GameDev

Article: Bleszinski: "Gamers Exist in a Wired World Where Ignorance is Inexcusable"

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.

Article: Steam Early Access: A New Community Effort by Valve

Valve has long stated its beliefs in a community-driven gaming environment, as evidenced in the tools the company has released for its own Team Fortress 2 and other titles; they see gaming as an ecosystem that can be sustained better by players than by developers, in part due to numbers, in part just because gamers are closer to the end product given their nature of being isolated from the development process.

Article: Star Citizen Technology Interview: Gaming for HW Enthusiasts

When left uncorrupted by the technologically-crippling nature of consoles, PC gaming's propensity for visual and mechanical immersion provides an unrivaled entertainment medium for gamers. Even the cheapest, most stripped-down budget gaming PC has technology that far-and-away surpasses the capabilities of the current-gen consoles. Transistor count alone is indicative of the vast leaps made in the last 7 years: the...

Article: Level Design 101 for Mapping & Modding

Level Design is probably the most important production stage of any game: The environment of a level is what the player directly interacts with -- visually and physically -- and determines what, how, when, and why all of the different elements come together. This design can hopefully provide the player with an...

Article: Technology in BlackSpace: Quad-Core Utilization, 3D Vision, More

Given the opportunity, we always explore the technology behind upcoming games; understanding GPU specifications is great, but it's important to put that knowledge to practical use. We were able to talk with the developers of BlackSpace (originally covered here) and ask them about how, exactly, the visual...

Article: How KOTOR Laid the Groundwork for the Mass Effect Trilogy

Recently BioWare responded to the outcry for a more complete and comprehensive ending to Mass Effect 3. Most people appear to be satisfied with this new iteration, but there are still suggestions that the new ending remains inadequate because it's just a series of cinematics with a voiceover. Taking previous games into account, though, it's always been apparent as to what the new revision would be, and using the game story analysis skills...

Article: Heat Signature: Offspring Fling! Gameplay Analysis & Hands-on

The much-awaited Episode 9 of Heat Signature is now here! That's right, we're resuming the series, but with a twist: Heat Signature episodes will now offer more in-depth gameplay analysis and a run-down of what game design elements are at play that make the games so entertaining. The series will continue to focus on up-and-coming games.

Article: Game Story Design: Predicting a Game's Story Outcome

Video games in recent years have seen a trend toward greater depth in story development. Gaming has become more about immersion in a different world as technology advances and for most gamers this is best accomplished with a deep and encompassing story. While the gameplay mechanics of the Assassin's Creed franchise, or games in the Elder Scrolls universe (which we made even more...

Article: Revitalizing The Game Industry's Ecosystem with New Tech

Very little is original in modern entertainment outlets, but there's always a new approach to design - it just needs to be discovered; the best ideas, hopefully, remain just beneath the surface, and many of our future advancements in the gaming industry will rely heavily on design/development ingenuity and technological advancements. The not-yet-included design features are everywhere, we're just waiting for the strategy and equipment to...

Article: What can Video Game Devs Learn from … Plants?

Video games and plants have a long, intertwined, rich history together. Actually, that’s a lie. Almost everyone would probably agree that they are completely unrelated entities altogether, and that would be mostly true; however, video games and plants do share some interesting properties that plants have had 475 million years to perfect, while video games in comparison have only had about 30 years. So to help video games evolve and become a...

Article: Gears of War 3’s Visual FX Were Made by 2.5 Artists

For a game so known for its deep, emotion-provoking story, Gears of War 3 has had phenomenal artistic direction and functionality as well; Epic has proven that games don’t need to pick between mechanics, graphics, and writing and can instead focus-down all three core elements in a much more efficient manner.

Article: Turning Death into a Useful MMO Game Mechanic

Imagine this scenario: You’ve been playing an MMO title since its launch. You are now a level 40 warrior, or some equivalently generic class, and are about to tackle a little-known dungeon; the closest town and respawn point are both over thirty minutes of travel away via mount. To get there, you have to pass numerous mobs at higher levels than you, but your group is prepared and you are ready to roll. Reaching the dungeon was the easy p...

Article: What is a voxel, anyway? Voxels vs. Vertexes in Games

With all the talk whirling around voxel games like Cube World, a self-described Zelda-Minecraft hybrid, and Castle Story, a voxel RTS, we've been asked numerous times to explain what voxels are and what their implication is on future games. To do that, let's start by better understanding the commonplace approach to...

Article: Cube World: A Fusion of Diablo, Minecraft, and Zelda

Imagine an expansive, randomly-generated atmosphere that is flooded with unique creatures, troves of hostile warriors, snot-leaking giants, villages, and fantastical environments with massive trees, waterfalls, and the like. A place to explore and conquer - to quest and customize your gear, build homes, and work with NPCs.

Article: $3189 Ultimate Game Design/Development Rig - February, 2012

Game developers and designers are running rampant with technology of late, and whether it's real-time ray-tracing or simply designing the most complex, over-the-top games possible, strong systems have become a necessity more than ever. Rendering, encoding, and compiling times can be unbearably slow with the wrong hardware (often taking an entire...

Article: Organ Trail Kickstarter Project Reaches $3000 Goal

The very structure of video gaming technology, software development lifecycles, compatibility analyses, and nuclear fission have been propelled to previously-unimaginable heights as a result of a single, pioneering video game: The Oregon Trail.

Article: Open source game aims to create infinite universe

Article: Gaming Jobs: Game Test Technician

Video Game Tester. The job title alone conjures up images in most people of the perfect job where people sit in a room (that looks just like their living room), eating junk food, and bad-mouthing people over Xbox LIVE all day (alternatively, the facebook ads would lead you to believe that all game testers are twenty-something females). In reality that's the life of someone who actually does play video games all day which, despite...

Article: Writing a Good Video Game Press Release

If you're a developer, then you should know that your brethren send us hundreds of press releases monthly (if not thousands). The press releases are often groan-inducing and uninteresting; they're over-inflated with text, and at times, even downright ugly to scroll through. However, on occasion, there are press release emails that grab our attention enough to write up entire features (and eventually, reviews) on the posts. Believe...

Article: NVIDIA Predicts 1000% Gain in GPU Power by 2015 (ECGC Keynote)

"Would Minecraft with Samaritan graphics be better? I think so." -Tony Tamasi, SVP Content & Technology at nVidia. A bold statement to make at the East Coast Game Conference (ECGC), but it does stir thought: as we approach...