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...

Learning how to program can be a nightmare. An aspiring coder has to jump through many unpleasant hoops and mysterious error messages just to get "Hello, World!" printed on the screen. Then, she's left wondering, "OK, now what? How do I actually build something?"As game developers seeing someone struggle through this, we should be screaming, “NOOOOO!” The whole thing reeks of bad game design: a lot of work with no reward, unclear failure cases, advanced features pushed on new players, etc. If we simply apply some simple game design principles, learning how to code can be much more ...

Previously at Creat Studios, Vivendi Games Mobile and JAMDAT, amongst others, Scott brings eighteen years of industry experience to MocoSpace. He heads the company's internal game studio.We've all witnessed the growth of mobile and social gaming over the past two years: the two genres have continued to evolve independently, while also coming together and embracing the power of HTML5.Mobile browser-based social games have found an audience and are thriving.This new gaming category draws from the strength of both web social gaming and native mobile apps, but the two do not overlap perfectly. Unl...

Are you looking to set up an independent game development team?  You’ll need a team that covers all areas of game development including programming, art, design, sound, project management and business.  You need to pick the right people that can work together for months or even years.  Below are some tips for putting the right team together to increase your chances of success.RolesGame development involves a number of common roles as well as some overlooked ones.  Individual team members can handle multiple roles on smaller teams and some roles can be shared by more ...