News

JikGuard
Designing for meaningfulness - Player freedom and prototyping exploration mechanics
Exploring design considerations in creating a videogame to evoke meaningfulness through the lens of various disciplinary perspectives such as philosophy, psychology and spirituality.
Aug. 11, 2021
JikGuard
Steam demo showcases: officially good for sales!
We can now see official Valve data that shows that Steam Next Fest is 'good for you'. So what does that mean? And how about all those antitrust suits? This, and much, much more...
Aug. 10, 2021
JikGuard
How Difficulty Impacts Motivation in Game Design
Continuing my thoughts on difficulty design, I want to spend a few minutes discussing player motivation and how it can push someone to keep playing a game, or cause them to bow out of a game if they feel stuck.
Aug. 10, 2021
JikGuard
Introduction to Caching Shading Information in World Space using Implicit Progressive Low Discrepancy Point Sets
A hands-on article briefly discussing the research presented in the thesis/publication "Caching Shading Information in World Space using Implicit Progressive Low Discrepancy Point Sets".
Aug. 9, 2021
JikGuard
UX Design: Alleviating burdens on playing gaming through better interface layout
How should we sort out the information content, which appears at different times? This article mainly analyzes from two dimensions of space and time, and talks about the role of hierarchical unfolding thinking in game UX design.
Aug. 9, 2021
JikGuard
Game Dev Digest Issue #105 - Double Stuffed
Game Dev Digest Issue #105 - Double Stuffed. The latest from the free weekly Unity3d/gamedev newsletter.
Aug. 6, 2021
JikGuard
Epic advances, Steam reviews, oh my!
We lok at Epic court documents to analyze EGS advances, take another look at Steam 'reviews to sales' ratios, and lots more besides.
Aug. 4, 2021
JikGuard
How to Estimate Steam Video Game Sales in 2021?
This article lays out a way of estimating how many units any Steam game has sold. It's updating the well known Boxleiter method using the largest dataset to date.
Aug. 2, 2021
JikGuard
In Defense of Hard Counters in Real Time Strategy Games
The conversation around 'soft counters' and 'hard counters' in RTS games often focuses on best case scenarios for soft counters and worst case scenarios for hard counters. This article is an attempt to address the topic in a more open and fair framing.
Aug. 1, 2021
JikGuard
What the End of the Nintendo DS Means for Handheld Games
In 2020, you might have missed a little news about the end of the entire Game Boy and DS line from Nintendo, and for today's post, I want to talk about why this is a bigger deal than most people realized, and a blow to handheld games and preservation.
July 30, 2021
JikGuard
The faces of 'the creator economy' for DIY games
Who are the 'creators who aren’t full-time game devs' making popular games and mods for game creation platforms? We explore game discovery by talking to them.
July 29, 2021
JikGuard
Directing Virtual Characters in Wayward Strand, Part 1
Exploring the design and tech behind directing Wayward Strand's character animations in Unity - including how we've set up our animator controllers to allow for continuous, complex character animation.
July 29, 2021