If you've got any real world programming experience then no doubt at some point you've had to resort to some quick and dirty fix to get a problem solved or a feature implemented while a deadline loomed large. Game developers often experience a horrific "crunch" (also known as a "death march"), which happens in the last few months of a project leading up to the game's release date. Failing to meet the deadline can often mean the project gets cancelled or even worse, you lose your job. So what sort of tricks do they use while they're under the pump, doing 12+ hour per day for weeks on end?Below ...

It's the shooter season of the year and this fall was all about Modern Warfare 3 versus Battlefield 3. And being the kind of game they are they also try to keep their audience playing by introducing some additional level of engagement. Both Call of Duty and Battlefield introduced their own online community websites and statistic platforms. Call of Duty has Elite, Battlefield has Battelog.But just because these services are sitting in the same spot it does not mean they are in any way similar. And that actually goes for more than just their monetization plans and feature sets. Elite is a tradit...

I recently released my first game, X Fleet, available now in Android Market. It’s a fast paced space shooter / rpg riddled with awesomeness and you should get it now.The reason you should avoid hierarchies/inheritance is your objects will be far too varied and complicated in form to be accurately represented as such. More on this below. The alternative is a component model. This is very basic. Instead of having everything inheriting (e.g. Object -> MovableObject -> AnimatedMovableObject), have your GameObjects include a list of GameComponents, and delegate behaviour from the ...

Next Games, a Finnish mobile game developer and publisher is working along with Alcon Entertainment for the development of "Blade Runner 2049".The Next Games CEO, Teemu Huuhtanen disclosed the news this month in Electronics Entertainment Expo 2017. Besides displaying only a screenshot, the companies are yet to uncover the details regarding the release date and the title of the game.Alcon Entertainment is busy in the production of movie "Blade Runner 2049", a sequel to the 1982's dystopian science fiction film "Blade Runner" with Warner Bros and is taking the efforts of domestic distr...

Social games have been a big trend in recent years. Zynga struck it big and now everyone else is trying to emulate them. Unfortunately, the first thing that pops into anyones head when a Zynga game is mentioned is Facebook. Facebook is the platform upon which their success stories like FarmVille were built, but it’s not the reason for their success.Zyngas games work because they are fun. The social connectivity is merely a mechanism to share your enjoyment of the game with others. It becomes utterly useless if there is no enjoyment to share.Sadly, many focus on socia...

Last night a good friend of mine showed me the latest Need for Speed game on the iphone / ipad. Quite an impressive feat of rendering and a relatively good game to boot. However, the front end, wow, a classic case in UI mis-engineering. Loads of stats, pages and pages of bits and pieces to wade through – a classic case of over stimulating the player with lots of decisions they have no business making – stuff that will significantly change their game play experience but being made at a time when the user often has no experience of what changes actually mean.It got me thinking abou...

I believe that making a game is part art and part science, so it's no wonder that managing a game project is also part art and part science. Clearly if it was all science then the industry would get a collective F for not having made any significant progress over the last decade - all one has to do is just glance at the published postmortems to see that the same patterns are repeated over and over.A game has to be fun, engaging, grab users in the first two minutes and also keep their attention for countless more hours. These requirements place a very difficult burden onto design dire...

This weekend I started work on my first full blown game for the iPhone. I’m not ready to share the details of what the game will be specifically as I’m sure these will change dramatically over the coming weeks. All I’m sure on is it will be a platform game built with Corona SDK.To get me started I’ve been downloading a bunch of games from the app store, jotting down some of the areas contributing to their addictiveness and success.Short levelsI do most of my game playing in short burst. This may be during a short train journey into town, or a few minutes while my di...