August 14, 2005

August tidings from August

aug05sm.jpg A main weblog post from me inevitably means a new issue of Game Developer has hit news-stands and subscriber mailboxes, and as you can see, it's the Psychonauts-themed August issue, complete with day-glo art stylings and brutally honest postmortem ($11.8 million to make? It's really brave of them to admit that), this time round.

Next up is September 2005, and our first ever specialized mobile gaming issue. Although cellphone games sometimes get short shrift, it's a fast-growing market, in which increasingly interesting titles are being produced. Not least of these is Square Enix's Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII, which is our cover game and postmortem subject, and shows great use of mobile camera and online connectivity - it may even come to the States before long, too.

We also have a great article by Paul Hyman discussing the state of the North American mobile gaming market - why are the carriers important? Do only 'casual games' with licensed names hit big? Are mobile developers getting more selective about game subjects? Plus, the technical team from Glu Mobile talk about the biggest logistical problem in the market - converting titles between literally hundreds of different mini-'platforms', dependent on the phone's hardware abilities - that's a pretty darn tricky proposition. We also have a neat, inspirational Business Level column, check out the latest phones for the news section, and have our regular, lovable technical columnists doing their largely non-mobile thing, yay.

We're still trying to make Game Developer relevant to all disciplines, yet sufficiently technical - being all things to all people is a strain. But we really do try hard, and I think, judging by the majority of the feedback we get, we're getting it basically right. Feel free to ping us if you disagree. And we're still posting lots of exclusive goodness on Gamasutra for those pieces we can't fit into the mag.

Allegedly good Gama content recently? I very much enjoyed Morgan McGuire's technical SIGGRAPH wrap-up, as well as Brad Kane's more general one, plus Chris Kohler interviewing Silicon Knights' Denis Dyack and a much-debated John Sutherland article on story in games, and a great Soapbox from Borut Pfeifer about indie development, to name but a few. Also, we're close to 60 stories per week on the news page nowadays, and they're all actually pretty relevant. Which is nice. Onward and upward...

Posted by h0l211 at 07:08 PM