In most multiplayer video games, you’re on equal footing with your opponents. You’re on the same map, with the same moves and tools, and the more skilled player will theoretically win. That’s not the case with Spy Party, a two-player game where each player’s role couldn’t be more different.
I played several different games at the Game Developers Conference last week, but I only ate one of them.
Here at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, there’s an increasing momentum for the action that game developers have whispered about for decades: Unionization.
Fun fact: there’s an entire company dedicated to helping game developers create believable trees. SpeedTree offers developers a huge library of trees as well as tools that let them quickly make their own, and its tech has appeared in everything from The Witcher 3 to Forza to Destiny. Which video game trees are the…
Epic flew a bunch of Twitch streamers out to GDC to stream Fortnite on a big screen. And ride a mechanical llama. Streamer Pookieface told me that the experience has been kinda nerve-wracking, but she eventually found her groove and won a victory royale, to big crowd applause. “It’s more of an adrenaline rush, and you…
The puzzles in The Room series are equal parts captivating and haunting, but they have just one problem: you can’t use them to kill anybody after you’ve solved them. The Bard’s Tale IV takes its inspiration from The Room, but with weapons instead of rooms.
Nintendo’s latest Zelda adventure followed up its win at the 2017 Game Awards with GOTY honours at tonight’s Game Developers Choice Awards, held as part of the 2018 Game Developers Conference.
At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Jason Schreier and I sat down with Aaryn Flynn, formerly of BioWare, to talk about his time working under EA on games like Dragon Age: Inquisition and Anthem.
Harold Halibut is an adventure game where everything is handmade. “Almost every object you see in the game exists in real life,” one of the game’s developers told me during an Xbox event at GDC yesterday. The demo I played felt like a streamlined take on standard point-and-click adventuring (with some worrisomely…
What The Golf is my favorite game of GDC so far. Its developers assert that golf is boring, so they’ve made tons of tiny levels that turn the sport on its head. The game is riotously funny. In one level, I scored a “hole-in-one” by launching a typical golf hole into a giant 1-shaped crater. Another gave me, playing as…
Game Workers Unite is a fledgling effort to get game devs unionized that’s formed around this year’s GDC. The organization was born of discussion surrounding an upcoming roundtable on unionization to be hosted by the International Game Developers Association, which has expressed controversial views on the subject in…
Sign of the times. As I emerged from a panel at GDC in San Francisco, I saw a huge line that wrapped around itself, easily the biggest I’ve seen at GDC so far. Curious, I decided to see which presentation it was for. The sign at the door read “Making Indie Games That Sell.”
The 21st D.I.C.E. Awards—voted on by over 30,000 members of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences—just wrapped up in Vegas, and among the winners are Breath of the Wild, Horizon Zero Dawn and Cuphead.
A day after saying it would give Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell its 2018 Pioneer Award, the organizers of the Game Developers Conference have pulled the award, saying they will now award it to no one. The quick change followed 18 hours of outcry about Bushnell’s alleged unsavory behavior toward female Atari…
Here’s the full recording of Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and Takuhiro Dohta’s talk about Breath of the Wild from last week’s Game Developers Conference.
Overwatch’s newest hero, Orisa, isn’t what you’d call, er, typical. She’s a quadrupedal robo-tank with horns, and she kinda came out of nowhere. In creating her, Blizzard faced some unique challenges.
It’s well-documented that Tracer was Overwatch’s first playable hero, but before the game was ever playable, another character helped hammer out Overwatch’s identity. Surprisingly, it was Torbjorn.
GDC’s “alt.ctrl.gdc” section is a lawless land unified only by a single question: “why not?” It’s living proof that anything can be a game controller if you just believe hard enough. And while many of the games on display can be gimmicky, Objects in Space feels like a game I’d play even without all the extra hardware.
The Game Developer’s Choice Awards were last night, and you’ll be shocked to learn Overwatch won “Game of the Year.” But there were other awards too, because there are other games. There are games besides Overwatch you guys.
At the Game Developers Conference in March, Bungie’s David Candland gave a really cool talk about the evolution of Destiny’s UI. Among other things, he showed a bunch of prototype menu screens, and also explained the complicated process of fine-tuning a video game interface.
