Firaxis Games co-founder and Civilization creator Sid Meier expanded the minds of GDC attendees by talking about the psychology of game design and breaking some bad news to us. Everything we know, Meier argues, is wrong.
The biggest winner of them all was Zombiecow's Time Gentlemen, Please! that won Best Game, Best Gameplay, Best Dialogue Writing, and Best Non-Player Character.
The full list of results can be found on the AGS Awards 2009 wiki page.
A group of successful independent developers has come together to form a new funding source for budding small scale developers named "Indie Fund".
According to the Indie Fund website, "it was established as a serious alternative to the traditional publisher funding model. Our aim is to support the growth of games as a medium by helping indie developers get financially independent and stay financially independent".
The fund is already backing a number of indie projects which will be announced in the future. The group is currently overwhelmed with requests and doesn't take new applications until a proper process for applying will be in place.
King's Quest fans might remember Phoenix Online Studios, a group of independent developers, announcing a fan game based on the popular franchise, which they named "King's Quest IX: Every Cloak Has A Silver Lining".
In 2005 the group received a Cease & Desist letter from Vivendi Universal, the owners of the King's Quest IP. After a few months a deal was made with Vivendi, resulting in the project being reinstated and renamed to "The Silver Lining".
We haven't heard a lot since then, but today we learned that the project was killed. Again.
Vivendi merged with Activision somewhere in 2008, resulting in the King's Quest IP changing hands. As stated in the press release published on Phoenix Online's website, Activision has no interest in a special agreement and demands the team to cease production.
The director of Final Fantasy XIII doesn't want you to think his game takes players along a straight, boring line, and instead says any linearity is actually a good thing.
"Welcome back! Last time I bitched about old-school adventure game interfaces and tried to convince people to throw them out the window. Today I?'m going to give an example of how I futzed around with the interface of my game, Resonance, adding a layer of potential complexity to the puzzles while keeping the interface simple, fast, and intuitive."
Student project-turned-commercial release The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom has arrived on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace, and boy is it stunning. "Stunning" really is the only way to sum it up. There is no other description that applies: it's simple, it's sweet, it's strange, and it never stops being fun.
After the best month in its history, the video game industry in January returned to the pattern it followed throughout 2009: sharp year-over-year monthly declines. According to a report Thursday from industry analyst, The NPD Group, video game sales across the board were $1.17 billion in January, down 13 percent from $1.34 billion a year earlier. Hardware sales were worst hit, down 21 percent year-over-year, while software was down 12 percent.
At A Hardy Developer's Journal, Jan Jacob Mekesbegins a series of articles about creating a believable history and interesting backstories for your game world. It might seem not such a complicated process at first, but it's easy to make bad choices that will influence everything.
Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced his resignation via a Twitter haiku late Wednesday, adding a poetic flourish to the end of his company.
Joshua Nuernberger has released the first trailer for his upcoming indie adventure Boryokudan Rue. The game is being developed with the AGS engine and is one of the Independent Games Festival 2010 Student Showcase winners.
Boryokudan Rue is a tale of science-fiction mixed with film-noir, following two separate, while interweaving stories. First, you play as Azriel Odin, a regretful cop en route to planet Barracus to meet and extract a mysterious defector trying to escape from the notorious crime group, the Boryokudan. Second, you play as Delta-Six, an amnesiac patient in a sterilized facility, who must survive and escape in order to find out why he is there.
Vince Twelve, the developer behind the much anticipated indie adventure Resonance, has posted a very analytical and in-depth game design article about creating interfaces for adventure games.
In the indie and amateur space, you see a lot of classic Sierra or Lucas Arts verb interfaces. That's because these come built-in to the most commonly used freeware engine and also because a lot of the hobbyist developers are at least partially aiming to satisfy their nostalgia by recreating the games of yore. Commercial titles <...> tend to stick closer to the two button interact/examine or interact/walk system plus an inventory. These interfaces are tried and tested. Why mess with them?
The AGS awards is a returning event where the best games, made with the Adventure Game Studio engine, are selected by the engine's community members. The organizers behind this yearly event have just released the nominees for 2009.
Voting will start in a few days, according to this official forum thread at the AGS website.
In the days when games were created by just one man, David Crane was a superstar.
The market for home videogame machines was just beginning to flourish in the late ’70s, when Crane was singlehandedly cranking out groundbreaking games for the Atari 2600 console, which was practically the only game in town.
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