Issue 1 Of Indie Games Developer Magazine Out Now - It's Free!

For all you aspiring game developer/designers, there's a new game dev mag in town... well at least on the internet. Indie Games Developer Magazine is now available, and it's free! You can download it or view it online(it's on Flash 10). The mag is supported by the indie game development community and has a bunch of handy tips which you'd definitely want to check out. It's great that indies now have a nice resource in the form of a developer magazine.

CryEngine 3 SDK Now Available For Free

For non commercial use that is. Crytek has done the wise thing and released the SDK(that's Software Development Kit) for CryEngine 3(the engine that powers Crysis 2) for free. Certainly Epic and Valve has seen the benefit of releasing free dev tools which modders can use to make games which in turn can become successful games on their own. Fancy yourself a game designer? You can get a hold of the CryEngine 3 SDK here. Currently it is not available just yet... but very soon.

Gabe Newell Says No To Source Engine 2 - More Prudent To Iterate On Source

Here I was, speculating that Half Life: Episode 3 might actually be made into Half Life 3 using a new Source engine. It turns out that the second half of my speculation might not turn out to be true. Gabe Newell, speaking to Develop, said that it is more prudent to continually iterate on the Source engine than to build a completely brand new engine from scratch. “There are lot of advantages on iterating on a mature and stable and shipped codebase, as opposed to starting over again” he said. He added “I think, when you see a game like DOTA 2, you’ll see how developers can get a lot more out of Source than most companies can get from a scratch-built engine.” He explained that the way Source is set up, they could iterate by adding new modules and even update the rendering technology of the engine. It is very likely Valve will be sticking with Source for a long time to come. You can read the excerpt to the full length feature in Develop Magazine on their online site here

Source: VG247, Develop

Erik Wolpaw Talks Portal 2

Portal 2 writer, Erik Wolpaw gave this lecture for the New York University’s Game Center series of talks. It’s as good as being there, you can watch him in the video below, talking about the development of the game and some ideas that didn’t quite make it. It’s an hour plus video that’s worth watching. Video below…

Will Wright Talks On Video Games & Learning

Will Wright has always been a big proponent for gaming and play as educational tools. In this talk he gave for the Summit on Science, Technology and education, he describes how the medium has evolved over time and the tremendous possibilities to learn from gaming. It’s a 20 minute talk and Will is as usual very entertaining and funny. Watch it below…

Bioshock Infinite Panel Video From PAX East 2011

Ken Levine and designers from Irrational Games talk about the process of crafting the world of Bioshock Infinite. The panel, hosted by Gamers With Jobs Julian Murdoch, is a rare glimpse into the minds of the creators of Bioshock and what they are aiming for with Infinite. If you’re looking forward to Bioshock Infinite and would like some information to how these guys are building Infinite, check this video out…

Tom Chatfield's 7 Ways Games Reward The Brain

Tom Chatfield, writer of the book Fun Inc, gave a talk on the TED conference on how we can learn from the way video games reward players and use them for real life applications. There’s some really interesting insight into how some of the mechanics in games tap into the built in neurological constructs of the evolutionary human brain. Video after the jump…

Former 1up Show Producers Back In Business With A New Show

The former 1up show crew is back at what they do best. Video game shows. The series is call CO-OP and you can view the first episode at their site called Area 5. If you are in any way interested in gaming and gaming culture, do give it a look. You won't be disappointed.

Please support these guys. They are really good at this and make great entertaining video game shows. Watch CO-OP

AMD Demonstrates Streaming Heavy Graphics Games To Your Browser

In a CES 2009 presentation, AMD representatives talked about the emergence of cloud computing and how the PC could stream games from a server directly to a web browser. AMD plans to work with a software firm called OTOY to develop a super computer that would make this possible.

The super computer will be called AMD Fusion Render Cloud and says their goal is to break the one peta flop mark.Bigdownload reported AMD demonstrating this technology at CES :

In a CES address can can been seen at this web site, AMD showed a notebook computer that ran Mercenaries 2 with the game being streamed to the notebook via a web browser rather than stored on the hard drive. The game's publisher Electronic Arts seemed to embrace this new way of distributing games; At the moment, AMD plans to have their Fusion Render Cloud project up and running by the second half of 2009.

