Popular News

Get a job: PopCap and others hiring now on the Gamasutra jobs board

In the latest postings over the last seven days, Gamasutra's jobs board plays host to roles in every major discipline, including opportunities at PopCap Games, Riot Games, and others. Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly. It will also be cross-posted for free across Gamasutra's network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on independent ...

Rating: 0.00 (0 votes)

Postmortem: 5 lessons learned making Diamond Dash mobile

Christopher Parschat is Head of Studio at Wooga, one of the biggest social game developers in the world. He was the company's first employee back in 2009 and has worked on social arcade hits such as Bubble Island and Diamond Dash. Here he talks about the transition Diamond Dash made from Facebook to mobile and the five steps developers can take to ensure that transition as smooth and successful as possible. It all started in ...

Rating: 0.00 (0 votes)

Behind Binding of Isaac's blasphemous success

Edmund McMillen's The Binding of Isaac is an unlikely indie best-seller, and he knows it. "I knew Isaac was special, but if you asked me to bet on whether Isaac would sell over one million copies in less than a year, I would have bet against it," McMillen writes in the postmortem for the November 2012 issue of Game Developer magazine, "It was designed to be a niche hit at best." He adds, "I had ...

Rating: 0.00 (0 votes)

G4 canceling its video game shows

Newsbrief: Cable channel G4 will end its two long-running programs that cover video games, X-Play and Attack of the Show, at the end of the year. Launched on the ZDTV network in 1998, X-Play (previously known as GameSpot TV and Extended Play) has been one of the very few television shows dedicated to video games in the U.S.. The half-hour show features game reviews, hands-on demos, trailers, and more. Attack of the Show began airing ...

Rating: 0.00 (0 votes)

How did a relatively unknown studio take the LittleBigPlanet reins?

Just a few days after launch, LittleBigPlanet PSVita has an aggregate score among the most favorably-received titles on Sony's new portable thus far -- at a time when the Vita, off to a slow start, needs a star. And its developer, little-known Tarsier Studios, achieved a success against formidable odds. It had to inherit Media Molecule's acclaimed brainchild from that studio as it moved on to new projects. And it had to design the beloved ...

Rating: 0.00 (0 votes)

The headache of not being able to tell players your plans

"If you are an indie developer, I'd say to never get yourself into a situation where you can't talk about what you are doing."- Hello Games' managing director Sean Murray cautions developers against making agreements that prevent them from talking directly to their fans. The studio caught a lot of flack from PlayStation 3 owners and fans when it released an Xbox Live Arcade sequel to Joe Danger but no PlayStation Network version (the original ...

Rating: 0.00 (0 votes)

The Man in the Cape highlights this week's Best of Indie Games

This week on "Best Of Indie Games," we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week. The delights in this edition include a snappy experiment in interactive fiction, a twin-stick shooter that boasts a quirky premise and an eclectic soundtrack, a physics-driven action game starring an unusually destructive feline, plus a new game pick from Indie Royale's recent Fall Bundle. Here's some recent highlights from IndieGames.com: ...

Rating: 0.00 (0 votes)

In-depth: Bitsquid Foundation Library

In this reprinted #altdevblogaday in-depth piece, BitSquid co-founder Niklas Frykholm shares a new minimalistic "foundation" library that's meant to serve as a starting-off point for open source projects. Today I want to talk a bit about the Bitsquid Foundation Library that we recently released on Bitbucket (under the permissive MIT license). It's a minimalistic "foundation" library with things like memory management and collection classes. The idea is to have something that can be used as ...

Rating: 0.00 (0 votes)

CCP Online's three design pillars for sandbox MMOs

For CCP Online senior game designer Matthew Woodward, building MMOs solely around hand-crafted content is a losing strategy. "Trying to be the next World of Warcraft doesn't work," Woodward said during at GDC Online, "Content is expensive." Woodward's talk, "The Other White Meat: Design Architecture for Sandbox Games", explained the three pillars that CCP relied on to make EVE Online into a compelling sandbox MMO -- and thereby keep players coming back to play for ...

Rating: 0.00 (0 votes)