Behind Devteamlife, the "most relatable" comic about making games
When you think about game developers venting about the trials of game development, you usually think of conversations that take place in the studio, the back halls of GDC, or maybe the months after release on Twitter. While the game-playing public worries about the quality of water puddles, developers sweat at the thought of closing their Jira tickets.
It’s those highly niche problems that concept artist and comic strip creator Victor Lahlou has elegantly captured in his online comic strip Devt ...
Why future game events may look like music festivals
At a Glance
E3’s demise in 2023 showed that video game events need to evolve in a post-pandemic world.
Double Fine and iam8bit’s Day of the Devs may hold clues for where video game gatherings can go.
The world of video game events has gone through a massive upheaval since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. Events like Game Developers Conference (our sibling organization) and Gamescom have bounced back with thousands of attendees, but poor strategy and a floundering mission statement led to ...
Deep Dive:Making a manual for every learning style with The Banished Vault
Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.
Earlier installments cover topics such as how indie developer Mike Sennott cultivated random elements in the branching narrative of
Astronaut: The Best, how the developers of Meet Your Maker avoided crunch by adopting smart production practices, and ...
Making RoboCop:Rogue City a shooter was too "obvious"—so the devs made an RPG instead
On the surface, a RoboCop video game seems like a very straightforward premise—fight bad guys as a cyborg cop and uphold the law in dystopian ‘80s America. However, most of RoboCop’s game appearances didn’t quite focus on the social satire and gray morality of Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 film, instead leaning on a shooter experience.
But with RoboCop: Rogue City, developer Teyon aimed to not only capture the bleak, sci-fi setting and hyper-violence of the original films but also cast a light on the h ...
Pushing the Button...Wait. Not That One:The Launch of Fish Game
On Sat Oct 11, I slithered onto my Edmonton hotel bed with my shoes still on, my left eyelid vibrating as it had been for 2 weeks straight. I was giving a talk at Alberta Game Series that weekend, which inconveniently wound up being the same weekend we were announcing the launch date for Fish Game. I had left for the airport that morning on no sleep due to an all-nighter cutting and delivering the Fish Game Date-Announce Trailer so our PR company could distribute it Sunday.
Before descending in ...
Finding the magic in firearms in Wizard with a Gun
Wizard with a Gunis a cooperative survival game set in a world devastated by magical catastrophes. Not that any of the mages of that world have learned anything from that—they all still make use of firearm-based magic to do just about anything. From fighting monsters to building furniture, there’s a gun for that.
Game Developer spoke with Patrick Morgan, studio lead at Galvanic Games, to talk about the challenges that come with making changes to eight years of worldbuilding, the balancing chall ...
Respawn Madison boss Ryan Burnett spotlights the game dev potential of Wisconsin
Back in March, Electronic Arts subsidiary Respawn Entertainment opened up a satellite studio in Madison, Wisconsin to bolster development on Apex Legends. As the company noted at the time, its new office wasn’t established as a pure support studio—it’s a third arm of the game development team behind the company’s juggernaut sci-fi Battle Royale.
Earlier today studio director Ryan Burnett—who leads Respawn’s third office—delivered a keynote at midwestern video game conference M+DEV arguing that ...
AI let devs "do more with less" when making The Finals
Embark Studios’ The Finals is a free-to-play online shooter that brings the Battlefield series’ level of mayhem and destruction to an over-the-top team-based reality TV-style competition. After several months of playtests, The Finals is out, and the impressive technology behind its environmental chaos is now on display.
But as The Finals marched toward release, critics zeroed in on how Embark Studios (which is owned by Nexon) used generative AI technology to create in-game dialogue. As describe ...
Cyberpunk 2077:Phantom Liberty sold 4.3 million copies in two months
Within two months of release, Cyberpunk 2077: The Phantom Libertyhit 4.3 million copies sold, according to CD Projekt’s CFO Piotr Nielubowicz.
In the company’s financial breakdown for the third quarter of fiscal 2023, he revealed the expansion was the main driver for the 443 million PLN (or $112.74 million) in revenue made between July 1 and September 30, 2023. Compared to last year’s 245.5 million PLN, that’s growth of about 80 percent.
Phantom Liberty had already hit 3 million in its first w ...
Unwording is a puzzle game that teaches you to be kind to yourself
Unwording is a puzzle game about overcoming negative self-talk, following a character’s journey through a flat 2D world into a vibrant 3D one as they learn how to better talk about themselves to themself.
Game Developer sat down with Armaan Sandhu, the game’s developer, to talk about the personal reflections that lead to the creation of the game, how they turned the process of improving self-talk into puzzles when they had little experience with puzzle games themselves, and how they reflected a ...
