News

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How Getting Over It Introduced The Positives of 'Jank'
Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy brought the idea of "rage" or "jank" games to the mainstream. Love them or hate them, there's an interesting design discussion about games purposely built to make you pull your hair out.
Feb. 17, 2021
JikGuard
Not Game Over: Game Developers Tackle the Climate Crisis
The climate crisis impacts our ability to keep making and playing the games we know and love. We as game makers and players have significant power to take truly meaningful action against this existential threat. Learn more about what's happening in 2021.
Feb. 17, 2021
JikGuard
What are your game's pre-release 'story beats'? 2
For your in-development game, story beats are the 3 or 4 ‘big pre-release announcements’ that you actually expect to get wider press and notice. What should you pick, and why?
Feb. 16, 2021
JikGuard
Video Game Music Concerts in 2021
In this article, game composer Winifred Phillips discusses how video game concert tours and other video game music events have coped with Covid-19. Included: links to live-stream performances, free online concerts, and news about upcoming concert dates.
Feb. 16, 2021
JikGuard
Autochess: Market Status and Design Analysis
Autochess was the hottest gaming trend in 2019, but not anymore. We explore its history, market status and audience, and the design flaws that stopped it from becoming "the new MOBA".
Feb. 16, 2021
JikGuard
Lessons Learned From Teaching Game Design
In this blog post, I want to share five practical rules you can apply to improve your own teaching in the field of game development and game design. I've learned these lessons from teaching game design at the Cologne Game Lab, a German games university.
Feb. 16, 2021
JikGuard
Designing touch controls for Human: Fall Flat
For over a year Codeglue has been working for 505 Games on the mobile adaptations of Human: Fall Flat. In this blog post we will explain how we designed the touch controls for mobile version of the game.
Feb. 16, 2021
JikGuard
Breaking the Virtual Ice: Toxic Behaviors in Social VRs and How Developers Cope with Them
Social VR games foster unique interactions that stem from their immersive quality. Managing new behaviors emerging from the freedom that VR brings has many challenges for developers. I tried to find out more about these behaviors in my survey.
Feb. 16, 2021
JikGuard
How Resident Evil Revelations 2 Showed Up Its Predecessors
The Revelations series may have been just a spinoff of Resident Evil, but Revelations 2 surprised me with just how well it nailed the formula of a good Resident Evil game.
Feb. 12, 2021
JikGuard
Implementing Raytraced Ambient Occlusion in The Riftbreaker
In this article we describe the process of implemention raytraced ambient occlusion into The Riftbreaker. We describe the process, the obstacles we had to overcome and the optimizations we included along the way.
Feb. 12, 2021
JikGuard
Designing for a Sense of Mystery and Wonder
This article examines the sense of mystery and wonder that’s tied not to story or themes, but to exploration. Based on a comparison of two Zelda games, four key design strategies are extracted, as well as some more general considerations to keep in mind
Feb. 12, 2021
JikGuard
Game Dev Digest Issue #81 - 2D, Animation, and more
Game Dev Digest Issue #81 - 2D, Animation, and more. The latest from the free weekly Unity3d/gamedev newsletter.
Feb. 12, 2021