Quality-of-life, DRM, Piracy and other discussions reverberate in today’s Developer Links.

Indie Fund Now Backing “Panoramical” (IndieFund)
“We are super excited to announce our support of Panoramical, a collaborative project by Fernando Ramallo, a game developer from Argentina, and David Kanaga, best known for his work on Proteus and DYAD. Panoramical is something really different from what we’ve funded in the past, and its difficult to describe it in words. It uses an input device like an iPad or MIDI controller to explore hand-crafted musical landscapes, allowing the player to alter the visuals and music to their touch.”

Game Developer Quality-of-Life Survey (Gamasutra)
“”Game Developers: How are you doing?” That’s the question we asked approximately 1,000 of you at the end of 2012. We know that between the long hours, frequent layoffs, and crunch phases, the game industry can be a notorious grind. While we perform a yearly Salary Survey every April to check the pulse of developers’ financial health, we thought we’d supplement that with a quality-of-life survey to see how you’re doing in ways not measured by dollars and cents. Are you satisfied with your pay? Are you confident in your current project? Do you want to be in this industry five years from now? Read on to find out how your colleagues responded.”

Meat Boy dev: DRM hurts more than piracy (Games Industry)
“The troubled launch of EA’s SimCity due to its always-online requirement has raised the issue of digital rights management and the effectiveness of anti-piracy measures once again. In a post on his own blog, Super Meat Boy developer Tommy Refenes gave his own take on the subject, arguing that developers’ attempts to keep their games from being pirated are hurting themselves first and foremost.”

Vlambeer: Mobile devs mustn’t be scared of charging more (Develop Online)
“Mobile developers should not be scared of charging more for iOS and Android games, a developer from Vlambeer has said. Speaking in a Reddit Q&A, developers from the Super Crate Box studio said that indies needed to be sell a countless number of titles at the standard $0.99 (£0.69) price just to survive on the platform, and encouraged more developers to start charging more.”

Sony easier to work with as an indie, Guacamelee dev says (Shacknews)
“With Guacamelee’s release on PS3 and PS Vita imminent, developer Drinkbox Studios took a moment to praise Sony’s continuing efforts to reach out to developers–smaller indie studios, in particular.”

Democracy 3 development blog video #2 (Positech Games)
“Another short video showing off new color schemes and some new features.”

Overgrowth a198 video changelog (Wolfire Games)
“Here is the new Overgrowth alpha video!”

Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 4 Trailer! (Zeboyd Games)
“Our first trailer for our upcoming new game, Penny Arcade’s on the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 4 is now live! “

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Natural Wonder

Learn in today’s Developer Links why to use the Lua scripting language, what kind of social media policy to decide on, and how a developer raised money from pirates.

Mew-Genics Teaser Week 17, Cat Fight! (Team Meat Blog)
“As many of you might have guessed from the song “Cat Fight” in the Ridiculon video post, Cat fights are a large part of Mew-Genics. How will these fights go down?  How will the game actually play?  Why have i been using faked graphics for all the cats ive posted in the past 17 weeks of updates? find out next week! when we finally announce what this damn game is!”

The Video Game Kickstarter Report – Week of Feb 15 (Zeboyd Games)
“Not much this week in terms of new kickstarters to look out for, but I did spot two that I thought sounded interesting. The first is Throw Trucks With Your Mind – a multiplayer FPS where ‘you’ll fight entirely through NeuroSky’s MindWave headset peripheral that reads the electrical activity of your brain.’ It’s up to $11k of its $40k goal with 26 days left to go. The second is Genocide Dolphins. I have no clue why it’s called that, but it’s a FPS with a really trippy visual style. It’s only at £417 raised of its £5k goal with 12 days left to go, but the goal is modest enough that I could see a last-minute recovery.”

Democracy 3 Development Blog #1 (Cliffski.com)
“A short video with me going through the new stuff in Democracy 3:”

Why Lua? (AltDevBlogADay)
“A question that I get asked regularly is why we have chosen Lua as our engine scripting language. I guess as opposed to more well-known languages, such as JavaScript or C#. The short answer is that Lua is lighter and more elegant than both those languages. It is also faster than JavaScript and more dynamic than C#.”

Drafting A Social Media Handbook Policy For Developers (Gamasutra)
“Big companies have recently gotten into hot water by trying to govern employee social media use — but the right way to do this is even more complicated than you might expect, so Gamaustra presents this article, written by an attorney, to help put you on the right track.”

The Witness Audio: 1000 Subtle Layers (The Witness)
“I didn’t think Witness was going to be an easy project by any stretch, but I certainly didn’t expect it to be one of our biggest creative challenges. I’ve worked on nearly 80 projects spanning feature film, games, ads and other sorts, and my job as sound designer had always been to broaden the experience in every possible way. The Witness inverts this notion.”

