Notes on Game Dev

Just when I believed my attention span was shot and I didn’t have it in me to commit to a role-playing game…. I picked up Tales of Vesperia on the Xbox 360...

All Environment Artists work slightly differently, partly to fulfill their own role or specialty and also as a result of personal preferences...

The role of the Environment Artist is to help create an immersive 3D world in which the game takes place. Usually taking up the majority of the screen space during play, the environment graphics are a very important aspect of the games visuals...

A panic is fermenting among established men of letters. “Video games will kill the narrative!” they say, and shut their eyes and ears against the perils of lions and tigers and video game writers, oh my...

Now don’t lose me here. There is a good side to being a Quality Assurance tester, despite my long list of bad things in the first part of this series. If you want to be in QA, there is light at the end of this tunnel. And hey, I’ve been in QA all this time, so there must be reasons that I stay...

Do you want a QA Testing job really bad? Does the idea of playing games all day and getting paid for it your glamorous dream job? Do you want to see you name in lights with the latest video game hit? Are you insane...

Or otherwise titled, “Nine Things I Wish I Knew (Before I Went Indie and Made Two Hit Games).” There was a day, four years ago, when I was not a media whore. I’ve been indie for almost four years now. As the sole full-time member of Pocketwatch Games, I tend to do a little bit of everything...

I can’t remember when I first heard of design patterns. It was several years ago, I’m sure, but my awareness of them was a somewhat gradual buildup, not unlike the sudden dawning that the boss is calling my name while I’ve been daydreaming during a meeting...

Jenova Chen, creator behind the multi award-winning student game Cloud and flOw, co-founder of thatgamecompany, is dedicated to expanding the emotional spectrum of video games and making them available for a much wider audience. And how did Jenova “make it” as an independent developer...

Tamir Nadav, formerly a programmer who has marked his path out as a game designer at KingsIsle, has been involved in the industry for over 5 years with his enthusiastic networking abilities...

Before making art for Flash games, I spent 9 years working on PlayStation titles in the console games industry. When I first started in games it was fun—teams were small and games were done in 12 months. Usually you had a lot of control over how your levels looked...

On my personal scale video game art and the impressiveness of its implementation are easily rated. I’ll tell you now that it is a personal scale—not anything based in numbers or calculations and yet I believe it is relevant...

So where does someone now considered an industry “veteran” go when they fancy a break from “games”? It wasn’t that I’d stopped enjoying working on games, more that I had a sudden overwhelming urge to do something “worthy” with what I’d learned over the last 16 years...

Mythic isn’t bad, they’re just a victim of genre. Jen MacLean, Chairperson of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) and VP of Business Development at 38 Studios, recently set the record straight about the Mythic Warhammer Online credits controversy...

I get emails from 3D modelers, animators and other artists now and then. Based on my very scientific research (that would be bunch of emails) I could estimate that 50% of the emails I get have no sample links. Some send me extremely long emails explaining their history since they were born...

For all of you independent game developers out there, it ain’t always easy finding funding, especially for avant garde or experimental games. That’s where GCube Ventures, an investment firm for interactive entertainment, steps in...

Ready for a Retro-Future with customizable characters and a wide range of new creative “homemade weapons” to blast away your nuclear waste enemies? The time is almost here! But until then, there’s a range of concept art and sneak peek screenshots...

The Austin Game Developers Conference unofficially began on Sunday night, September 14th, as many attendees met with specialized groups in various bars around downtown Austin. If you have ever wondered how to go about networking yourself with industry professionals, this is it...

Independent game development is, by and large, a solitary activity. Collaborations take place across countries, and even if your team is in the same city, chances are you communicate mostly by email. Consequently, I know other developers mostly by their games...

Although we specialize in game art and design, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk with Blaine Christine, Producer at BioWare Austin...

This weekend, Electronic Arts Inc. released Spore, the next game from Will Wright, designer of SimCity and The Sims...

There are a lot of “Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games” (MMORPGs) on the market. They are games whose center focus is the leveling of the player’s character...

In 1977, kids were listening to Rush, smoking cigarettes and a few of the lucky ones had even gotten to second base with the girls, all of which left Bioshock creator Ken Levine wondering “where am I at this point?” Well last week thousands knew exactly where he was as we gathered for his...