Dev Links: Giving Tanks
Game mechanics are one of the most obvious and talked-about aspects of game development, but today’s Developer Links include a new approach to them… as well as articles about some aspects of game development that aren’t so frequently talked about, like localization, and monetization through advertising.
10 Tips: Localization (Gamasutra)
“The days of ‘all your base are belong to us’ style translations might be thing of the past, but localization is still one of game development’s Cinderella specialisms. ’A lot of people in the industry still don’t understand localization very well,’ says Kate Edwards, chair of the IGDA’s Game Localization Special Interest Group. ‘Many still think of it as something done at the end, but it is as much a part of the development cycle as coding or writing or designing.’”
Lunch Bug Now Featured In The Chrome Web Store! (Lost Decade Games)
“We just received notification from a kindly Googler that Lunch Bug is now featured in the Chrome Web Store! It can be seen here on the homepage: And also in the games section:”
Making Money With Android Apps (AltDevBlogADay)
“Making money on Android can be hard. Many developers devote countless hours to building, testing, and marketing their apps only to fall short of that income-independent holy grail. We went through over 50 Android game & app postmortems and developer income reports to put together a list of common best practices and tactics that worked.”
Latest Screenshots of GTB (Cliffski.com)
“I’m working on some new stuff. I thought I might as well upload some eye candy. Here is what I am working on today, click the smaller images for larger versions. New units and props and maps basically, And restricting some battles to just WW2 era technology (no lasers or mechs), to give the game a ‘WW2 Tower Defense’ mode, in effect.”
Horse Talk: Chris Mans The Stall (Octodad blog)
“‘Horse Talk’ is a series here on the Octodad blog where we’ll be running some intra-team Young Horses interviews. The first 2 or so questions will be the same for each horse, but afterwords we crowd-source the team for things they’d like to ask the interviewee.”
The Designer’s Notebook: Machinations, A New Way To Design Game Mechanics (Gamasutra)
“Game mechanics are harder to talk about than any other aspect of game design. The terms we use are largely abstractions — things like negative feedback loop and difficulty progression. They’re a nuisance to prototype and test, too, because unless they’re simple enough to implement in a board game, you have to either write code or use a spreadsheet, and neither one is particularly fast or intuitive.”
Covetous (Auntie Pixelante)
“covetous accomplishes more with a vocabulary smaller than pac-man’s than most big-budget ‘horror’ games.”
World Of Goo Speedrun In 31 Minutes (2D Boy)
“World of Goo speed run in 31 MINUTES, made possible by cyborgs.Perhaps someone can explain this better than me, but here’s how I think this works: A bright young fan of World of Goo turned on their Nintendo Wii, and then legitimately purchased a copy of World of Goo from WiiWare, and then merged his or her brain with a quantum time vortex computer, and PLAYED EVERY SINGLE LEVEL in like 0.2 seconds each, finishing the entire game in 31 minutes, 99% of that time waiting for cutscenes and animations. Each, animation an eternity. A hummingbird’s wings flap leisurely outside the window.”
