Jamin Warren

IGF entrants are trickling out over the web; you can start the hype machine ‘a-rolling. (Hype machines have wheels btw.) Anyway, Apparatus is a new platformer tjat pulls from the high art of Scandinavian attic design. You’re a jumble of cubes that falls apart and reassembles at your command. Accordi

Last month, I travelled to Redmond to visit the offices of Turn 10, the home of the Forza franchise. I’ve never been a big racing games fan (outside of karts, of course), but much like sports games, I’m interested in the design challenges involved in making games like those. With racing games, espec

Last week, we announced the launch of our Kill Screen show with the Creators Project, a partnership of Vice and Intel. We looked at the cinematic realism of Crysis 3 and why games are now including “crap” like lens flare to make titles look more like film. This week, we travel to offices of Harmonix

Scott Jon Siegel made the rounds of the social games bubble at Zynga and Playdom, so he’s no stranger to some strange or terrible ideas. Over the weekend, he started the Bad Games tumblr in an attempt to design the worst games ever. “I’d rather make bad games now than good games eventuall,” he expla

Earlier this year, the fine organizers at Portland’s XOXO Festival asked me to interview Ron Carmel, principal of the Indie Fund and co-creator of World of Goo. Ron was a lovely intervieweee and the piece above is a great overview/origin story from start to finish of a successful indie title. We tal

When we started Kill Screen a couple years ago, I used to feverishly check our order queue as the first crop of customers began to file into our web store to order print copies of issue zero. (Still available in ebook form!) It was a daily ritual for me, the way one might check on an herb garden or

We have some exciting news to share! For the past two months, I’ve been traveling around the country (plus one trip to Germany) visiting video game studios for a new project. Today we can announce it — in partnership with the Creators Project, Vice, and Intel, we’ve launched a five-video series that

Guillermo Del Toro’s game project may have gotten the axe from THQ during the publisher’s blood-letting this year, but the director naturally has new projects in the works. Rise of the Guardians will be out soon and that gave the Del Toro a chance to wax philosophically about what makes good stories

As part of his graduation project for design school, Massoud Hassani created a low-cost tool to help locals in places like his hometown of Kabul survey the area for landmines. The cost for finding landmines can be prohibitive, but Hassani’s giant Katamari-style roller is about 40 euros.  The crazies

British author Simon Reynolds recently decried the obsession in music for all things old made “new” again. I wonder why we’re so obsessed with the past, particularly in music, because that’s my thing. A lot of the other retro phenomena I find vaguely amusing, but the music is a genuine worry because

While listening to an NPR segment about a young girl who had outfitted her fish tank with MIDI sensors, Michael Rosenblatt realized that more kids should be creating machines. Rosenblatt was part of the first generation of the iPod team and his new project ATOMS Express wants to put machinery in the

James Kochalka, author of the American Elf series and contributor to KS issue #2, had some problems with his Wii U. So, of course, he made an adorable comic about it.

If you’re curious what even a moment of a worker of an MTA pump train is like, David Albert, Michael Geraci, and Nicholas Bergson-Schilcock have an answer for you. Much like Diner Dash and Tapper before it, Pump Train is manic “spinning plates” style game that has you thrillingly at the helm of a, u

Students at the Miami Ad School have developed a genius idea for the holidays. Called Donation Box, this app would sit on your iDevice home screen and allow you to turn in unused apps in exchange for charity. It’s just a concept and of course, would require Apple’s full cooperation, but it does poin

A couple years ago, journalist Leigh Alexander gave an impassioned speech at the annual rants portion of the Game Developers Conference. Her point was very simple — if game designers don’t more openly talk about process and kept the workings of their engine and development cycle tighter than Apple’s

For Wii U launch day, the fine folks at Broken Rules (maker of one of my favorite spinning paper pastiche platformer And Yet It Moves) posted a mini-trailer for their new title Chasing Aurora. We’ve discussed this before, but the Wii U’s tablet opens up new local multiplayer opportunities and a fasc

Glued is a hilarious short about one mother’s quest to free her son from the clutches of his Super Nintendo. It was created by four students (Alon Tako, Guy Elnathan, Daniel Lichter and Sivan Kotek) at the Bezalel Academy of the Arts and Design in Israel for their 3rd year of animation studies. If y

Last week, Deadspin detailed the online travails of Adria Gasol, the youngest of the budding basketball dynasty Gasol family. Marc’s older brother Pau is an NBA all-star who just crossed the 15,000 point mark (joining other foreign-born pros like Hakeem Olajuwon and Steve Nash). Adria’s other older

Well, I’m not sure there are any other Wii U drinking games although technically everything could be a drinking game if you’re on the AA fast track. Anyway, some of the folks that worked on office fave B.U.T.T.O.N and Jones dance the world are collaborating on a new title with an adorable suggestive

I don’t spend a toooon of time on Indiegogo but Montagues Mount is a total gem that might miss its mark. Irish game designer Matthew Clifton is taking the dark greys of homeland and sending a Dear Esther vibe along its hills. Any game named after the house that Romeo hailed from has to be a tragedy,

While KS regular Yannick LeJacq was waxing with NIN front Trent Reznor about the soundtrack for the the new Call of Duty, Reznor made some apt observations about the differences between games and music: I walked into Treyarch studios and was just like, “Holy sh–!” It blew my mind that all of these p

Yup. That’s about right.