of my favorite games. Tracy Lien, writing for Polygon, covers the story behind the game. Great read.
In many ways the Kickstarter campaign should have failed. Its developers were unknown. The game had no existing fanbase. It didn’t have fancy graphics or promise a product so enormous that players would need to hook car engines to their computers...
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Why I Hacked Donkey Kong For My Daughter →
I didn’t set out to push a feminist agenda, or try to make a statement. I just wanted to keep that little grin lit up on my daughter’s face every time we sit down to play games together.
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Symbiosis: A Creative Commons Art Book →
Artist Steven Sanders has created a Kickstarter campaign for his Creative Commons source book. Anyone is free to use the world he illustrates in their own work under the terms of the CC license. Very cool stuff and worth your support.
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Consider This a Beta →
Green Throttle, maker of a game controller for Android devices, has quite an ambitious business model.
The company’s got a three-part business model. Step one is to sell the controllers — and it has plans to offer more types of pads than just the initial 360-esque controllers in the long run. Green Throttle has already begun to develop its own first-party games. Finally, and...
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Ian Bogost is Wrong and a Little Right →
Yesterday, games academic, writer and developer Ian Bogost took Polygon to task for changing their review score for Sim City due to launch day server issues. Mincing no words, Bogost told Polygon editor Chris Grant “Your website is shit.”
Patrick Stafford argues that Bogost is both wrong and right, but says Bogost took the wrong approach:
But let’s not just descend into a battle of...
July 2012
3 posts
2 tags
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Jane McGonigal: The game that can give you 10... →
When game designer Jane McGonigal found herself bedridden and suicidal following a severe concussion, she had a fascinating idea for how to get better. She dove into the scientific research and created the healing game, SuperBetter. In this moving talk, McGonigal explains how a game can boost resilience — and promises to add 7.5 minutes to your life.
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