Have you ever been to the Game Developers Conference? Well, we haven’t, but we’re going to hide in a corner and blame it on third-worldliness or something. But for those who haven’t had the opportunity to go this year, there’s a little text adventure over on GameSetWatch which offers a […]
Yearly Archives: 2009
We’ve covered drawing basic meshes, and we’ve covered the all-important transformation functions. We’ve also covered lighting. Now that we have all these basics down, it’s time to start on some of the nifty tricks that you can pull using what we’ve learned.
3D graphics with Game Maker Part 3
Gather around kids: it’s a story of numbers, statistics and the gaming market! This survey report from Gamasutra seems to be painting a rather droll picture for mobile developers: despite the fact that the mobile gamer base is growing, the percentage of people who are buying said mobile games apparently […]
Mobile game conversion not growing
This article originally appeared in Dev.Mag Issue 21, released in March 2008. One way to populate large worlds with objects is to simply place objects on a grid, or randomly. While fast and easy to implement, both these methods result in unsatisfying worlds: either too regular or too messy. In […]
Poisson Disk Sampling
Retroremakes.com has recently been collecting and summarising its archive of older games (yeah, we get the irony) for some unknown – and probably sinister – purpose. This particular vault collection from 2003 is pretty gosh-darn big and contains remakes of a whole bunch of cool classics, even if the list […]
Retro galore!
A few days ago, we announced the release of Glum Buster, a surreal and rather endearing title created in Game Maker and released to the public under the label of “charityware”. After less than a week on the market, Glum Buster has already reached its first charity milestone and will […]
Glum buster hits charity milestone
Hey, remember back in the day when publishers were basically akin to an entire Greek pantheon’s worth of deities? According to this rather interesting article on Gamesindustry.biz, that’s changing quite rapidly. We recommend that you give this one a read. Not only will it allow smug indie devs to pat […]
Read: The End of Publishing
In the mainstream market there has been a lot of focus on moral dilemmas recently. Bioshock asked its players if they would rather save deformed little girls than bump them off for the ability to set their hands on fire. Fallout 3 wanted to know if greed is enough motivation […]
Mastermind: World Conqueror Review
The way I see it, modern indie development is imbalanced. Not in the way that a foul-tempered DotA player would scream “IMBA!” after getting killed for the fifth time in succession – no, I’m talking more about exposure, attention and who is playing what out there. I’m talking about everyone’s tendency […]
Fighting the Narrow Game Focus
To many developers, the fine art of game creation lies strictly within the domain of the first world. Europe, America and Japan have all been sitting pretty with a very well-developed industry for a while. Other territories have recently hopped onto the bandwagon, of course: we have high-profile offerings such […]
Game Dev from the Dark Continent
After reading up on the latest XNA Creators Club Communiqué (because everything is better with fancy accented letters), it seems that gaming Website IGN is throwing in some weight to help profile and promote some of the better community games out there. The Xbox Live Community Games initiative has received […]
IGN promotes Xbox Community Games
So, we’ve been keeping a close watch on the recent TIGSource Cockpit Competition (the theme of which was, funnily enough, cockpits) and now the results have been somewhat unofficially released. Emerging as the winner is Enviro-Bear 2000. This is possibly one of the most stupid games in existence. And we […]
Cockpit Competition Closes
We’d admittedly never heard of Glum Buster until a few days ago when it was posted on the IndieGames blog as a freeware game pick. Even then, we didn’t pay overly much attention to it until it was reviewed on TIGSource as well, at which point we decided to get […]
Glum Buster
This article originally appeared in Dev.Mag Issue 27, released in November 2008. SpaceHack is one of two Game.Dev DreamBuildPlay 2008 entries. It eventually placed among the top 20finalists in the competition. The following is a discourse by one of the game’s two creators about the creation process and the story […]