Game dev link roundup - 14th April

Games

Crow by Sunside Inc

Hadn't heard much about this iOS title until last week. Great stuff.

A Few Feet of Snow by Martin Wallace

So want this deck-building card game. Out of stock in the UK at the moment unfortunately.

Sine Mora by Grasshopper Manufacture and Digital Reality

This XBLA side-scrolling shooter is so beautiful it might just keep my attention long enough to figure out how to play one of these things properly. 

Design

Permanent Record - The Paradox of Online Worlds

Outline of the issues around designing for permanency and user consequence.

Rational Design: The Core of Rayman Origins

Great write-up on the rational design principles that underpin the fantastic Rayman Origins. Also check out Ubiart's blog for more on the same. Unfortunately stale, but some goodies remain.

Code

The Top 6 Misconceptions I Had About Unity

Great post on Unity and some general usefulness about component architectures in general.

Algorithm is not a 4-letter word

Great presentation from last year. Just go watch it if you've not already.

Events

Ludum Dare 23 & warm-up weekend

Warm-up weekend is this weekend, 10th anniversary of the actual event is next weeked. Excited about this one. Also check out some of the give-aways and IRL meetups.

Indie buskers

Also this weeked. Go throw some change at them.

Game dev link roundup - 30th March

Not done this for a while... here's a bunch of stuff I've come across in the last week or so.

Games

Home by Benjamin Rivers

Hauntingly beautiful pixel horror adventure.

Dyad by Shawn McGrath

Didn't quite get to see this at GDC. Wish I had.

Lone Survivor by Jasper Byrne

More pixel horror -- this one's out already though. 

Offspring Fling by Kyle Pulver

Just in case your twitter stream didn't explode with this Friday night -- go check it out.

Design

Controls You Can Feel

Slides & notes from Zach Gage's outstanding GDC 2012 talk on touch tactility.

Mirror's Edge: Building the impossible

Interesting commentary from Rob Briscoe on some of the decisions that went into the art decisions on Mirror's Edge.

Code

Git tricks, tips and workflows

I don't care what you do, if you do it with code this is useful.

d3.js

Data-driven documents. Such a clever way to do DOM bindings and transformations. So many ideas sparked from this already.

Cubes all the way down

Renaud's slides from his GDC/IGS Fez technical analysis. Full of interesting technical and design points.

Commentary / analysis

iOS Sales Statistics including Q1 2012: Split by Model and OpenGL ES 2.0 Support

Great analysis from Steffen on the breakdown of GL ES 2.0 support on iOS devices.

Blow on The Witness & Braid

Informative and practical design interview with Jonathan Blow over on the PA Report.

Resources & tools

Pixel Joint

Massive community of pixel art & artists.

Lost Type

Ridiculously high-quality fonts on a name-your-price basis.

Spriter

Kick Starter-funded multi-part image animation for 2d characters. Free beta also available.

Frustro

Typeface design is cool. Deal with it.

Sources & inspiration

Disasterpeace

Wonderful game dev for your ears.

Cargo

Art profile sites, running on Cargo's backend -- full of interesting art and inspiration. The image browse page is a good place to start.

Spy vs Spy -- Omnibus Vol. 1

I don't seem to be able to detach myself from an endless stream of spy vs spy-like inspirations. Recent exposure to Gunpoint, Spy Party, Moncao and Beat Sneak Bandit aren't helping either.

Dead West (and 36peas) at GDC 2012

I'm going to be at GDC next week. If you fancy coffee, wine, food and/or whatever let me know.

I'll be giving early demos of Dead West to those who are interested as well -- we're looking at distributing alpha-like demos the week after GDC so what I'll be showing is the very last stages of getting to that point. Given we only got round to the writing code for this thing in the last 5 weeks, we're doing pretty well :)

Give me a shout by email gareth@36peas.com, or twitter @36peas.

In related news, we just put up a Dead West holding page and news sign up thingy. Go sign up for news and updates about Dead West.

It's go time: project updates and some teaser art for Dead West

Dead West went into full production last week -- it's been a while getting to start on this one, but fortunately we're way ahead on the art production side. First demos will be around the time of (and at) GDC early March. In the meantime an update on other stuff and some of our latest characters and level background style updates...

Another Hyperion update was submitted last night -- it features an in-game tutorial and tips system. Great for both new and experienced players. Watch for that hitting the App Store -- we're dropping the price at the same time. And by dropping the price, we mean making it free.

As usual we're involved in a couple of long-term and couple of shorter-term consultancy and service projects. This year we're being somewhat more discriminating about what we accept though -- if you need help give us a shout at help@36peas.com. We generally always have capacity for iOS games projects and normally (depending on other commitments) some back-end multiplayer and infrastructure stuff as well.

iPad Game Design -- slides from Develop Liverpool December 2011

I presented this at Develop Liverpool yesterday -- similar to what I did at 360idev Devner back in September.

Note: SlideShare seems to have had some kind of fit with the title slides. I really don't repeat myself that much ;)

A lot of the salient parts were made by me vocally. As far as I'm aware there wasn't a recording -- and I don't have notes, but you should get the general idea from the slides above.

There's also a great write-up by Keith Andrew over at PG.BIZ.