Dev Links: Palatable Patterns

“On July 15, 1983, Nintendo sold its first Famicom.

On today’s Developer Links: 30 years of NES, broken game design and living video games.

The NES turns 30: How it began, worked, and saved an industry(Opposable Thumbs)
“On July 15, 1983, Nintendo sold its first Famicom. Gaming hasn’t been the same since.”

How biotic developers combine microorganisms and video games(Polygon)
“In a few research labs around the world, researchers are combining microscopic organisms and and video games to create living — or “biotic” — video games.”

Video: ‘Broken’ game design – it’s not all bad(IndieGames.com)
“In this free GDC Europe 2011 lecture, the Sportsfriends developer says not to worry about enforcing rules or preventing cheating. Instead, he says to focus on “deputizing” players and shares lessons he has learned from traditional folk games and design research which support this type of play.”

Gentle introduction to Google Analytics in Flash(#AltDevBlogADay)
“Being able to check out how many players play your game, from what countries, for how long, on which levels they have problems, how much points do they score, even do they ever visit your precious Credits screen or the average FPS number – that sounds incredibly useful, doesn’t it? Fortunately, in web browser games, there’s a way to get such informations. In this post I’m going to describe the process for Flash (ActionScript 3), because I’ve recently implemented it in my released game, and can share some experiences.”

An Idea for Making Ailment Abilities Useful in Cosmic Star Heroine(Zeboyd Games)
“In most RPGs, ailment & other forms of non-direct attack abilities are awful. They tend to have a low chance of success that drops even further (or is outright resisted against) when you’re fighting bosses – aka the enemies where ailments would be the most useful. Occasionally, you’ll see a game where these kinds of abilities can be more useful – for example, in some of the Shin Megami Tensei and related games, you can find out which enemies are weak to various ailment elements & then only use those abilities on vulnerable enemies – but in most case it feels like these abilities are a wasted opportunity and everyone just ends up using direct damage & healing spells exclusively (with maybe a buff here and there).”

Giant Robot Game Night Recap(The Behemoth)
“A few of us Behemoth folk drove up to LA on Saturday to check out the Game Night at Giant Robot 2, which featured The Behemoth games on their free-to-play stations: Alien Hominid HD, Castle Crashers XBLA and BattleBlock Theater. We sold some game merchandise in the store for that night only and held a mini BattleBlock Theater ball game tournament outside the store.”

Tutorial: Simple, High-Performance Particles for Mobile(Gamasutra)
“When it comes to game development, is there really a silver bullet? Perhaps, but from what I’ve found, you have to shoot a lot of bullets and shoot ’em fast.”