News

An ice-breaking and idea exchange activity for Game Jams
An ice-breaking and idea exchange activity for Game Jams
Game jams bring total strangers together to work in a game for several hours. I present here an ice-breaking, group-forming and idea-exchanging activity that was used with great success at the Civic Game Jam #3: Machines on November 18th, 2017.
Nov. 27, 2017
Cracking the complexity of Lifetime Value in freemium games
Cracking the complexity of Lifetime Value in freemium games
To provide a complete perspective on LTV, I’ve decided to outline what I’ve learned from my own experiences and those of experts from Rovio, Miniclip, Wooga, Space Ape Games, Pixonic and many others.
Nov. 27, 2017
Day 39 of 100 Days of VR: Creating a VR First Person Shooter II
Day 39 of 100 Days of VR: Creating a VR First Person Shooter II
Today we’re going to continue to integrate VR into our game. We're going to deal with Unity's Event Trigger system and solving problems that occur, because of our change to VR.
Nov. 27, 2017
Video Game Deep Cuts: HAL In The Clouds, Monster-Free
Video Game Deep Cuts: HAL In The Clouds, Monster-Free
The latest Video Game Deep Cuts includes a look at HAL Laboratory's last self-published title, a poke at a famous game artwork's use of Mario's clouds, and how SOMA's patch allows you to play sans monsters.
Nov. 26, 2017
The Entity-Component-System - An awesome game-design pattern in C++ (Part 1)
The Entity-Component-System - An awesome game-design pattern in C++ (Part 1)
In this article I want to talk about the Entity-Component-System (ECS). It is a design pattern – mostly encountered in video games – which allows you great flexibility in designing your overall software architecture.
Nov. 22, 2017
Urza's Dream Engine & The RoboRosewater RoboDraft: Creating a machine learning algorithm to illustrate Magic cards
Urza's Dream Engine & The RoboRosewater RoboDraft: Creating a machine learning algorithm to illustrate Magic cards
I spent that last two months teaching a bot to create illustrations for Magic: The Gathering cards designed by another bot. How I built Urza's Dream Engine to generate art for RoboRosewater cards and the tournament that humans played with automated cards.
Nov. 22, 2017
[Post Mortem]: I thought I could ship at least 700 units to stay in business
[Post Mortem]: I thought I could ship at least 700 units to stay in business
I should have been able to move at least 700 copies of a niche game at a low price and stay in business. I did not - this is a warning to other developers out there who work full time on their games!
Nov. 21, 2017
The five biggest lessons we learned making a game in our spare time
The five biggest lessons we learned making a game in our spare time
As a studio of two we have spent evenings and weekends for years working on a game. With day-jobs, we have struggled to maintain momentum on our personal project. In this article, we'll talk about the lessons we've learnt trying to get our game finished.
Nov. 21, 2017
Creating A Board Game On Platform Cooperativism
Creating A Board Game On Platform Cooperativism
How I created a board game on the theme of platform cooperativism and its difficulties, as outlined by Trebor Scholz (so an "edu" board game).
Nov. 21, 2017
Project Management Part 3: Burning Money, Brain Power and Morale To Make Your Game
Project Management Part 3: Burning Money, Brain Power and Morale To Make Your Game
When making a game you need to keep track of what resources you are burning. It's far more than just time and money. This is Midnight Hub's last post in a series about how to reduce stress when working with games!
Nov. 21, 2017
Video Game Deep Cuts: A Need For Soderbergh's PlayerUnknown
Video Game Deep Cuts: A Need For Soderbergh's PlayerUnknown
This installment of the best longform articles & podcasts of the week includes a look at Need For Speed's monetization, Steven Soderbergh's new interactive film project, and a new AIAS podcast talking to Brendan 'PlayerUnknown' Greene.
Nov. 20, 2017
A Kickstarter postmortem for The Iron Oath
A Kickstarter postmortem for The Iron Oath
Our tactical RPG The Iron Oath was successfully Kickstarted in September 2017. I'd like to share the process we went through that helped us achieve over 200% funding!
Nov. 17, 2017