News

How to stand out in the crowd
How to stand out in the crowd
We will explore the traits that make a game stand out in in a saturated market
April 23, 2018
PAX East 2018: Designing a Convention Booth
PAX East 2018: Designing a Convention Booth
This post is a cross-post from our own website blog. Link: http://www.simplemachine.co/pax-east-2018-recap/ In this post we go over what went into planning our booth for PAX East Including what to order, how to lay stuff out, how to sell merch, etc.
April 23, 2018
The Level Design of Super Mario Odyssey's Best Stage
The Level Design of Super Mario Odyssey's Best Stage
Super Mario Odyssey may have taken the level design of Mario in a different direction, but there was one stage that rose above the rest and is worthy of being studied more closely.
April 20, 2018
Lessons Learned From Five Years of VR Locomotion Experiments
Lessons Learned From Five Years of VR Locomotion Experiments
A five-year retrospective on lessons learned from inside the history of VR locomotion by industry pioneers at Cloudhead Games.
April 20, 2018
Atari VCS: Video Cube
Atari VCS: Video Cube
An excerpt from '21 Unexpected Games to Love For The Atari VCS,' Atari Video Cube doesn't actually work like a real Rubik's Cube. It's a lot more accessible! It's a laid-back kind of puzzle game that Atari originally sold by mail order.
April 19, 2018
Logarithmic Interpolation
Logarithmic Interpolation
Linear interpolation is undeniably useful, but sometimes values are better expressed on a logarithmic scale (music notes, zoom factors), and logarithmic interpolation is a better fit.
April 19, 2018
Unity SRP Overview: Scriptable Render Pipeline
Unity SRP Overview: Scriptable Render Pipeline
I did some research and write an upcoming experimental Unity feature: Scriptable Rendering Pipelines. Why? Because it concerns you, it concerns me. It will eventually change the way you have to work. The readier you are, the better off you will be.
April 19, 2018
Try/Fail Cycles
Try/Fail Cycles
Games as power fantasies result in success after success for player character. For the story that makes them boring because the characters never encounter failure and have to change track. A Try/Fail cycle is vital to interesting storytelling in games.
April 19, 2018
Latvian gamedev conference
Latvian gamedev conference
Indie developers Helen Carmichael and Jake Birkett from Grey Alien Games learned a lot at the recent Latvian game developers conference. Here's Helen's report from the event.
April 17, 2018
Video Game Deep Cuts: Dancing Below The Ceiling?
Video Game Deep Cuts: Dancing Below The Ceiling?
This week's highlights include an update on Capy's much-discussed Below, how Valve gets you to look up in their first-person shooters, and lots more.
April 16, 2018
Searching for AlphaMystica
Searching for AlphaMystica
Digidiced has been trying to produce a Hard AI for Terra Mystica using machine learning. Our results have been a lot less impressive than we were hoping for. This article will describe a little bit about what we’ve tried and why it hasn’t worked for us.
April 16, 2018
Techs of Civilization
Techs of Civilization
A breakdown of the techs of Civilization.
April 16, 2018