Game Theory. Lewis Pulsipher's Blog - How Novice Game Designers can Be Taken Seriously by Publishers and Funders (cautionary advice) How Novice Game Designers can Be Taken Seriously by Publishers and Funders (cautionary advice) The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. “Seven Years and a Million Dollars” orHow Novice Game Designers can Be Taken Seriously by Publishers and Funders(cautionary advice) The blog posts that I've combined and modified here were originally written for aspiring tabletop game designers. I was taken aback at how many people appreciated the advice in the original blogs. S HTML5 Adventure. Be on the lookout!
Wooga has just released a very special creation into the wild as an open source project. That creation is ‘Pocket Island’, a HTML5 game developed by Wooga that is now available for all to download and iterate upon. Piracy Activity vs. Product Features in Digital Games. Game Tycoon»Blog Archive » Debating F2P Monetization. One of the things holding back the evolution of F2P gaming in the West is the understandable discomfort that many Western designers feel about the “aggressive” monetization strategies employed by Asian game developers.
For the purposes of this post, I’m defining “aggressive” as the sale of items that impact gameplay and/or speed up a player’s progress, in addition to other, less controversial premium features like aesthetic items and account personalization. To many developers, the idea of designing a game to be anything other than “fun” is heretical (they may also fear the possibility of offending sensitive players.) Consequently, they either ignore the F2P business model or attempt to create games with relatively tame revenue-generating systems; for example, focusing on the sale of items with aesthetic benefit only, or roping off a portion of the game and hoping enough players voluntarily pay for access.
Developers express concern over pirated games on Android Market. App developers are concerned that Google is being too lax in its regulation of the Android Market, where apps are made available for download to the millions of Android phones now in use – and allowing copyright infringements, as well as the risk of malware-laden apps, to flourish.
There are also concerns that it's simply too hard to get discovered on the Market – meaning that unless you're one of Google's own apps, or a port of an iPhone app, you probably won't feature in a prominent place where people might see your work. Kevin Baker, an Android developer based in the UK, says that the combination of lack of discoverability and ease of copying and republishing is turning the Market toxic. Baker told the Guardian: "I have a game on the market called Sinister Planet which was released about eight months ago. Sales have been pretty slow, although picking up slowly over the months, despite a lot of great reviews. Gabe Newell on Valve. The PC games pioneer bares all on Valve's unique dev culture, and shares his grand plan for the future.
[This Q&A comes as part of Develop’s package of five interviews with Valve Software. An index of each interview can be found here.] Interview with:Gabe Newell - Co-founder and company president So, honestly, is it true that everyone at Valve has wheels on their desks and can change what floor they work at whenever they like? Xbox Live Indie Games: no way to make a living. If you want to publish a console video game, there's no easier route than the Xbox Live Indie Games program.
But while it's relatively easy to get your game on the service, it's hard to get it noticed. There's a lot of junk on XBLIG, so much so that a group of developers banded together at the end of last year to promote quality indie titles. There have been success stories—like the recently released FortressCraft, which managed to sell 16,000 units on the day of release—but they're not exactly common.
So with virtually no promotion, and with average earnings of just $3,800 per title, why do developers continue to create games for the platform? MMObility: Illyriad devs shine light on HTML5. HTML5 is somewhat of a mysterious beast.
We've probably all heard whispers of the "new" version of the standard web coding language, but to most of us it means very little. After all, why is it number five? Console Gamers Get Killed against PC Gamers. Microsoft Killed a Killer Project I never thought I would be more disappointed in the industry then when Microsoft killed Ensemble Studios. ..however nothing surprises me anymore :) Rumor has it that there was a project many many months ago at Microsoft that was under wraps.
The goal was to bridge XBOX gamers with PC Gamers so they could play against one another in games like Unreal, or Gears of War. The Path of Go. Q: What’s The Path of Go?
A: The Path of Go is an Xbox Live Arcade game based on ‘Go’, the ancient Chinese board game. The game was developed using pioneering artificial intelligence software at Microsoft Research Cambridge. Go is a captivating game that takes minutes to learn but a lifetime to master. Brisbane-based Company's New Graphics Technology "100,000 Times Better" Euclideon, an Australian company based in Brisbane has made the remarkable claim that they've developed a new graphics rendering technology for video games that is "100,000 times better" than existing systems.
After their first announcement around a year ago, they dropped off the radar, and have recently resurfaced with a new statement as part of a video showcasing their new technology, built with nearly $2 million dollars of assistance from the Australian Government While it is a bit light on the technical details, it is intriguing: There is a better way to do computer graphics, which is used in medicine and the sciences.
Farewell to DirectX? Despite what delusional forum chimps might tell you, we all know that the graphics hardware inside today's consoles looks like a meek albino gerbil compared with the healthy tiger you can get in a PC. Compare the GeForce GTX 580's count of 512 stream processors with the weedy 48 units found in the Xbox 360's Xenos GPU, not to mention the ageing GeForce 7-series architecture found inside the PS3. It seems pretty amazing, then, that while PC games often look better than their console equivalents, they still don't beat console graphics into the ground.
A part of this is undoubtedly down to the fact that many games are primarily developed for consoles and then ported over to the PC. However, according to AMD, this could potentially change if PC games developers were able to program PC hardware directly at a low-level, rather than having to go through an API, such as DirectX. Understanding the Effects of Violent Video Games on Violent Crime by Scott Cunningham, Benjamin Engelstätter, Michael Ward. Scott Cunningham Baylor University Benjamin Engelstätter Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) - Information and Communication Technologies Research Group Michael R.
Ward University of Texas at Arlington - College of Business Administration - Department of EconomicsApril 7, 2011. Crysis 2 tessellation: too much of a good thing? By now, if you follow these things, you probably know the sordid story of DirectX 11 support in Crysis 2. Developer Crytek, a PC favorite, decided to expand into consoles with this latest release, which caused PC gamers to fear that the system-punishing glory of Crytek's prior, PC-only games might be watered down to fit the inferior hardware in the console market. Crytek assured its fans that no such thing would happen and, in a tale told countless times in recent years, proceeded to drop the ball dramatically. Upon release, Crysis 2 supported only DirectX 9, with very limited user adjustments, like so many other games cross-developed for the consoles.