DICE general manager Karl Magnus Troedsson has hit back at industry "naysayers" proclaiming the death of console gaming in the face of a growing mobile market.
Rarely has a game simultaneously asked so much yet so little of its players. Nimblebit’s molasses-paced follow-up to Tiny Tower requires a significant time investment, a lot of patience and a tremendous amount of willpower not to spend money on hurrying things along. Yet your input is reduced to the occasional handful of taps, the majority of your time spent waiting for something to happen.
Revolution Software’s Charles Cecil kicked off this year’s GameHorizon conference in Gateshead by welcoming the uncertain game industry landscape, saying it plays into the hands of smaller developers.
Of all the tools and languages we discussed with members of the videogame industry while putting this feature together – including indie developers, course leaders and studio managers – nearly everyone mentioned C++. The object-oriented programming language is ubiquitous and continues to underpin the game industry, despite a broadening range of available platforms and development environments that compile code on your behalf and are lowering the barrier to entry.
Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada has hit out at "whining and complaining" fans who repeatedly call for voice samples from the early games to be used in the upcoming Tekken Tag Tournament 2.
Spread across the neighbouring UK south coast towns of Bournemouth and Poole, Bournemouth University offers a BSc in games technology and an MSc in computer games technology. In addition to these two courses, The School Of Design Engineering & Computing also offers a BSc in music and audio technology, which covers C++ programming, making it ideal for musicians with a specific interest in the game industry.
When approaching Adult Swim’s latest arcade time-waster, it’s hard not to suspect that the name came first, and the mechanics were then constructed to fit around it. Who cares? Velocirapture’s sugary and simple: a heavenly spin on basketball played with vengeful deities and huge 1950s-styled dinosaurs. It draws you in after your first few taps of the screen, and it’s smart enough to keep things brief, topping off a short campaign with an endless mode and a limited selection of unlockables.
Throughout this week we're publishing an extensive interview with Trip Hawkins, founder of EA, The 3DO Company, and Digital Chocolate.
This could well be one of the most subversive shooters yet made. That doesn’t say very much: vaulting the bar set by other entrants to the genre is hardly an Olympic feat. Nonetheless, Spec Ops: The Line deploys the crude ordnance of thirdperson carnage to persecute more formidable targets: war, soldiering, American interventionism, and the depiction of those things within videogames.
Organisers of Evo 2K12, the biggest and most prestigious fighting game tournament in the world, have announced that 10 indie games will be playable at this year's event, which takes place next month in Las Vegas.
The demonstration starts and there’s nothing onscreen bar a wall of white. It’s impossible to tell the game has even loaded. There are no markers or displays; even the environment is missing. Then Ian Dallas, Giant Sparrow designer and co-founder, pulls the trigger on his gamepad and a black bead of paint sails through the air, leaving a splatter ahead of us as our first reference point.
Two British filmmakers have launched an Indiegogo campaign in a bid to fund From Bedrooms To Billions, a documentary about the UK videogame industry from 1979 to 1996.
In an interview, Anthony Caulfield - whose partner in the project is his wife, Nicola - explains that the pair have been working on From Bedrooms To Billions, on and off, for four years. It's an ambitious endeavour, telling a story spanning 17 years in just 90 minutes, with a third act set in the present day.
Teesside University has worked closely with Reflections, a Ubisoft studio, over the past 12 years, the developer taking students (the current body of which you can see gathered above) for work placements during sandwich years, advising on course content and providing project feedback.
The relationship led initially to Reflections’ sponsorship of Teesside’s Vis Awards – which recognised the achievements of students on the university’s game-related courses – with Reflections judging work and offering four six-month paid internships as prizes.
Electronic Arts is 30 years old, and there is no denying that the publisher casts a long shadow of influence over the entire industry. The company, founded in May 1982, pioneered a business model that treated game designers like rock stars and software publishers like record labels. It pushed the use of big names and big licenses in sports (think Madden, NFL) and soon grew to gobble up many renowned development studios to become a massive entertainment conglomerate.
The University of Hull has a deep connection with early gaming technology, given emeritus professor George Gray’s discovery of one of the essential components for LCD displays during the ‘60s. So we have Hull to thank, in part, for Nintendo’s Game & Watch handhelds. Nowadays, Hull continues to directly contribute to the industry not just through its graduates, but also via an in-house development company called SEED, where students can get a taste of what studio work is like.
The University of Hull has a deep connection with early gaming technology, given emeritus professor George Gray’s discovery of one of the essential components for LCD displays during the ‘60s. So we have Hull to thank, in part, for Nintendo’s Game & Watch handhelds. Nowadays, Hull continues to directly contribute to the industry not just through its graduates, but also via an in-house development company called SEED, where students can get a taste of what studio work is like.
The unrelenting pace of the videogame industry means it isn’t an easy partner for the necessarily more ponderous world of higher education. It’s a disconnect that any external observer could be forgiven for thinking was easily rectifiable, given that the cutting-edge games of the past couple of generations have taken just as long as a bachelor’s degree, if not longer, to complete.
[INT. Tense boardroom of a social game giant, Clickathon, in Q3 2015.]
CEO: We're getting killed out there. Those damn console manufacturers have taken back way more market share than anyone expected with their high-fallutin' new consoles - our customers are queuing up to give them money. Most of all, that pesky publisher SegSoft is hoovering up our revenue with their free-to-play firstperson shooters, made by that super developer GunMans. We need a plan.
Public exposure to the videogame industry is at an all-time high in the UK. The government’s recent reform of the National Curriculum will allow students to be taught computer science over the much-maligned ICT; powerful game creation tools like Unity and GameMaker are cheap to try and easy to use, while commercial releases now routinely include extensive level editors; and then there are projects like the $25 PC Raspberry Pi, and high-profile contests such as Epic Games’ Make Something Unreal jam, which concluded at public consumer electronics event The Gadget Show Live.
Applying to work for Electronic Arts, a huge multinational developer and publisher, may seem like a daunting task for those starting out in their career. But while the corporate façade might be one of dizzying scale, the studios that compose this well-oiled machine are approachable, have distinctive personalities, and in many cases are proud of their ‘small-studio’ mentality.
Nintendo Of America president Reggie Fils-Aime has defended the company's performance at E3 2012, has said he is "troubled tremendously" by core gamers' "insatiable" appetite for new announcements.