News

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Building games that are fun to watch, fun to play in the Twitch era
Gameplay understanding, tension & suspense, and relatedness: Some of the lessons Breakaway's development team has learned about building games for streaming.
June 21, 2017
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Designing Silicon Void's Combat, Part 1: Clockwork
Exploring how the time mechanics of Silicon Void, a turn based RPG in early development closely based on the combat system of Chrono Cross, are tweaked to encourage players to plan ahead.
June 21, 2017
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Building a Simple System for Persistence with Unity
A quick overview of building a system to support saved game files in Unity for games requiring level persistence. Explores unique ID creation and management, data storage, and serialization.
June 21, 2017
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E3 2017 Media Coverage Analysis – aka “Who won the E3 media battle?”
As per the tradition, this is the media coverage analysis of the 2017 E3 that took place last week.
June 20, 2017
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Selling ASCII: Pre-Steam Sales Data for a Traditional Roguelike
A summary of Cogmind's second year of alpha (early access) sales data, including revenue, pricing effects, and a breakdown of development time.
June 20, 2017
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How Do You Design Your VR Game Around Motion Sickness Constraints
This article is an attempt to shed some more light on the VR motion sickness subject and hopefully help game developers find a better approach when it comes to design their VR game with motion sickness constraints in mind.
June 20, 2017
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Video Game Deep Cuts: Those Hidden Coin-Operated E3 Boys
This week's longform article highlights include behind-the-scenes on Hidden Folks, an interview about the Coin-Operated Americans book, interviews from E3, and much more.
June 19, 2017
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Tracking our Twitch success in real time
Immortal Redneck managed to appear on almost every big Twitch channel. This is a story about it and wow we tracked the success in real-time.
June 19, 2017
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Games Have Too Many Words: A Case Study.
A step-by-step design analysis of the very long, long introduction to a recent popular game. The goal: To show how it could be shortened to make a more effective game and a less grueling experience for the player.
June 16, 2017
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Rethinking 'Interactivity'
The myth of player agency is actively detrimental to game design.
June 16, 2017
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Test your damn game: choosing participants
Overview on choosing participants for focus groups, betas, and usability tests. From defining requirements to screening potential participants.
June 15, 2017
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Obscure Steam games and digging for Hidden Gems
Looking through Steam game data for little-known but highly-rated games, seeing what can be found and how common it really is to have a great game that doesn't sell.
June 15, 2017