Bink Video! Bink 2.4 Video is now shipping! Bink 2.4 now ships with optional GPU decoding! Using compute shaders on Windows, Linux, Sony PS4 and Xbox One, you can offload much of the video decoding. This is two to four times faster than CPU-only decode (and even more for 4K video). Decode 4K video frames in 2.3ms on PS4/Xbox One, and 1.4 ms on a PC! Bink 2 is massively better than Bink 1. And even cooler, Bink 2 can be much faster than Bink 1, due to its multi-core scaling and SIMD design (up to 70% of the instructions executed on a frame are SIMD). Bink 2 is available for Windows (standard, Windows 8 Store and Windows 8 Phone), MacOS, Linux, Sony PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, Sony PS3, Sony PSP2, Nintendo Wii and WiiU, Android and iOS. Bink is the defacto video codec for games. Most game developers are shocked to find that they can get Bink videos playing in less than an hour - including tricky stuff like pixel shaders. Bink videos look amazing! The best way to learn about Bink is to just try it!
The Miles Sound System The Miles Sound System is one of the most popular pieces of middleware ever released. It has been licensed for over 5,200 games on 14 different platforms! John Miles first released MSS in 1991 in the early days of PC gaming. Today, Miles features a no-compromise toolset that integrates high-level sound authoring with 2D and 3D digital audio, featuring streaming, environmental reverb, multistage DSP filtering, and multichannel mixing, and highly-optimized audio decoders (MP3, Ogg and Bink Audio). New! Miles 9, with all new high-level audio tools, is now shipping! Miles is the most sophisticated, most robust, and most fully featured sound system available for your games. Game Developer Magazine inducted the Miles Sound System into its Front Line Hall of Fame the very first year - the first middleware package ever to receive that honor. You should check out what our customers think, or you can read more about the Miles SDK itself. Why Miles is right for your game:
Rayman Origins designer Chris McEntee's rational approach to game design In Gamasutra's latest feature, Rayman Origins designer Chris McEntee explains Ubisoft's "rational design" approach, and why he believes it's a key to success in the game design field. Conceived by several Ubisoft veterans, the rational game design method was implemented in the publisher's sidescrolling game Rayman Origins, which was praised by critics and gamers alike as one of last year's best platformers. McEntee explains, "Rational design is all about eliminating unnecessary information, making things inherently readable, understandable and apparent, introducing mechanics in an orderly and easily digestible fashion, and preserving the learning and difficulty curves of a game, known as macro flow. "In principle, it is best to provide a player with significantly interesting and deep mechanics that are well explored and exploited through clever rationalized level design, rather than injecting the game full of one-shot gameplay mechanics to feign depth."
Simul Scaleform Video | scaleform Gameware Product Manager, Ankur Mohan, talks about the latest Gameware releases at GDC 2014. Click here to watch the video. Click here to learn how one of the largest mobile game developers leveraged the power of the Scaleform SDK to create Tiny Thief. Visit the AppStore to download this free, highly addictive tower defense game published using the Scaleform Mobile SDK. Our low priced licenses now include FMOD for audio support and render to texture capabilities for Unity developers. Click here to learn more about the new Autodesk Scaleform Unity/Mobile packages. Join our weekly webinar to learn how our solutions can help streamline your development pipeline. Autodesk® Gameware is a collection of powerful game development software and middleware tools that address many critical areas of game creation. Autodesk game development software enables designers to create game lighting, character animation, low level path finding, high level AI, and advanced user interfaces.
Zelda: Wind waker Tech and Texture Analysis *picture heavy* So After this little thread: i felt like the opinion was more yay than nay. it seamed people are (just like me) highly interested in "how" wind waker was made. so here are my findings: there are 4420 unique textures that i encountered in my (what i believe to be a) 100% play-through: i could not bring myself to upload the textures to my webspace and take that level of responsibility but saw "someone" has them available right here: other stuff i found noteworthy: now while posting this i realize for the first time that the "second/ugly" kind of alpha material probably saves massively on overdraw. hope you enjoy. Darim Developing Meaningful Player Character Arcs in Branching Narrative A little background: During my years at BioWare, I found that despite the enormous amount of talent housed in the writing department, there were certain subjects for which we lacked a common language of craft -- a clear and broadly applicable way to discuss what worked, what didn't, and why. This article is an effort to remedy that problem for one particular subject. Due credit goes to my former BioWare colleagues Cameron Harris (now of ArenaNet), who provided feedback on my notes for a previous iteration of this article; and Daniel Erickson (now of Bluepoint Games), who reviewed a near-final version and suggested I take it to Gamasutra. Thanks to Greg Rucka as well, whose blog posts on character arcs in Mass Effect helped inspire elements of this discussion. Let's start with the basics. Stories -- traditional stories, archetypal stories -- are about protagonists who go through difficult circumstances and who change or resist change because of those circumstances.