Indie Dev Makes $12k Through Piracy Promotion (Develop)
“An indie developer has made more than $12,000 after advertising its game through the Pirate Bay. In a blog post, Sean Hogan wrote a post-mortem of the experiment to advertise action-adventure RPG Anodyne through piracy channels, and noted a significant upturn in website hits, Steam Greenlight votes and sales.”

Rocket Report #6 (Rocket Bear Games Blog)
“Last week was quite exciting, development-wise. Guess what?  Those helicopters that I added to the game last time can now do airstrikes.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Interest Groups

Today’s Developer Links comment on possible alternative financing models, different promotional techniques, an oft-overlooked aspect of human body movement, and, well, commenting.

XNA-To-Unity Part 2: Rendering (Radiangames)
“Last time I covered the general setup for the XNA-to-Unity transition.  This time I’m going to delve into details of the most difficult system to port: Rendering.  Some of the problems I encountered are specific to my methods of rendering, but you’ll likely run into many of the same problems.”

make your first game in twine (Auntie Pixelante)
“being the author of a book about digital game-making for non-coders and a hopeful ambassador for game creation, i figured i should have some link on the front of my site where someone with no game-making experience can click and learn how to make her first videogame. naturally, i picked the simplest, most non-coder-friendly, and my favorite game-making tool: twine.”

Head Over Heels: Upper Body Movement In Gameplay (AltDevBlogADay)
“When it comes to in-game locomotion, we rarely get to see the eyes clearly as we’re mostly behind our character, so the next stop down the chain of importance is the head. Unfortunately, when we place such a high focus on maintaining solid foot-planting, we create a fulcrum point at the ground and our characters often pivot in extreme ways to compensate. This is especially noticeable in bigger direction changes and when aligning characters to interact with each other (melee, high fives, piggyback rides, etc.).”

Expos And Shows Vs. Advertising (Cliffski.com)
“I was rambling to someone a few days ago about advertising and risk, and something hit me about indie attitudes to risk and promotion. I know a lot of indies who never do any advertising. I don’t mean word-of-mouth promotion, tweeting, updating facebook and sending people press releases, that’s PR, it’s not advertising. I actually mean paying for banner ads, and search advertising, and even print or video adverts. For most smallish indie teams, the advertising budget is zero.”

The End Looms! (Instant Kingdom)
“That means we’ve completed at least two thirds of the NEW content (or about 98% of the whole game) for the final alpha, which will be the final version before release! Yay! I don’t yet know how long it will take to complete the rest, but rest assured, you’ll be the first to know if you’ve signed up for the release newsletter.”

Fantastic Arcade: Once More, With Feeling (Octodad Blog)
“Last year we made our very first visit to Austin when we were a featured spotlight game at the super rad event Fantastic Arcade, part of Fantastic Fest, at The Highball.  While there we showed off the first Octodad in a really interesting arcade machine setup. This year we may not be part of the spotlight, but Octodad: Dadliest Catch will be there and playable on all the showcase laptops for ya’ll to try out! FOR FREE! So if you’re in the Austin, TX area be sure to come by and play Dadliest Catch along with all of the other spectacular titles we’re showing with.”

The Elements Of Comment Style (AltDevBlogADay)
“Programming comments are a critical, and often overlooked, part of the development process. Comments may not be exciting enough to have certifications and training classes dedicated to them, but in many ways the difference between a good codebase and an excellent codebase can come down to the quality of the comments.”

Can Film-Inspired Project Financing Work For Games?  (Gamasutra)
“In this extensively-researched piece, former Ubisoft associate producer Yann Suquet, who has a masters in corporate finance, takes a long hard look at precisely how films are funded and pulls apart the question of whether the same could work for games.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Facial Features

Today’s Developer Links cover breaking the rules, texture atlasing, infinite replayability, and more.  Though not infinitely more.

Q-003: What Is One Mistake You Made Recently…? (AltDevBlogADay)
“What is one mistake you made recently and what lesson could you share with others?”

Cooperative Gaming Co-Op (Auntie Pixelante)
“my comrades john and james have put together a free arcade in downtown san jose that opens tomorrow. they asked me to put together a selection of games for them – to curate an arcade cabinet centered around the idea of game zinesters. there are the games i selected, which will be available to play at the arcade until october 13th (and are, naturally, free to play online):”

Storytelling Without Stories: Writing For Infinite Replayability (Gamasutra)
“What goes into writing for a game without a linear narrative? A lot, say Valve and Madden veterans, who explain the keys to writing for games which will be played again and again.”

