underlost blogs.

Hacking Gamers' Memories

While outside doing yardwork the other day, some tune came back into my head, and I couldn’t place it. After a half hour or so of singing it to myself, I finally realized it was the level music from iOS game ZombieSmash—written by my colleague Chris Huelsbeck. This was a game that I had bought and played for only a couple days before it faded into the rest of my 200+ installed apps. But the music pulled me back in, for a little while anyway—and just long enough to hit the next content update.

This, developers, is why audio matters in your game.

Isogenic HTML 5 Game Engine Released

The Isogenic Game Engine is a modern web-based MMO game engine that allows you to rapidly develop your next MMO for the web. Isogenic requires no plugins to run which means players can run your game without Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight, straight from their web browser.

I’ll eagerly be looking for the first Diablo clone to use this.

Blizzard Auctioning Off Old Warcraft Servers

Blizzard Entertainment is offering a series of special charity auctions featuring server hardware originally used during World of Warcraft’s early days. We’ve since upgraded the game’s infrastructure with the latest technology to offer an even better player experience, but these “honorably discharged” server blades are now unique collectors’ pieces.

Even Blizzard is now throwing their junk on Ebay.

Introducing GLaDOSiri on iPhone 4S

The three terrifying minutes that created The Gunstringer

The developer had scored a major meeting with Microsoft to pitch a new game developed exclusively with Kinect (then “Project Natal”) in mind. It needed to be big, it needed to be smart and — most pressingly to Wilford and Bear at that exact moment — it needed to exist.

Ask HN: Has anybody here ever successfully started a videogame company?

I think most of the honest people here 30 or younger will say they got into programming in some part due to videogames. These days, it seems more viable than it used to, with the various routes for self-publishing available through the Xbox Live marketplace and the app markets.

Bring a stick man to life.

Wonderfully fun and creative.

Quake 2 Source Code Review

Collection of Game Development Blogs

Osama Bin Laden Abbottabad Compound Counterstrike map now Available

Created by Fletch (May 7, 2011)
Based on Osama’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Map may be used as a base for a bomb or hostage map at a later stage. 3D skybox will also be added when/if I have time.

That didn’t take long.

DRM drives gamers to piracy

According to Kukawski, the situation with restrictive DRM has reached the point where gamers often feel pushed into buying a game at full price, but then still download a cracked version to avoid the DRM.

I’ve found myself doing this on several occasions, or just completely staying clear from a PC port and sticking with a console version instead. 

Cyberpunk is Dead?

The problem is cyberbunk is no longer the future- It’s the present. That said, the last two paragraphes really speak truth:

So from this learning process we gain the perspective of boringness. Being a progressive participant of cyberspace today is not about being elite and surfing the most underground hubs. It’s about surfing on the top of it all, on the big normal junkyard of human creation and picking up the inspirations together. It’s also about reading a book again, following an author’s thought through 400 pages instead of 140 letters. And also in the same sense: doing a website again, a static thing that waits for hundreds to come by, just like a book in the library, instead of giving daily updates to attract some other thousands that need their daily fix of info. Some books still are more actual than the daily news reports (when these were still existing, now the news must be updated all the time). And maybe the lost dreams in these books need an actualisation through a website, instead of just a quotation in the fast streams of actualities. It’s about refusing the entertainment, it’s about finding enlightment in thought processes themselves and not in what forms they have been given for representation. It’s about picking up something dead and giving it life instead of living the perpetual death of the bubble of statements.