Stencyl is a game development platform that builds on Adam Saltsman’s Flixel framework. It’s a drag-and-drop affair, apparently, and it’s meant to be fairly user-friendly. The reason I’m talking about it today is that, over on Newgrounds, it’s been at the centre of a new game jam competition, and a lot of the entries have turned out to be fairly good.
On the quest to combine truth with entertainment, the ability to compress, expand and abstract reality is crucial. We bumped up against this while developing Waking Mars. Growing an alien seed to see what emerges would be amazing in real life, but when it comes to entertainment, you don’t want to wait weeks just to see vine tentacles poking up from the soil. Our solution was to present, without comment, the dubious vision that Martian flora grows in mere seconds.
At Edinburgh Interactive this morning Christian O. Peterson, VP of Cloudmade, detailed a new service, dubbed Sponsored Locations, which he believes will make the freemium model work properly, raising revenue, increasing user retention and giving the mobile game industry access to one of the world's most lucrative revenue streams.
Gordon Hall sold his first commercial game to a company called Firebird when he was a teenager. Over the past 28 years, he has set up Mobius Entertainment, sold it to Rockstar, ran what then became Rockstar Leeds and developed three handheld Grand Theft Auto titles, among other games. He also stepped in to run Rockstar San Diego for around a year during the production of Read Dead Redemption.
Paradox Interactive’s success may be as puzzling to some industry observers as its namesake conundrums. Only last year, Epic Games’ Cliff Bleszinski pointed to the rapid coalescence of the game industry into two clumps at either end of a studio-size scale. On one end, you have the burgeoning indie scene; on the other, mega-developers.
On first contact, you could easily mistake Gameglobe for a jazzed-up MySpace page. Your window on the thirdperson adventure game’s world occupies the top half of the page, while the lower half is dominated by a comments thread, ‘like’ button and leaderboard.
Seamus Blackley, one of the founding members of Microsoft’s Xbox project and now mobile start-up Innovative Leisure, told the audience at Edinburgh Interactive this morning not to get distracted with emerging business models and trends and instead focus on gaming’s greatest selling point: fun.
Paradox Interactive’s success may be as puzzling to some industry observers as its namesake conundrums. Only last year, Epic Games’ Cliff Bleszinski pointed to the rapid coalescence of the game industry into two clumps at either end of a studio-size scale. On one end, you have the burgeoning indie scene; on the other, mega-developers.
One of my favourite podcasts, The Partially Examined Life, features a gang of postgraduate dropouts discussing philosophy in erudite and entertaining fashion, and occasionally swearing. Unfortunately, Apple disapproves of ‘bad words’, and so forces me to look at a bright red ‘EXPLICIT’ tag next to every episode in iTunes.
The iPhone has not only forged new software and game markets, but a new media industry too. Stock in iPhone 5 rumour stories continues to rise as the (assumed) product launch draws closer, and the longer Apple refuses to comment on such bluster, the more the ferocity of the speculation builds.
Like every block-headed robot that rolls off the production line in your floating space colony, Kairobotica is cute, reliable, solidly built and barely distinguishable from its predecessors. There is, however, one key difference: having mined its own Epic Astro Story and Dungeon Village for inspiration, Kairosoft has added a sprinkling of turn-based combat, lending its familiar blend of management sim and light role-playing elements an additional hook.
How To Make A Game continues with a look at PS Minis. Is Sony's indie game service a good fit for your first game?
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Greetings, gamers of 2012. My name is Game Designer #9384, although I once had a mother and she called me Bobby. I write to you in secret from the dank, lightless barracks of the High Lord Gamer Melvin Fauntleroy. The year is 2020. Trans-temporal email has just been invented, so you can expect a lot more messages like this, mostly about cybernetic erectile augmentation and desperate princes in the Sovereign Republic Of Texas. Your primitive spam filters will be useless. I pray this message reaches you before Google adds the Block Future Email button.
Greetings, gamers of 2012. My name is Game Designer #9384, although I once had a mother and she called me Bobby. I write to you in secret from the dank, lightless barracks of the High Lord Gamer Melvin Fauntleroy. The year is 2020. Trans-temporal email has just been invented, so you can expect a lot more messages like this, mostly about cybernetic erectile augmentation and desperate princes in the Sovereign Republic Of Texas. Your primitive spam filters will be useless. I pray this message reaches you before Google adds the Block Future Email button.
Gunpoint is an industrial espionage game with a pair of key mechanics that have no relation to one another.
At the Loch Ness shop in Inverness, you’ll find every kind of Nessie merchandise imaginable. What most tourists fail to notice about the assorted plastic keyrings, bath toys and fridge magnets is that very few of them are manufactured in Scotland. Instead, they’re stamped: Made in China.
Thousands of kilometres away, factories located in Shenzhen and Dongguan in the Guangdong province churn out the souvenirs alongside toys and toasters. It’s a hub of the plastic manufacturing industry, a place where you can have almost anything mass-produced to order.
How To Make A Game continues with Tom Francis, designer, coder and writer of upcoming PC stealth puzzler Gunpoint, on the merits of YoYo Games' Game Maker.
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