Game Development

On May 3 Apple said that it was very close to hitting 50 billion app download mark on its App store. Today the company announced that its App Store has surpassed the milestone - which they point out does not include re-downloads of apps or updates by users. While we do not know the exact data and time this milestone was met, we do know who the person was that downloaded the 5 billionth app: Ohio's Brandon Ashmore. Apple awarded him a $10,000 App Store gift card, and his app of choice - the word game Say the Same Thing by Space Inch.read more

Motherboard (part of VICE - which you may know better from their new weekly news show on HBO) has an interesting interview with two hackers - Dragon and PhäntömZ - who run a stresser/booter company called Agony (a stresser/booter is a software or service that allows a user to flood a network). In the Interview the publication talks to the duo about Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, botnets, shells, black hat and white hat hackers, Anonymous, CISPA, and more.read more

Is Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Patriots dead? We're not sure, but GameStop made a dramatic move today that might indicate that something bad has happened to Ubisoft's upcoming game. According to IGN, video game retailer GameStop has removed the game from its database, and is no longer available for pre-order.read more

First Lady Michelle Obama recently gave a commencement address at Bowie State University encouraging more young African Americans to continue their education. She does so by throwing culture like videogames, television, and music under the bus.read more

Valve announced six new titles to be greenlighted by the Steam community. The new games that will eventually make their way to Steam thanks to the community's support are Bleed, Game Dev Tycoon, Riot, Stardew Valley, The Legend, and Legends of Eisenwald.read more

Nintendo has a novel way of getting gamers (who do not already own a Wii U) excited about the games it will be showcasing at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles next month. At participating Best Buy stores consumers will be able to get hands-on time with pretty much the same game demos as the press gets access to from the E3 show floor. The announcement was made by Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime today during a Nintendo Direct presentation.read more

The BBC reports that four members of the hacktivist group LulzSec based in the United Kingdom have been sentenced this week. They are Ryan Cleary, Jake Davis, Mustafa al-Bassam and Ryan Ackroyd. All four pled guilty to various charges either last year or earlier this year.read more

Say the name of an Electronic Arts title you'd like to see come to the Wii U. Okay, now let me break the bad news to you as gently as I can: There are no games from Electronic Arts coming to the Wii U in the foreseeable future. Not one title. Not even a Sims game. "We have no games in development for the Wii U currently," company spokesperson Jeff Brown told Kotaku yesterday.read more

Nintendo says that first-party game sales for the Nintendo 3DS were very strong in the first four months of 2013. The company claims that within that time period it moved more than 2.1 million units of first-party Nintendo 3DS software in the U.S, an increase of 52 percent over the same time period last year. In 2012, it took 30 weeks for Nintendo 3DS to sell 2 million units of first-party software, according to Nintendo. In 2013, the platform accomplished that same feat in 18 weeks.read more

Do you recognize her? it’s Aquaria, one of the superheroes of the Undead Lily game In the blog title, I paraphrased the famous game “Where In The World is Carmen Sandiego” The reply to the question Where On Earth Is Undead Lily could be “she went on hiatus for a year or two but now she’s about to come back!”. Yes, because finally all the backgrounds for the game are finished (that artist was busy doing Loren GUI and other things, so wasn’t his fault), and even if I asked the original character artist to redo the final romance scenes, work on the game can start already. I’m still in the planning stage for now, but I really think that I’m going to make it a bit different from the original idea. A tag-team battle, arcade style wouldn’t really be simple to do in Ren’Py, and since those games are all about the animations, it’s definitely not a good idea. So I’m just going to make it more RPG-esque! In the game there are 12 characters, 6 “evil” and 6 “good”. That would be already enough to do a classic party-based RPG. However, since there won’t be a real exploration but more like a sort of big “map” where you move your units each turn (who remembers the old game “Archon”?), I think I’m going to make it similar to a collectible card game, where each character can learn to summon creatures to help them in battle, starting from low level ones to big powerful ones. So the idea for now is to allow a party of max 2 superheroes, each one able to summon several “elemental minions”. Or maybe only 1 superhero each battle, as always will have to see while playtesting what is better. Anyway that’s the initial idea for now I’ve been also experimenting more with the “topsecret” RPG set in Aravorn. I had a brilliant idea (modestly MOUHAHA). Take a look at the screenshots below: As you can see, the position on the battlefield will have a big impact on the gameplay, and the Thief will have a special bonus vs the Warriors being able to always attack without penalty any enemy, no matter their position. This small change should lead to interesting decision during the battles, and finally give some use of the thieves in the front line. I had other ideas like some random special zones on the battlefield that would give bonus/malus (like a rock area that increases defense, a mud area that slows character down). But have yet to see if they’re easy to implement. Anyway as you can guess I’m having some fun experimenting! But that is just a side-project. On Planet Stronghold 2 side, Anima is going forward coding the new RPG framework that will be awesome, with lots of new features, while Aleema is doing her great job as always writing the story. I can’t wait to reach the demo stage with this game to show it to everyone