Category: Games

Interactive entertainment’s answer to art-house films is indie game development. Titles like Minecraft, Recettear and World of Goo have captured a legion of forward-thinking fans’ and bedroom coders’ imaginations alike. But despite consistently raising the bar for innovation and creativity, life left of the keyboard isn’t all fun and games. Dave Gilbert, founder of indie adventure-game studio Wadjet Eye Games (The Blackwell Legacy , Puzzle Bots ), explains the indie life to Scott Steinberg.

Kevin Dill is the latest developer in a series of interviews I’ve done with the authors of Game Programming Gems, 8th edition. He wrote a chapter on patterned approaches to modular artificial intelligence (AI) games. These are some excerpts from our interview.

Whether you’re developing a new game or have an existing game that you want to port to the netbook platform, it’s important to know how to optimize it. The netbook market is growing steadily and creating new opportunities for game developers on this mobile platform. The best way to show you how to optimize your game for netbooks is to describe what we did when creating a demo for Fireflies. It’s a great example of the easy optimizations and quick performance gains you can achieve when developing games for this fast-growing market.

Veering away from painstaking authenticity and turning back to the white-knuckle arcade races which initially defined it, high-stakes driving game Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit appears to be cruising in the fast lane toward success. You can credit not only an impressive sensation of speed, but also the introduction of savvier computer-controlled opponents and a suite of new social networking elements that enhance online play. Producer Hamish Young drove by to tell us how publisher Electronic Arts is steering the storied franchise back on course.