Building a better role-playing game story This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. Getting story right in role-playing games is crucial. Even if narrative is not your primary motivator, it's a key element to the RPG genre. But not all role-playing games have discovered the right formula. Its been my experience that there's no set checklist to ensure a successful story, but I've found that there are key components that can appeal to players with a narrative focus. I'd love to say "follow these pieces of advice and make a great RPG story!" Balance the Antagonists: Getting a villain wrong is one of the most common mistakes of most video games, especially role-playing games. Many of the best game stories, however, utilize both kinds of villains, where a powerful evil force triggers political chaos and ethically complicated situations.
Joost Rietveld's Blog - Partnering vs. self-publishing: how independent should you really be? Partnering vs. self-publishing: how independent should you really be? 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. “We do not write a marketing plan, marketing doesn’t work.” – Indie developer in recent email conversation Independent game studios have the tendency to revert from publishing partners when it comes to commercializing their games on digital distribution channels. Adding value through certification and complementarities “We have 300+ email addresses from press contacts that we can contact. Great games are being released every day, whether it’s on iOS, Android, or Facebook. Perceptions of quality with prospect consumers or gatekeepers are positively influenced by the reputation of the developer/publisher. Routes to market based on reputation and complementarities Reputation alone won’t do the trick though. Final thoughts
The Independent Games Festival is Fine - You are the Problem Yesterday, the Rotting Cartridge ran a piece explaining why they believe the judging process for the Independent Games Festival is broken, based on their experiences with a game they submitted to the festival, Kale in Dinoland. During the course of that article, they reprinted a piece of private correspondence from the IGF’s organizers and saw the lack of attention their magnum opus (a monochromatic Game Boy-style platformer) received as evidence that the festival is a corrupt and contemptible institution. Jenn Frank was not amused. My friend was right when he warned me not to get so agitated. “It’s scene drama,” he told me. I have been privy to scene drama, not only in videogames, but among otherwise-wonderful poetry communities, among fiction writing majors, theater schmoes, whoever. I really hate to suggest it, but maybe the problem was your game The Independent Games Festival (IGF) has been drawing drama since it started 14 years ago. I have not-played my lion’s share of games. So.
Features - Learning From The Masters: Level Design In The Legend Of Zelda When going back to replay classic games I played as a kid to mine them for knowledge, I always fear that any games from the NES era or earlier are too old to learn much from. I tend to assume that many elements of modern design will be missing: no training, bad difficulty ramping, haphazard level design, and so forth. Before writing this article, I was under the impression that many "good design principles" I've come to know and love were invented during the SNES era and iterated on from there. The NES was the Wild West of game development, I thought, lawless and free. So when I went back on Link's 25th anniversary to play the first Zelda game and maybe write an article about it, I was a bit gun-shy. As it turns out, I was totally wrong! In an interview, creator Shigeru Miyamoto once said that with The Legend of Zelda, he wanted to evoke the feelings associated with exploration in the player: "When I was a child," Miyamoto said, "I went hiking and found a lake. Level Flow. Breakdown
Game Dynamics and Loops [Game Design Describing Game Dynamics It’s easy to understand what a game action is: I push a button, I shoot my gun. I click a plot of land, I plant a strawberry. I pull the right trigger, my car accelerates. A loop is also fairly straightforward. I take an action, the game or another player reacts, and the process repeats in a loop until I win or lose. Game dynamics are the next level of complexity, and describing them is much harder. What designers often do is describe a game dynamic in terms of other games. Some designers try to avoid describing a game dynamic altogether and instead spec a game purely in terms of actions and reactions. What Is A Game Dynamic? Here’s my attempt at describing a game dynamic: A game dynamic is a pattern of loops that turns them into a large sequence of play. Game dynamics are larger than individual loops, but smaller than segments (commonly called levels or chapters) in terms of time and size. Primary And Secondary Dynamics Tension and Dynamics Rhythm and Tone Conclusion
Numina [Games and Fantasy We often infer more from a game experience than is actually on the screen. We have the capacity to use the game as an imaginative springboard, inferring personality traits, characters, behaviours and a sense of a larger game world beyond even what the developer intended. We make cognitive leaps, little observations and associations that contain the quality of empathy, and so it feels like there is more there than meets the eye. Videogames are capable of inspiring this sense, just as great novels and movies can, and this is why they are an art. Peripheral Perception The players thought that they could see subtle effects in how the footballers acted, momentary actions and other patterns that were not actually in the game. From my own experience, I remember playing Doom for the first time and getting the sense that I really could see the mountains of Phobos, and would travel to them. I and practically everyone else that has ever really got stuck into a game has experienced numina.