I always make the joke that people are so price-sensitive on iPhone games, that they think 2.99 is UBER expensive for a game, yet they buy cups of coffee for 6 dollars. Since I first started making that joke, we developers have been empowered with much better ways to make money, like in-app purchases. And [...]

So what we’re gonna talk about today is, the eternal question of “Why don’t game awards carry the weight of the Oscars?” I’m gonna delve mostly into the content of the games, rather than the peripheral questions like the history of the Oscars, the budget of each show, etc. First of all, let’s get all [...]

This here is gonna be one of my most spontaneous blog articles. I’ve been thinking about doing a how-to of games, but didn’t know where to start. Then today I got inspired by a lot of facebook traffic about marketing-driven games vs indie games and the creative process. This traffic was all spurned by a [...]

In the nerd and tech communities, we pretty much argue every day about why Apple is horrible or perfect. The one thing we all agree upon is that, just like politics, Apple is polarizing. Let’s gab about the very high level concepts of the debate. Walled Garden A few of the practices of Apple are [...]

The word “immersion” is thrown about every single day at video game companies and schools. In the industry, it basically means the idea of making a player feel as if they’re part of the experience (or simulation). In layman’s terms, it means they forget that they’re playing a game and “become” the character. They forget [...]

If you read my column on the regular, you probably know that it’s a video game industry look at games. So with that being said, it was an interesting challenge to keep it game related during book week. So I decided to talk about a topic that, in this day and age of kindles and [...]

First of all, what is a First Person Shooter? It is a game in first person (as in, you are the camera, like in a movie where you see a shot of someone running through the forest from their POV), and it involves them shooting. So you have a camera POV and usually a gun [...]

My little outfit, Part Time Evil, recently decided to do a Kickstarter to fund our indie game Zig Zag Zombie. Not the “I need money to live off for a year to make this thing” type of Kickstarter. Everyone on this project is employed in the day, so we raised enough for contractor pay, software, [...]

A lot of F and N readers are from film and literary nerdship, so here comes a little helping of cross-cultural columnizing. Games and Movies have shared a sort of awfully awkward sisterhood since the early eighties. We could talk about their first public spat when the ET movie became a classic and…the ET game [...]

Designing Gamer Interview Series: Life of a Game Designer Today I sat down with designer Danny Bulla. Danny Bulla cut his teeth at Full Sail University’s Game Design and Development program. Upon graduation, he teleported to the deep heart of Texas to work at Midway Austin on titles like Blacksite: Area 51. He then warp-zoned over to [...]