Former Epic Games Design Director Cliff Bleszinski gave a keynote presentation at the 2013 East Coast Game Conference (ECGC) Wednesday, April 24th. His keynote speech reached twenty years into the game designer's past, explored the once-emergent shareware distribution model, and then bridged those experiences with the future of gaming and its charted trajectory.

Bleszinski's keynote spanned topics across the gaming world, including commentary on the "millennial" generation—a term that the twenty-year veteran hates—the enablement and rise of indie gaming, and brief commentary on software piracy. The central message to the speech seemed to encourage a coming-together of the industry's seemingly-severed AAA and indie market segments. We've embedded a video of the entire ECGC 2013 keynote with Cliff Bleszinski, found below, but have also gone through and extracted some noteworthy statements.

After spending an hour with GRID 2's devs on a live stream (VOD online) yesterday, we have some new information pertaining to the upcoming racing game's multiplayer game modes, social features, "RaceNet," and gameplay interactions. We previously got a hands-on with the game at PAX East, discussed briefly in our "PAXCast" video cast.

Along with the below screenshots, this was grabbed from the livestream, so the quality is down slightly due to streaming limitations.

GRID 2 is the long-awaited sequel to the original GRID, released back in 2008, a game that bridged the gap between driver simulation and arcade racing. GRID 1's cockpit mode (sadly absent in the sequel), semi-realistic car damage (destroyed clutch, burnt-out tires, smashed body), and fantastic graphics made it one of the best racing games produced in the past few years -- and personally, I still play it.

In this episode of Saturday Heat Signature (the 12th installment!), we take a gander at the upcoming Kickstarter project by Pathea Games: Planet Explorers.

The game focuses on survival and colonization, with the core concept being that you (a survivor of a crashed colony spaceship) must scrounge-up resources, establish a base camp, and assemble other survivors in effort to make your place on this new world. Planet Explorers has a massive scope, and for purposes of simplifying things (perhaps a bit too much), it can almost be thought of as an amalgamation of Spore and Minecraft: The game has fairly freeform customization in terms of vehicles, structures, weapons, and is also voxel-based (non-cuboid, for once), allowing full point-to-point destruction or manipulation of terrain.

Everything's described pretty thoroughly in our Planet Explorers gameplay preview & overview video, found below:

It's tough to follow-up our booming Star Citizen coverage, but if any game's got the grit to do it, it's Castle Story. Between our friends over at Sauropod and friends at Cloud Imperium Games, our coverage of successfully-crowdsourced games at PAX East feels pretty filled-out. Besides, our Castle Story FAQ was a big hit, so it made good sense to revisit the game and check up on its progression.

For the unfamiliar, Castle Story is the up-and-coming freeform city-builder / RTS hybrid that accumulated nearly one million dollars via Kickstarter. We first covered the game almost exactly one year ago, and while things have certainly changed, the general concept remains the same -- go check that link if you're not yet sold on how the game works. This post will focus more on delivering new information to existing backers / fans of the upcoming RTS.

This article and the video interview aim to detail Sauropod's improvements to Castle Story over the last few months, their UI overhaul, future plans, and the sheer amount of work involved with living up to sudden success.

We'll start with the videos:

In suit of our technological analysis of Star Citizen's high-end hardware utilization, we regrouped with Chris Roberts at PAX East 2013 to briefly discuss overall progression, PvP, the node-based networking framework, and more.

Roberts made an appearance in the final hours of the show and participated in a panel discussing crowd-sourced obstacles and benefits, titled "Going Back To The Future - Calling All Mechwarriors, Tribes and Star Citizens." After meeting up near the somewhat internet-famous Firefall and LoL statues (seen here), we journeyed up to the panel area to talk some Star Citizen; it quickly became evident that Roberts is a marked man in the games industry, with several excited fans greeting and thanking him for his efforts to revitalize the Space Sim genre. He's ambitious and dedicated, but every conversation sort of resonated a "no, thank you for supporting us" humble tone.

You'll find our video interview with Chris Roberts below, a recording of the panel, and discussion on Star Citizen's future.