Dev Links: Writer’s Block

“Courtesy of GDC Vault, this free GDC 2013 video shows The Stanley Parable’s Davey Wreden, Spelunky XBLA’s Andy Hull, and Loot Drop designer James Lantz offering unique lessons to expand creative game design.

Today’s Developer Linksinclude articles on polishing what you have, mixing music, and sensationalist headlines regarding RAM.

Video: three indies exploring creativity in game design(IndieGames.com)
“Courtesy of GDC Vault, this free GDC 2013 video shows The Stanley Parable’s Davey Wreden, Spelunky XBLA’s Andy Hull, and Loot Drop designer James Lantz offering unique lessons to expand creative game design. The aptly named “creatrilogy” session includes Hull’s “good kind of stealing” and other wooden toy design tips applicable to games, Lantz’s 4 different directions to go with genre innovation, and Wreden’s 14-tip “tool set for evoking creativity in game design.””

Strattonian Gambit(#AltDevBlogADay)
“After a 1 year hiatus from the site (including a bit of crunch), I thought I’d try to start making videos again. Hopefully I can also finish a bunch of the almost dones and post them as well. I apologize in advance for how hastily I threw this together.”

Polishing what you have(Positech Games)
“I sometimes think indie game developers get a little bit carried away with new features. They cram in new stuff, in an excited and passionate way, without stopping to think that they should probably get last weeks feature working better first.”

This is how we mix music for Luxuria Superbia(Tale of Tales)
“We built a tool in Unity to work with the more than 100 looping music tracks that Walter Hus composed for the game. The engine behind it synchronizes all tracks with each other (well, actually with a silent master track running all the time).”

Australian government to give $6M over three years to indie devs(Polygon)
“The Australian government is pledging $6 million over the next three years to 10 different indie studios, amid declines in revenue and employment for the country’s game industry, Screen Australia announced today.”

Tales from the Dev Side: XNA, XBLIG, and Me by Michael Neel(Indie Gamer Chick)
“In November 2008, the same month Xbox Live Community Games launched, I organized a geek dinner. I wanted to make sure there was some real geekery involved, so two days before the dinner I downloaded Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio. Until that weekend I had never developed a game.”

Crypt Run alpha 0.0.95(Lost Decade Games)
“We’ve been working hard! Here’s the massive changelog since the last version of Crypt Run you’ve played.”

That RAM…(Brian Provinciano)
“We can’t go into specifics about stuff like that, but I’ll say that if you go by Eurogamer’s article “update”, it would show that PS4 provides at least as much RAM to the developer as the XB1. While Eurogamer updated theirs, Game Informer still has their sensationalist headline “PlayStation 4 Reserves Nearly Half Of RAM For OS” up, a headline which was poor even at the time of the initial rumor. While the article itself does say “slightly more than its competitor”, the headline is what the majority of people will ever see. This is a problem. This caused problems.”