Dev Links: Taking A Break

“The game industry has undergone massive changes since its inception with rapid technological changes and new platforms transforming games from the motion of a handful of pixels into realistic 3D open-world simulations.

Today’s Developer Linksfeature pieces on marketing your game, deathmatch map design and the glorious voxel.

Design for Marketing: A Manifesto([a]list daily)
“The game industry has undergone massive changes since its inception with rapid technological changes and new platforms transforming games from the motion of a handful of pixels into realistic 3D open-world simulations. Until the last few years, though, the same basic business model has driven game design, development and marketing for decades: Create a game, put it in a package and sell it at a retail store.”

Meet the voxel, the pixel’s long-lost cousin, and why it became videogames’ Betamax(KillScreen)
“Cube World is how all modern video games would look if the voxels had won. The distinguishing feature is not the rolling countryside that stretches to the sky, not the sheer size of it all. (A criticism of the alpha is that while endless, there’s little to do.) The thing that stands out is the eye-candy. True to its name, the world is built of millions of tiny chunky uniform blocks, like the sugar cubes you arranged in the shape of a Final Fantasy airship for the 5th grade science fair.”

Deathmatch Map Design: The Architecture of Flow(Gamasutra)
“Over the lifespan of the current generation of game consoles, the first person shooter, or FPS, has risen to become one of the most popular genres among Western audiences. Budgets of the best-selling series have swollen to eight figures to meet public demand for ever-more visceral simulacra of wars contemporary and futuristic. (Historic settings have fallen out of favor.)”

Infinitely Close #Screenshotsaturday(Terry Cavanagh)
“Been back working on this for three weeks now. Maybe it’s time I said something about it? I feel like talking about this one is jinxing it a little…”

Life can be better (part 3 of 3)(AltDevBlog)
“The first article of this series briefly covered some of the quality of life issues that I’ve seen during the ten years I have been a part of the video game industry. The previous article was a deep dive into my own personal experience of burnout and depression and what it took me to regain my own health, vitality, and enthusiasm for the work that we all do. In this final article, I take a look at conditions of the work environment, share some practical things that I do to conserve willpower throughout the day, talk a bit about how I get quality sleep, and tie up some loose ends with the series.”

I sense some incoming preorders…(Winter Wolves)
“First let me introduce the last two party-member characters of the Seasons Of The Wolf RPG.”

Feedback Friday: Shark Rider 0.22(Arges Systems)
“For this version, I wanted to do a bit of an experiment on our end to see how long it would take us to do some character alternates, since I plan to have a “kill book” where you can collect the various enemies you have encountered. This build contains alternate version for the Bunny, the Cactus and the Unicorn.”

Cosmic Star Heroine – Unity Engine Status Report(Zeboyd Games)
“I’ve been working on getting our new RPG engine up and running on Unity for Cosmic Star Heroine and thought some of you might be interested in hearing how that’s going.”