1 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.
1 
6 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.
Quadtrees: Implementation
2 Two Dev.Mag writers share their board game design experiences: conception, design, production, playtesting.
Board Silly (Tabletop Game Design)
3 This article shows how to implement a simple graphical logging system to find errors in physics, AI and animation faster.
Using graphs to debug physics, AI, and animation effectively
24 In this article, the Dave Russell introduces the basic concepts of diegesis theory in video game interface design.
Video game user interface design: Diegesis theory
3 South African game developers share what skills they think are important for budding game developers.
Top skills to become a game developer: what South African ...
9 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.
Make your logs interactive and squash bugs faster
42 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.
11 Tips for making a fun platformer
I don’t think that the roguelike genre is particularly renowned for its storytelling. This isn’t to say that roguelikes are particularly crappy at this sort of thing, it’s just that designers tend to focus on other things which players usually appreciate more — providing games which are praised for their […]
Where We Remain
I think it would be nigh unforgivable to skip out on mentioning the recent IGF awards, even if such a mention is a little later than most. After finally getting a chance to sit down and watch some juicy bits of the awesome video, I decided to post a quick […]
IGF winners announced
Our local homies at Luma Arcade (swell buncha folks)
XNA on phones, full 3D promised – really
Look! More stuff comin’ from sunny SA. Bounty Arms is a side-scrolling platformer thingum, made with the recently released Unreal Development Kit, and has been under development for quite some time. But just today, the developers have just released a playable demo. It’s quite a hefty download, be warned, and […]
Local pretties – Bounty Arms
Look, here I am again, trying to get you to spend money. Don’t you just love me? No? Well you should, because it was just Vamlumtimes Day and that’s what you’re supposed to do, I’m told. Anyway, this is all beside the point, because there are a whole bunch of […]
Valentines gifts?
So I was poking around on Twitter today (Digsby, thank you for making the Internet tidy again!) when I saw mention of an IGF student entry called Continuity. Armed with a decent Internet connection and high spirits, I decided that now was the time to spread my wings and get […]
Continuity
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.