This article gives a brief tutorial to XNA, a set of game development tools from Microsoft. The tutorial covers the basics of drawing a sprite, playing sound, and handling input.
Mar 032011
This is the first part of an in-depth look at the design of Desktop Dungeons, the South African game that won the Excellence for Design Award at the IGF. In this part, we look at the player actions, choices, and tension.
Feb 232011
Quadtrees are 2D data structures, useful for efficient representation of 2D data (such as images), and lookup in a 2D space. This is a simple implementation tutorial.
Two Dev.Mag writers share their board game design experiences: conception, design, production, playtesting.
This article shows how to implement a simple graphical logging system to find errors in physics, AI and animation faster.
In this article, the Dave Russell introduces the basic concepts of diegesis theory in video game interface design.
Text files can be messy when logging events from games. In this article, Herman Tulleken shows you how to use HTML, CSS and JavaScript to build visually informative logs that make debugging easier.
Jan 182011
This article gives handy tips for designing and building a platformer. There are tips for designing the interface, handling jumping and collision boundaries of goodies and baddies, implementing AI, and other ways to make a fun game.
Two things are key to becoming a great game designer: making games, and playing games. In this article, Rodain Joubert extracts and explains three game design lessons from playing Dungeon Crawl that revolves around difficulty, providing meaningful decisions, and removing tedium from the game interface.
I have a weak spot for cool game development tools. Not the IDE, or art or sound tools – I mean the level editors, AI construction tools – those that developers develop specifically for their games. Those that you know could help you multiply your content, and craft your game just a little bit better.
When you sit down to write a book, one of the most important things to bear in mind is the shaping and formation of your expression: if you can elegantly express in a single sentence what a lesser writer would need a paragraph to evoke, then you’ve got yourself a talent for writing. Good journalism, [...]
Aug 252009
This tutorial covers basic algorithms with vectors.
Welcome to the Starting Small series. The aim of this series is to take a programming language that you hopefully know a bit about (enough to feel comfortable using) or that you want to try out and show you how to use it to make games. The language that this tutorial focuses on is Python [...]
Aug 122009
Geometry plays a central role in game programming, underlying not only graphics, but also physics and spatial AI. A lot has happened since geometry was first formalised by the Greeks more than two thousand years ago, most notably the invention of coordinates and vectors. These inventions are indispensible for doing geometry on machines (at least, [...]
This article originally appeared on NAG Online. Code in Python, go to outer space. A simple process, really. Do you really, really want to become a game programmer? Do you really, really have no idea how to start? Try some Python! This easy and simple programming language is not just a great springboard for people [...]
With the recent surfacing of the Game Maker 8 open beta, I felt duty-bound to download the tool and give it a whirl to see what’s improved over previous versions. It turns out that there’re quite a lot of tweaks in the new release: some of them are purely aesthetic, while others shake the system [...]
Being in the process of developing a game that has a web of interconnected rules and... } – 
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