"Here are two tools I've been using lately to better understand the functionality of my game designs.  The first is the loop, a structure that should be very familiar to those who have looked into skill atoms.  The second is the arc."

"And I don't have an extensive background in game design -- I'm learning as I go -- but one thing that's really obvious is making a good single-player game is really hard. Making a good multiplayer game is like maybe not exponentially harder but much, like an order of magnitude harder. And making a massively multiplayer game is just fucking retardedly hard compared to either of them because it has to be fun in the minute-to-minute thing, and it has to be fun with other people doing stuff that affects the state of the game around you, and it has to scale."

Raph get all atomical about game design.

original pac-man sketches!

"Even at the start there was something different about video games — something way more engrossing — and I’m trying to figure out exactly what it is."

"The native language of video games is neither spoken nor written"

Quoting Miyamoto, "A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever."

"Let’s start our deconstruction with the most basic feature of the player’s character, Link: his movement."

"My favorite video games tend to have a very par tic u lar, yet highly abstract, aspect to them. I love games with a clear set of rules com bined with an envi­ron ment to sup port the explo ration of those rules and the dis­cov ery of their boundaries."

''Three to six girls can play in a game. Everyone starts out with 10 Self-Esteem points. When other girls humiliate and abuse you, you get really embarrassed and lose your self-esteem. If your Self-Esteem goes down to zero, you become, like, totally mortified and a loser and have to sit out for the rest of the game.''

"Open Emu makes emulation of classic game systems a “first-class citizen” on the Mac. But if it were just a game emulator, well, it wouldn’t be news. What makes it news is that at its core, Open Emu is an open source platform and modular architecture into which your favorite game systems can be added as plug-ins. And thanks to that architecture, you can treat your favorite game systems as though they’re modules in a grand, 8-bit modular visual synth, crunching their textures into geometry, adding real-time effects, and controlling the whole thing with multiple controllers, audio, and MIDI."

"flixel is a completely free collection of Actionscript 3 files that helps organize, automate, and optimize Flash games; an object-oriented framework that lets anyone create original and complex games with thousands of objects on screen in just a few hours, without using any of the Flash libraries."

"We’re starting to dip our toes in the waters of prototyping again. One of the first steps was trim down the framework we built for World of Goo and gear it towards a rapid prototyping workflow."

"Bloopsaphone is a Ruby library for making 8-bit music and sound effects. _why intends it to be used by the kids to enhance their video games and what not."

Musings on the most minimal games. "There are some things that all of these games have in common: Something surprising happens in all of them, and that surprising thing is critical to the gameplay."

"Meggy Jr RGB is an open-source kit to build your own pixel-based video games based on an 8x8 RGB LED Matrix."

"...a simple means of getting basic sound effects into a game for those people who were working hard to get their entries done within the 48 hours and didn't have time to spend looking for suitable ways of doing this."

"Skill atoms are a technique for modeling the player’s experience throughout the game. The designer breaks their game down into a series of interactive loops that describe how the player learns a specific skill. Each learning loop is known as a ‘skill atom’. Skill atoms can be strung together in a graph to form ‘skill chains’."

"LÖVE is an unquestionably awesome 2D game engine, which allows rapid game development and prototyping in Lua."

"Can games be realistic emotional simulators? Game designer and writer Ernest Adams explores in depth how AI might actually emulate human emotions."

C++ physics engine, recently ported to the iPhone

so much incredible sprite artwork

much classic goodness - i'm fairly obsessed with adventure games recently.

social games live

"My talk was on building an application that rescued princesses. The goal was to give interaction designers some insight into how game design might be applied to the domain of more utilitarian applications."

different control methods for iPhone games...the winner, in this case: surprisingly, swiping

On Blast Works' detailed level creator. "What I discovered is, as you might expect, it's pretty damn hard to make a fun game. You'll probably fail."

All hail Wikipedia taxonomies

"From the looks of things, the game acts like the old Barcode Battler -- using the data from the songs stored in your iTunes library to create an infinite variety of different soldiers to fight in your army."

built in 3 hours by the inimitable cactus

"The new MMO's website will have a Flash game similar to Snake built into it. But instead of simply hoping for a high score, players maneuver the snake around the board in a hunt for pellets with the ultimate goal of making the snake come to life."

7 bots enters. 1 bot leaves.

"International Festivals of Independent Games"

"Ted Castronova's 5 Tips for Making Games That Don't Suck"

open source game building tools initiative