The Molecarium Project’s mission is to “excite children about the world of science and…ignite their curiosity.” To this end they created NanoSpace as an education tool that is supposed to be fun and informative: NanoSpace offers more than 25 games and animations that teach kids about atoms and mole
It is becoming increasingly difficult for new indie developers to get noticed. Gains in technology have made it easier for people to develop games, but it’s a double-edged sword as the potential for these titles to get lost in the fray also increases. Jeff Sullivan, a spokesman for Microsoft describ
“Extracurricular” would be a generous word to describe my gaming career in college. At Rice, games are aparently part of the curriculum — I guess I went to the wrong school. This is the course description for English 312: – – – This course has two goals. First, it introduces students to fantasy as b
Gamers my age (23) grew up with the Metal Gear series. It means different things to different people, but no matter what it meant, it marked time for a generation of gamers. This story recounts a life through each iteration of Metal Gear, beginning with Metal Gear Solid: Metal Gear Solid is a videog
Gamers are still in the honeymoon phase with Kickstarter. What happens when games never make it to launch? Kyle Orland at Ars Technica discusses Haunt‘s recent failure and what this says about the Kickstarter phenomenon: Over 1,200 backers helped Rick Dakan and the development team at Mob Rule Games
Have you ever wanted to make your own adventure game? Failbetter Games has created a tool called Story Nexus which allows you to craft your own text based adventure. And even if you don’t want to create a game, you can play other people’s. The adventure creation package requires no coding but allow
Why? Why not. This is how it was done: Instructables user dany32412 pulled an Xzibit, he built a Nintendo NES system into an old school NES Cartridge. Inspired by Kotomi who completed a similar project, he sourced a NES On A Chip (NOAC), a cloned consol which is essentially a fully functional Ninte
Extra Life is a nonprofit that holds an annual 24 hour gaming marathon for charity. With the help of Twitch, a gaming entertainment service, they have set a fundraising record. The Twitch community has managed to raise more than $1.5 million for the Extra Life 2012 charity, which is set to see thous
Dishonored started with art and went from there, no plot, just an idea of what the world was going to be (a fact which our reviewer discovered on Monday). With Viktor Antonov, the guy who brought us the design of City 17, leading the charge, it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. Antonov and Sebastia
Kotaku hosted a forum where its audience could ask an anonymous game developer about the development process. No punches were pulled: One reader asked, “If a small Studio pitches an idea, how much of the influence will be on making money from that Idea?” To which the developer responded: “Most of th
Ever wonder how a video game gets greenlight? Sometimes all it takes is a 96 second demo: This video wasn’t even playable. It was just an idea that Nels Anderson and Klei were kicking around and had animated. Interestingly enough it bears quite a resemblance to the final product.
Starcraft 2 is one of the biggest e-sports around. If you can’t compete with the best, you can at least watch them. “The Drinking Man’s Guide“, as dubbed by its creator Frank Lantz, can help you get acquanted with the particulars: Lantz, designer of “cross-media entertainment” and games, and co-foun
Video games and the future of psychological analysis: Back in 2011, PhD student Giel van Lankveld noticed something interesting about Neverwinter Nights. If you compared the in-game experiences of characters with the personality test results of players, certain in-game actions lined up with prominen
Elisée Maurer has made “a game to make games”. If you think Minecraft is a platform for game creation, just wait until you see Maurer’s Craft Studio: It take inspiration from Minecraft of course, but it’s also reminiscent of Little Big Planet, letting you build things, but also design the principle
This is how you end up making a clay video game: Most game artists are used to working with pixels and polygons, but what do you do when you’re an artist just getting into development? If you’re like Anders Gustafsson and Erik Zaring, you make your game out of clay. – – – Both Gustafsson and Zaring
Terry Cavanagh, the creator of Super Hexagon, was trying to rerelease his 2009 flash game Don’t Look Back on the iTunes store. It was rejected because it contained a description that did not comply with the app store guidelines: The sentence that ruffled Apple’s feathers was “there are no in-app pur
Mike Singleton’s obituary in Rock, Paper, Shotgun: [He] will perhaps be best remembered for a series of remarkably ambitious ZX Spectrum titles including The Lords of Midnight, Doomdark’s Revenge, and War In Middle-Earth. Personally I was enormously influenced by his Midwinter games for 16-bit home
TheTruth, the anti-smoking campaign, created a full fledged mobile game to counter the devious advertising of tobacco companies. Flavor Monsters aims to shed light on the machinations of big Tobacco (flavored cigarettes? Seriously?) Check out the gameplay:
A game that is “good” doesn’t mean it won’t eventually make you want to bash your head into a wall. Adam Harshberger (founder of Pixels or Death) chronicles his failed attempts to find a satiating videogame. I’m level 14 on Guild Wars 2 and I think it’s a great game. But I can see every inch of t
Sophie Kan reveals her design process for these portraits: 38 New Yorkers whose portraits I made, using a 3d laser scanner. The result is an identity parade of textured 3d scans of their faces, rotating in and out of the light. The glitchy, fragmented look of these scans results from my misuse of t
Will this be the norm for much longer? In an industry that seems plagued with the underepresentation of any group besides white males, it’s reassuring to read reports of a little diversification. Walking around the show, playing the games, and networking with peers, it was striking how many people
Art that looks like a cross between Super Metroid and Watchmen can’t go wrong, can it? Uno Moralez doesn’t think so, and his art does more than that. Some of his black and white pieces look like higher res renditions of some Commodore 64 adventure games. You can see more of his work here.
Ohio State’s halftime show at the game against Nebraska was truly a spectacle to behold: a full ten minutes of their marching band performing video game tributes. I went to Michigan, so understand that praise of OSU is sacrilege, enough to get me burned at the stake in Ann Arbor. Combine an idea fi
Coins are ubiquitous in Mario games, but their function has remained relatively constant. Who can deny their allure? The collectibles are a little different this time and just that small change can affect the way the whole game is played. – – – For one thing, it’s a Mario that’s concerned with score
Peter McFarlane makes art with computers. No not on Photoshop, but with old circuitboards from garbaged PCs: To me, waste is just lack of imagination. This belief carries beyond the boundaries of my art production and permeates most aspects of my life. Most of my home and studio, and much of everyt
