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SEARCH KEYWORD -- Game changer

  GDC 2012: How Vector Unit made the leap from console to mobile games

Matt Small, creative director at independent developer Vector Unit, thought his small studio would focus on consoles forever when it was working on Hydro Thunder Hurricane for Xbox Live Arcade. But then the smartphone and tablet market picked up, and mobile devices started to offer increasing amounts of processing power. That increase in power opened up new opportunities for the people at Vector Unit, which had years of developing for consoles. So the studio worked with Tegra chipmaker Nv...

   Advice,Game design,Palm,Phone,Change     2012-03-14 13:46:22

  PopCap’s 10 rules for commercial failure in mobile games development

PopCap, the company behind social gaming hits as Plants vs. Zombies and Bejeweled, has a way of doing presentations at conferences. Last year’s Social Gaming Summit presentation was insightful in the sense that developers were advised to postpone trying to make money from their game until there is some serious traction. At yesterday’s London Games Conference, PopCap’s presentation was equally remarkable. During a brief presentation David Bishop (Senior Game Designer) ...

   Game design,Rules,Smart phone     2012-04-16 13:25:27

  Simplicity Oriented Programming

After few years on Warsztat (a Polish gamedev site) I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon. Every now and then there are Compos (programming competitions) organized in two different flavours. Some compos are single-run events that last only few hours, others are long-term (several days/weeks). And as an extra catch, the former are usually restricted to basic APIs (SDL, OpenGL etc) while the latter are free-for-all (all sorts of engines, UDK/Unity allowed). Now, results are somewhat shocki...

   Programming,Research,Advice,Time efficie     2011-08-04 01:55:40

  Lessons from the Trenches

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 a...

   Game,Trenches,Tips,Game design,pattern     2011-10-10 05:08:50

  Tips for a better first-time hackathon experience

Here are a few things you can consider. These are by no means the only way to go about hackathons, just what's worked for me.ProjectI strongly strongly recommend doing something you haven't done before. Even if you're going into a hackathon with the intention of winning, trying something new is always fun and will keep you engaged throughout the event. Jump into mobile development, try hardware hacking, write a compiler, whatever; it's always fun to try out new things.Sticking to things you're c...

   hackathon     2014-03-31 07:25:09

   Opinion: The Elusive 'Quick Iteration' - Tips for Indie Devs

[In this reprinted #altdevblogaday-opinion piece, WB Games/Kindling Games' Kristen Bornemann offers independent developers advice on iterating and shipping their projects as fast as possible.] From agile and scrum to extreme programming, everyone's trying to nail down what it takes to iterate on products quickly and efficiently. There are a lot of methodologies that you can employ to guide you through shipping products. But today, I'll be talking specifically about video games and how, as a...

   Game,Electronic,Efficient,Development me     2011-08-15 07:41:47

  Do things, tell people.

These are the only things you need to do to be successful*. You can get away with just doing one of the two, but that's rare, and usually someone else is doing the other part for you. If you you don't have any marketable skills, learn some. It's the future. We have Khan Academy and Wikipedia and Codecademy and almost the entire world's collective knowledge at your fingertips. Use it. Then make something that you can talk about. Make something cool. Something interesting. Spend time on it. Go ...

   Tihings,Promote,Product,Open source     2012-02-21 05:28:39

  A Better Way to Learn How to Program

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...

   Programming pattern,Game design,Derivati     2011-09-19 13:51:17

  The dystopia from “Blade Runner 2049” to come to mobile phones

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 dys...

   MOBILE GAME DEVELOPMENT, MOBILE GAME SERVICE,GAMES APPS SERVICE,GAME APPLICATION SERVICE     2017-06-29 12:33:18

  Week 1 : Research - Elements of Successful iPhone Games.

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 levels I do most of my ...

   iPhone,Game design,Mobile,Facors     2012-01-16 09:47:53

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