This week on “Best Of Indie Games,” we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week. The delights in this edition include a handful of notable entries from the Ludum Dare 23 competition, a browser pick about unlocking achievements, a highlight from Indie Royale’s Spring Bundle, plus a new release from popular Flash game developer Nitrome….
Specified: Gamasutra
[Gamasutra highlights choice quotes from industry figures such as Creative Assembly's Tim Heaton, Sony Santa Monica's Chris Sutton, Naughty Dog's Richard Lemarchand, and many others in this weekly roundup.] In our original and exclusive interviews, analysis, and feature pieces over the past week, a wide variety of developers, publishers, and indies shared their thoughts on horror games, cutting features, gross design, crunch periods, and more….
[In this weekly column, Gamasutra rounds up the most popular paid and free iPad gaming applications on the App Store as of today, with Ski Safari, Angry Birds Space and Logos Quiz Game currently ranking among the platform's top downloads.] This week’s top paid titles are: 1. Ski Safari (Defiant Development, $0.99) 2….
GDC 2012 may have come and gone, but the GDC Vault service is working to keep the show’s spirit alive by debuting new free videos of its most popular lectures. This week, the service has added a handful of free sessions that offer a glimpse at GDC 2012′s notable Summits. This new batch of free content includes the extremely popular ‘Indie Soapbox’ panel, a postmortem from Fruit Ninja developer Halfbrick, an education-focused talk from adventure ……
In a new interview, the Portal designer and Quantum Conundrum creative director explains that “taking advantage of the fact that we’re animals, basically” is the right way to lead players into your design. How do you learn to design a game like Portal? Says Kim Swift, “watching an obscene amount of nature programs as a kid……
Newsbrief: Kenji Hisatsune, who was president and CEO for Namco Bandai Games America before the branch’s restructuring last month, will now lead Square Enix’s North American mobile team. As vice president of Global Mobile Content for Square Enix, Hisatsune will oversee the company’s strategic direction in North America, while also overseeing relationships with its major mobile platform partners in the country….
Over the past several years, Electronic Arts has continued to push its business into the digital sector with web-based social games like The Sims Social and Bejeweled Blitz. The company is currently competing with King.com and Wooga for the number two spot on Facebook, but CEO John Riccitiello thinks the EA has a long way to go before it can compete with a juggernaut like Zynga….
Digital distribution has brought a huge change to the game industry in recent years, enabling developers to distribute games freely without having to rely on a traditional publisher cutting into the profits. But that unlimited virtual “shelf space” comes at a cost: namely, it’s getting harder to stand out amongst the crowd….
Nintendo veteran Shigeru Miyamoto has revealed his thoughts on the PS Vita handheld, Sony’s rival to Nintendo’s own 3DS, stating that, while it’s clearly a powerful device, it’s suffering from the same lack of software that the 3DS also originally saw. “It’s obviously a very hi-spec machine, and you can do lots of things with it,” he told Edge, “but I don’t really see the combination of software and hardware that really makes a very ……
As part of BlackBerry owner RIM’s newly founded focus on the mobile gaming market, the company this week revealed a new standalone app that will act as a social hub and discovery tool for BlackBerry devices and the upcoming BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system. ‘Games’, as the new hub is simply known, will be integrated with BlackBerry Messenger and Scoreloop’s social gaming network, reports Pocket Gamer, and will act as the BlackBerry equivalent to Apple’s ……
