#gamedev
83 links · 2011–2022
how six months of quarantine affected life at Supergiant Games
running on PS5
wow, it must be painful to throw away a lot of things you’ve developed, go back to the beginning, give the project to another team, and have to talk about it publicly
interview with Lucas Pope about Return of the Obra Dinn
Unity interactive demo
documentary about PUBG
documentary about DOOM 2016
seems fantastic on many levels!
talk by Jake Birkett
talk by Mare Sheppard and Raigan Burns
N++
“The initial decision to do it was hard, because it did feel like giving up to a certain extent,” says Burns of the decision to return to the game. In fact, when Sheppard announced the game at GDC 2013, he wasn’t even present. “I didn’t even go to her talk because I was too ashamed,” he explains. “Everyone’s coming out with new cool stuff, and we’re still stuck on this one thing.”
“Give a man a game and he’ll play for a day. Teach a man to make games and he’ll never play one for the rest of his life.”
“Drawing his finger across the screen, he nudged the lever bars to indicate attributes like body mass, aggressiveness, windpipe length, wetness, screechiness, harshness. (The software makes sounds based on roughly a hundred different parameters.) Then, while moving his thumbs across two graphical boxes on the iPad—one labelled “vowel map,” the other “pitch”—and simultaneously twisting the device in space, he generated a vocalization. The iPad’s physical movement determined the energy behind the utterance: the arc of the motion shaping the sound’s arc.”
“short film created with the Unity game engine and rendered in real time”
“This post is about the magic constant 0x5f3759df and an extremely neat hack, fast inverse square root, which is where the constant comes from.”
fixing the “can’t read faces” problem in Obra Dinn
“Such model puts focus on iterative development, facilitating flexibility and growth. It’s quite different from premium games, where most energy is spent on the initial release, possibly followed by as few as possible patches.
Running a game as a service influences priorities in some very practical terms.”
talk by Darren Korb
A very good YouTube channel. The voice reminds me of Vimcasts…
interview with Dan Grey
talk by Grant Duncan
talk by Matt Nava
talk by Junya Christopher Motomura
talk by Rami Ismail
What It Teaches Us About Games
a note to future Mike
made with Unity
talk by Jonathan Blow
“I don’t play games to have my skills tested. Many do, and that’s fair. I play games to have experiences, to feel smart and creative and badass, of course, but not to be tested by an imaginary examiner. When choosing a difficulty mode for a game, that’s far more about the time investment I want to make (do I not have time for a slow run, or do I want to make it last?) or how I want to feel (Wolfenstein had to go to easy, because when playing a game like Wolfenstein, I want to feel unstoppable). It’s not about difficulty, it’s about the style of play I want to extract from the game’s mechanics.”
“It turns out it was easier to make the train car a piece of head armor and slap it onto an NPC than it was to make a working vehicle.”
“A lot of the camera movements and controls that video games have built up over the years will make many players want to throw up. […] For that reason Land’s End is a hands-free experience. That means that navigation is done simply by looking at little white dots placed strategically through the environment, each representing possible paths or actions a player can undertake.”
Representing Race in Games
“Humane design doesn’t use guilt as a motivator. It doesn’t punish you for having something more important to do on a given day.”
interview with Ken Wong
interview with Aaron Foster, the creator of Routine — a semi-regular reminder that life of a game developer sucks
82% of revenue from iOS
interview with Adam “Atomic” Saltsman
“a proposal and proof-of-concept for an interactive book about programming the graphics processor”
I especially enjoyed the little “Make this” games in the Sample Chapter.
creators of Indie Game: The Movie
talk by Peter Pashley
interview with Daniel Gray
“We do believe imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but ideally the imitation happens after we’ve had time to descend slowly from the peak — not the moment we plant the flag.”
talk by Jan Willem Nijman (starts for real at 6:57)
“Tiny Speck, Inc., the game’s developer, has relinquished its ownership of copyright over these 10,000+ assets in the hopes that they help others in their creative endeavours and build on Glitch’s legacy of simple fun, creativity and an appreciation for the preposterous. Go and make beautiful things.”
talk by Tim Schafer
talk by Ian Bogost
talk by Christian Lichtner
…Fights Pirates with Piracy
Oculus Rift guillotine simulator
talk by Gabe Newell
Glitch’s graceful exit
“No pressure…”
interview with the creator of Diablo and Torchlight
Automatic stats allocation, no skill trees, free respecs, each skill in six versions.
talk by Lilli Thompson
talk by Bret Victor
And hey, they coded it in Lisp!