Very bold plan from AMD. They have to go out of their way now that Intel seems to be having a huge lead over them technologically and market wise. There is only one problem I can see from this. Broadband infrastructure has to improve to a point that streaming gigabytes of data becomes fast and cheap.

Looking at Malaysian broadband services, I can foresee many frustrating experience in the near future.

Source : http://news.bigdownload.com/2009/01/09/ces-2009-will-pc-games-with-high-graphics-be-streamed-to-your-d/#continued

Mirror's Edge Breaks Player's Expectations

Ian Bogost wrote an analytical piece about Mirror's Edge for Gamasutra in which he describes the notion of games performing to the expectation of the player and how our expectations lead us on a false pretense about games.

Mirror's Edge presents its own take and view of the world and to apply everyday day logic, or commonly held gaming convention would dillute the message the developers were intending to deliver. He said :

Mirror's Edge deploys two main strategies to create the experience of fluidity. The first is its first-person perspective, an unusual, risky decision that alienates some players, those unable to get over the fact that Unreal Engine 3 would have afforded a more straightforward third-person viewpoint. The game would indeed probably have been easier to play with the camera locked behind its main character, Faith.

But the game's purpose was not to make movement predictable and easy -- to make it transparent, in the lingo of HCI. Rather, Mirror's Edge attempts to create a sense of vertigo which the player must constantly overcome in order to reorient Faith toward her next objective. The rewards for success are remarkable: running to a sprint and properly vaulting a fence produces a sense of physical mastery commensurate with the parkour expert.

This is how the developer's wanted players to experience the game. They wanted to deliver an experience that was unique and presented players with the attitude and point of view of a parkour artiste.

The second is its unusual level structure, one designed for difficulty. Mirror's Edge is a hard game; the number of times a player, even a good one, will fail is utterly enormous. When such failures occur, the game often asks the player to restart from a particularly punitive location, demanding that he work back to a point where, inevitably, he is likely once again to tumble violently down to earth.

Unlike Assassin's Creed, which adapts the fluidity of parkour by making movement consistently easy, Mirror's Edge adapts that fluidity by making it hard. But what initially seems like a punitive design gaffe actually carries a crucial payload: requiring the player to reattempt sets of runs insures that the final, successful one will be completed all in one go.

This is not the same type of frustration that one finds in Mega Man: the punitive levels are not conduits for final accomplishment and trophy, but for mastery over the very process of moving through the levels themselves.

There is a great sense of accomplishment with mastering a skill. It isn't about material rewards like points or gold coins but a mental reinforcement of how good you are. I think in this day and age of MMO's and competitive experienced based multiplayer games with numbers popping up to tell you how well you have done, gamers are forgetting to appreciate the less obvious rewards of games(which may be more fulfilling).

Mirror's Edge is not a perfect game, perhaps, but it is something more important: it is an interesting game. It can be played and experienced on its own terms, for its own sake, if players would only allow themselves to take a single videogame specimen at face value rather than as yet another data point on the endless trudge toward realistic perfection.

While Keith Stuart's rejoinder against meeting expectations does remind us that innovation offers an important avenue for creativity, to privilege experimentalism still implies a view toward titles of the future. We must stop looking at the games we make and play in terms of how well closely the vistas they open match the ones in our mind when we come to them.

Rather than seeing these works as mere toasters or word processors meant to deliver on our expectations while we await a better version to come along, we must begin to understand what a game can offer us today: how it can serve as a mirror that presents a new view of our own experience of the world, rather than as a window polished to an incrementally greater shine, facing that same green pasture of familiarity.

Which is a point I have often pondered about. What if games fail to meet our expectation on how something in it behaves? What if it defied commonly held game logic.I often found it entertaining to read about how gamers play games with a very methodical and almost perfectionist attitude.

What if a game behaved unpredictably? Games are not like a piece of software that are supposed to behave predictably for productivity purpose. Games are a form of expression of the developers.

Does all these mean they automatically make it a bad game. Do we judge a game based on our expectations based on our experience of playing other games or judge it based on its own merit?At least developers are trying to diversify form of experiences they want players to feel. That is a good thing.

When movie directors and book writers mess with our perceptions in their medium all the time, why can't games do the same? Which goes back to the article I wrote, Are games art? If we are to look at it at that, then we have to see them from its own perspective rather from a very mechanical aspect of gameplay dynamics.

Read the full article here : http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3890/persuasive_games_windows_and_.php