Have you ever wondered how anyone was able to create that magical cursor in the World of Goo? Wonder no more, noble Dev.Mag reader, for this article will explain how you can put that gooey cursor into your game, in just 15 minutes. We will be using Game Maker Pro […]
Monthly Archives: April 2009
Think game design is about hard code and gameplay? Well, it can’t be denied that those things play some of the most important parts in making up a game – but to make a game that’s truly something special, you’re going to have to exercise that creative muscle and let […]
Narrative: Part 2
It’s rare that a fresh concept is exceptionally implemented in its first incarnation, but that is exactly what Miktar Dracon has accomplished with Blastion. Taking the idea of racking up points with limited lives and flipping it on its head, Blastion’s gameplay is quite unlike anything else in recent memory. […]
Blastion Review
Earlier this year, three noble South Africans participated remotely in the annual Global Game Jam in a quest for truth, glory and really rapid game development. Teams all over the world were given 48 hours to make a game using a handful of keywords and whatever tools they could get their […]
Jamming in 48 hours
Being part of an active game development forum, I often stumble across works in progress from fellow enthusiastic devs. This in itself is pretty great. The problem – and I’ll confess to this openly – is that I often skip over projects which are only in the concept stage: you […]
Being a show-off?
This article originally appeared in Dev.Mag Issue 28, released in January 2009. Many of you have experienced it. You go online, log into your instant messenger or e-mail account and receive a link from some excited friend saying, “ARARRRAARARR PLAY THIS GAME ASBFLARGAFAG www.insertrandomlinkhere.com!!!!!” Chances are it’s either an Internet […]
Flash for Free
We’ve accosted indie developer Derek Yu, creator of Aquaria – which we covered extensively in the past – for a chat on his new creation, Spelunky, a unique blend of the replayability of roguelikes and the immediacy of platformers. All this goes well together with our review on the game […]
Speaking about Spelunky
This article originally appeared in Dev.Mag Issue 27, released in November 2008. Anybody who’s played Introversion’s seminal strategy/action game Darwinia will know the joys of having thousands of little flat men marching across the map in a long green column, leaving the glittering red digital souls of dead virii in […]
Multiwinia
This article originally appeared in Dev.Mag Issue 28, released in January 2009 When one talks about the development of episodic games, there are normally two distinct advantages that get touted. The first is a steady cash flow. The other is the ability to iteratively improve on the game as each […]
PAA: Episode 2
This article originally appeared in Dev.Mag Issue 24, released in August 2008. In most games, the opening cutscene generally consists of hints of a dark secret, a terrible evil that must be vanquished lest it destroy the world. This first episode of the Penny Arcade Adventures series of episodic games […]