News

Vainglory dev and Twitch announce multi-million dollar eSports partnership
Vainglory dev and Twitch announce multi-million dollar eSports partnership
The developer Super Evil Megacorp has announced a three-year, multi-million dollar partnership with Twitch to promote and support the eSports community around their touchscreen MOBA Vainglory.
March 31, 2016
Adding visual variety using a few Photoshop-like tricks
Adding visual variety using a few Photoshop-like tricks
We realized we needed to increase visual variety on our game, and instead of creating tons of new assets, we implemented and used some Photoshop-like tricks, which saved time and gave us a huge amount of variety.
March 31, 2016
How Japanese Mobile Game Makers Go After Whales: 5 Popular Gacha Mechanics
How Japanese Mobile Game Makers Go After Whales: 5 Popular Gacha Mechanics
Gacha, a mystery box mechanic offering random items to users, has been the top revenue driver in Japanese mobile games for several years now. This blog post sheds light on some of the most popular gacha variants used in Japan today.
March 31, 2016
Breaking Chess, but just enough
Breaking Chess, but just enough
This is the first part of my postmortem on my procedural Chess game, X: a game of YZ, created for the 2015 ProcJam. In this post, I talk about the design decisions I had to make and the motivations for the game itself.
March 31, 2016
Performance Critical Editor Tools and Serialized Objects
Performance Critical Editor Tools and Serialized Objects
I take a look at creating a Unity editor tool that requires high performance, how serialized properties can have surprising effects on performance and what I did to increase performance by over 20 times for my tool!
March 31, 2016
Analyzing the Epic Card Game
Analyzing the Epic Card Game
White Wizard Games gave themselves an impossible challenge. Here's how they're dealing with it.
March 31, 2016
Open sourcing 80 Days' narrative scripting language: ink
Open sourcing 80 Days' narrative scripting language: ink
inkle recently open-sourced their narrative scripting language, as used in 80 Days and Sorcery! How does it work, and why did they decide to make it freely available?
March 31, 2016
Sans voir: generating procedural chess pieces
Sans voir: generating procedural chess pieces
This is the second part of my postmortem on my procedural Chess game, X: a game of YZ, created for the 2015 ProcJam. In this post, I talk about how I approached creating procedural chess pieces.
March 31, 2016
Jessica Curry: A musical journey towards [Everybody's Gone to] "the Rapture"
Jessica Curry: A musical journey towards [Everybody's Gone to] "the Rapture"
In this article Pieter Smal discusses religious music in Jessica Curry's video game soundtracks with emphasis on 'Everybody's Gone to the Rapture'.
March 31, 2016
To Burst, or Not to Burst - and How? An In-Depth Guide to the Art of Burst Campaigns
To Burst, or Not to Burst - and How? An In-Depth Guide to the Art of Burst Campaigns
With 8.5M daily downloads attributed to the top 200 free US App Store apps, and Google Play seeing twice that many, it’s no wonder that every game developer dreams to make it to the top of that list. Find out how to up your store ranking AND optimize ROI
March 31, 2016
The 5 Key Video Game Elements for Maximum User-Sink Time
The 5 Key Video Game Elements for Maximum User-Sink Time
The ultimate goal of all game developers is to create a game with maximum “user- sink time”, meaning gamers will pick up their devices, begin playing, and not bother coming up for air again until a few weeks later. Learn what elements make a game a user-
March 31, 2016
UC Irvine to launch eSports scholarships for League of Legends
UC Irvine to launch eSports scholarships for League of Legends
The University of California at Irvine is launching a big eSports initiative this fall, with backing from League of Legends developer Riot Games and PC gaming seller iBuyPower.
March 30, 2016