Innovating By Breaking The Rules (Lazy 8 Studios)
“A big congratulations to Ann Burkett for putting on a successful inaugural Game Design Conference here in San Francisco! I gave a talk on on Innovating by Breaking the Rules. For those who are interested in my lecture slides, you can find them here. I’ll try to post a video later.”

Building An HTML5 Game? Don’t Shrug Off Atlases (AltDevBlogADay)
“HTML5 is an amazing technology for designing web sites. The general flexibility of HTML5 markup and JavaScript often leads web developers to create their content using individual image elements. This approach works well for small sites with low overhead, but for games or other high-load websites, using droves of single image elements leads to long load times and slow performance, resulting in a poor end-user experience.  In an ecosystem where 3 seconds may cause you to lose half your users, it’s important to use the proper tool to address this issue: texture atlasing.”

Indie Tools: Ogmo Editor (IndieGames.com)
“Did you know that Offspring Fling actually used the Ogmo Editor? Well, you do now and you are also about to find out that using the Ogmo editor is both extremely simple and very cheap indeed. Actually, it will cost you nothing, as the tool is a freeware, open-source offering you can download for your Windows PC right here.”

Inafune’s Onward March To Independence (Gamasutra)
“In this interview, [Keiji] Inafune talks about the hidden talents of Japanese developers, why there are few large independent Japanese studios, why he wants to work with Western partners to develop games, and how the back-and-forth of working with external partners works. It’s a calmer, more optimistic interview than we’ve seen from the man who has, of late, become more notorious as the doomcrier of the Japanese industry than recognized for his game development skills.”

A Big Post About Sir, You Are Being Hunted (Big Robot)
“The past couple of weeks have seen us enter a new phase with the game. We’re following the sort-of-standard development cycle in that for us “alpha” means “playable, but not yet feature complete”, and that’s where we are now. That’s not to say that the game is entirely fleshed out, because it lacks a tonne of art assets to fill out multiple islands, and it needs lashings more work on fine tuning our combat and stealth systems.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Triple Header

Is the conventional wisdom about AI in games really so wise?  Today’s Developer Links ask this question, along with discussing multiplayer development and “glorious trainwrecks”.

glorious trainwrecks dot exe (Auntie Pixelante)
“glorious trainwrecks dot exe is exactly the kind of inventiveness i want to see more of. made by mike meyer, it automatically indexes glorioustrainwrecks.com and allows you to browse games by event – whether they were made for last month’s klik of the month or for the gdc pirate kart or whenever – read their descriptions and download and play them instantly. glorioustrainwrecks is an amazing site that empowers everyone to make games, and uses monthly two-hour game-making events to help authors understand that creativity is more important than polish and presentation.”

Gratuitous Controllable Battles (Yes, Really) (Cliffski.com)
“I’ve been working on an expansion pack for Gratuitous Tank Battles, but hit a bit of an admin snag in releasing it right now, which gave me time to do something else. As I’ve had this GSB update pending for ages, I thought I’d get around to finally releasing it for everyone. This isn’t just a minor tweak and bug fix, it adds some good stuff. You might want to update your copy, and try this one…”

Level Lobby ft. The Level Editor [The Sequel] (The Behemoth Development Blog)
“Here’s a follow up post to the previous Level Lobby announcement and with all the fun facts that the first post didn’t have! Questions will be answered, such as: ‘What else is in the level lobby?’ ‘How do I use this thingamabob?’ ‘What do you think about sequels?’”

Q-001: Where Do You Feel Like You Are Being Held Back By The Status Quo In #Gamedev? (AltDevBlogADay)
“This was the question that started my twitter #gamedev Q&A series. As of right now we’re just shy of having discussed 100 questions on twitter. Feel free to join in!”

Cook, Serve, Delicious! Status Update (Vertigo Gaming)
“CSD has been undergoing private beta testing, and so far the results have been excellent. Squashed a lot of bugs, polished the game up quite a bit, and aside from a few bonus galleries the game is essentially complete. I’m definitely going to release it by the end of the month, however there are two things I’m waiting for before going forward with a release date:…”

Guerilla Multiplayer Development (Gamasutra)
“What’s the best way to get a networked game up and running on a smartphone? For his space battle game ErnCon, Ernest Woo investigated existing network techniques and integrated them together, coming up with a solution useful to iOS and Android developers, which he shares within.”

“Flip The Question Around” – Interview With Andy Schatz (Made by Pixelate)
“Andy Schatz has been highly influential and inspiring to the independent game development community for a long time, so I’m delighted to have had the chance to talk to him about Monaco and the Venture Games, the growth of indie games and the most important skill to run an indie studio.”

