GameDev Breakdown: Developer and Streamer Chris Gardner

The freestyle coder himself drops in to discuss the ups and downs of live coding, presenting at and organizing conferences, navigating the world of non-game commercial software development, and more. We also discuss what we’re playing now and what games we’re looking forward to getting our hands on.

Read more

My Q&A with GoldenEye X Project Lead, Donald “Wreck” York

As we (apparently) inch closer to a remaster of Rare’s 1997 Nintendo 64 classic, GoldenEye 007, I wanted to take an opportunity to contribute to the excitement. GoldenEye is easily one of my favorite games of all time, and my very first freelance piece in games journalism included excerpts from an interview with leaders from the GoldenEye X project–a campaign to port GoldenEye 007 to the superior Perfect Dark engine with locked content restored and other improvements in place–and our discussion didn’t get nearly enough room to breathe. Today, for the first time, I’m giving the full discussion (edited only for clarity and flow where helpful) a home online.

Read more

Weekly Round-Up: Godot Go Fast

Welcome creators! I want to say it right up front: this round-up is not usually going to be overwhelmingly focused on the Godot engine. Since I brought it up last weekend, however, the Little Open Source Engine Who Could (Maybe) surprised us all by jumping into the mainstream news. We’ll get into just what happened and what it might indicate for the near future. Also: developing for streamers, classic arcade talk, and more!

Read more

Remembering Our Friend Abel Wang

To celebrate the life of community rockstar Abel Wang, we revisit our 2018 discussion with him at GDC joined by Microsoft cloud advocate Jessica Deen.

Read more

Revisiting the GameDev Workflow Problem

I strongly believe in writing every day—until you publish a book. Now I think it’s pretty important to do something else for a little while. Like a lot of developers (I suspect), I enjoy starting little prototypes from scratch pretty frequently. This seemed like a great way to decompress from months of writing and editing, and so far it’s been very effective! I decided to toy with a 2d retro-inspired scene that could theoretically lead to another run at the cartridge-collecting game idea I’ve been so obsessed with for years. It led to a very pleasant weekend during which I did not obsessively jump from the Amazon book charts to the Kindle dashboard to the search listings and then back to the Amazon charts again.

Read more

A Popular Game Development Math Book Is Now Free to Read

Want to brush up on the math concepts that will elevate your game development expertise? Never really learned them in the first place like me? If so, a popular learning resource just became totally free for the first time.

Read more

BBC Micro Bot Invites You to Learn BASIC Like It’s 1985

If you ever think about what it was like to code in the 8-bit glory days but shudder at the era’s inconveniences, Dominic Pajak created a Twitter bot you need to know about.

Read more

Let’s Make a Nintendo Game

In continuing our console development basics series, we look at what it takes to develop an indie game for Nintendo’s latest game console, the Switch. If you like more options, we’ll look at a way you can make a limited Switch game with no permission from Nintendo whatsoever. Finally, we’ll take a look at the most manageable option for going old school with your own NES project.

Read more

Yes, Coding Is Hard

A viral tweet suggests coding isn’t hard, developers are just gatekeeping. Yikes.

Read more

Vintage Dev: Inside the Homebrew Game Development Community

This post was originally published at Zam.com in 2016. As products of the computer hardware industry, video game consoles inherit a finite life span ending in certain obsolescence. Since 1972, about 150 home gaming systems have been released in the United States alone, nearly all of which have been commercially retired. Sadly, player loyalty often … Read more