Dev Links: Getting Together

“FEZ was released a year ago today.

Today’s Developer Linksinclude a birthday for Fez, a postmortem for Fingle and more.

What Do You Mean It’s Been A Year?!?!(Polytron)
“FEZ was released a year ago today. A fact i find impossible to believe. But i’ve checked the calendar. I’ve done the math, and it adds up.”

A Fast, Type-safe & Minimal String Formatting Library, miniformat(#AltDevBlogADay)
“The inspiration for this came from tinyformat. Unfortunately it relies on the C++ iostream, basically std::cout, which is somewhat slow and definitely not everyone’s favorite. So I bit the bullet and got around to implement my own with minimal dependency and speed in mind.”

Postmortem: Game Oven’s intimate finger twisting Fingle(IndieGames.com)
“A year before Fingle’s release, Bojan and I had just finished a game on a big multi-touch table that invited people to play at the same time on the same device. We were showcasing the game at some event and I noticed that when people would accidentally touch each others hands, they would immediately back-off and be like ‘ewww, I touched someone’s hands!’. This was Fingle’s initial inspiration and eventually its common awkward response.”

ModJam Day 1: Ideas and Teams(Unknown Worlds)
“Games can take a long time to make. Mixing sound, art, gamecode, environments, and user-interfaces is a process that takes lots of time. Natural Selection 2 is a prime example – It took six years to make, and six months since launch UWE is still not done with it!”

Colonies, Events and Regions(Purple Orange Games)
“So we have been busy this last month working hard on our prototype. Please do keep in mind that this is a very early UI, I (The developer) have been coding a lot of stuff so I didn’t have that much time to refine the UI yet.”

Thumbs up for the Game of the Month!(Instant Kingdom)
“This is too cool not to mention: Driftmoon was picked out as PC/Mac game of the Month (March 2013) by www.gamezebo.com Would you know it, we beat Simcity!”

Go Home Dinosaurs! Review(Zeboyd Games)
“Go Home Dinosaurs! is a tower defense game with a Tetris-twist. You see, each of your “towers” has a certain shape to it and you’re only able to place them where you have enough room on the level map, thus forcing the player to mix up their strategies from level to level. In addition to your towers, you also have an avatar who can move around the map to collect coconuts (your tower-buying currency), act as a weak mobile tower, and who can be temporarily upgraded with power-ups if you need a sudden burst of power to take down a particularly difficult wave of dinosaurs. The visuals are clean and colorful, the music is inoffensive, and the voices of your fighting force are mildly funny at first before becoming annoying (but luckily, you can turn them off).”

iamagamer inaugural game jam to focus on female protagonists(Polygon)
“iamagamer will host its first 48-hour game jam for 150 developers, designers, artists and students to create games starring female characters, the organization announced via press release. The game jam is a response to a Gamasutra article that discussed the difficulties of featuring female protagonists. iamagamer, which organizes game jams around social causes, will attempt to dispute the idea that video games with female leads won’t sell well.”