Over 3 Million Castle Crashers (The Behemoth Development Blog)
“While we were in Seattle for PAX Prime 2012 the XBLA Castle Crashers leaderboards reached 3 million! This means that over three million humans have hacked and slashed their way into a castle in hopes of gaining animated glory! We are tremendously grateful that in four years, we’ve had the continuing opportunity to share this game with the world.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Floorplan

Want to get funding for your indie game?  One of today’s Developer Links addresses how to approach publishers, while another discusses what’s currently going on with indie games on Kickstarter… and in another, a developer explains why he doesn’t use Kickstarter himself.  Also, a look back at a famous indie game that was released two years ago and is still selling strong, and an indie developer shares some of her earliest, previously unpublished efforts…

Amnesia – Two Years Later (In The Games Of Madness)
“It has now passed a little more than two years since we launched Amnesia and one year since the last report, so time for another! One would think that there is perhaps not much to be said this long after release, especially for a single player game with no built-in social features. But the fact is that Amnesia is still going very strong and 2012 will probably be the best financial year here at Frictional Games, which we would never had expected two years ago.”

My Kickstarter Love/Hate (Cliffski.com)
“So kickstarter has raised a bazillion dollars for games. rejoice hurrah etc! I have a love/hate relationship with the idea. On the one hand, it’s awesome to see indie devs get games made that they didn’t have the money to make otherwise, as the alternative (gradually building up over time) took me about ten years to get to the standard of games most people know me for… On the other hand, it’s selling a dream, and a pretty unlikely and far-off dream at that.”

XNA-To-Unity: The Radiangames Method (Radiangames)
“Now with 4 full games ported to 2 major new platforms (iOS and PC/Mac), an all-new game based on the same XNA-based game structure, and another larger game on the way, I think I can say the transition was a success.  Many more XBLIG developers have made the transition from XNA to Unity, but some are still in the process or are only considering it still.  For them, and for others who prefer a more code-based game structure than Unity normally provides, I’m now going to share more details of my particular XNA-to-Unity path.”

What Publishers Want: 10 Tips For Getting Your Game Funded (Gamasutra)
“In such a competitive landscape, how does a developer possibly stand out when trying to land a deal a game publisher? Perfect World’s VP of business development John Young shares what he looks for in a pitch.”

Indie Tools: Blender (IndieGames.com)
“You may have already heard of Blender, the 3D open source suite, as an excellent option for creating 3D graphics and models. Well, that is definitely true. Blender is a 3D tool that actually makes sense for me (I successfully created an almost passable castle) and everyone seems to agree that is both powerful and pretty straightforward to use… The game creation advantages are pretty obvious, especially for artists and indie devs wanting to impress with shiny 3D stuff, but what really impressed me is the fact that Brender actually comes with a complete Game Engine.”

PAX 10! IndieCade! Freeplay! Oh My! (Cipher Prime)
“PAX Prime was awesome! Big thanks to everyone that came out to see us! It was great meeting some of you for the first time and showing off Splice one-on-one with folks. If you missed out on PAX or weren’t able to stop by the booth, there’s a great write-up on the PAX10 over at Geek’sDreamGirl.”

kid stuff (AuntiePixelante)
“here’s some stuff outta history.”

The Video Game Kickstarter Report – Week Of September 14 (Zeboyd Games)
“The big new kickstarter for this week just started a few hours ago. It’s a new RPG from Obsidian Entertainment called Project Eternity. Goal of $1.1 million but they’re already up to $344k after a few hours so they probably will make it.  The game is designed to be a great homage to classic PC RPGs like Baldur’s Gate & Planescape: Torment and will feature the talents of Chris Avellone, Tim Cain, and Josh Sawyer.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Game Pointer

In today’s Developer Links: Why people love indie developers.  Also, PAX on a budget, how an indie game has progressed in a year, and a tool to help indie developers talk to the press.

Indies Collaborate On Tools To Make Talking To The Press Easier (Gamasutra)
“If you want easily-distracted players to stay with your game, to give it a chance and discover all the work you’ve labored over, you make it as approachable and as easy to pick up as possible, right? That’s the same attitude indie developers should take when it comes to attracting the attention of the press, to ensure people are helping others find out about your game. That’s where the press kit comes in.”

I Can Almost Hear The (News)Hounds: Sir News! (Big Robot)
“Two updates for you: One is this interview with Jim on Gaming Nexus, the other is this profile of Sir on the main Unity site, with quotes from Tom and Jim. Go take a look! Meanwhile, Tom is back from his time in the wilderness of a house move, and now we’re motoring again. That means fixing the last of the major issues with terrain generation, putting the UI in, and pouring more time into the hunters themselves.”

Horse Talk: Clip Clop Questions With Kevin Zuhn (Octodad Blog)
“‘Why hello there and thanks for asking! I’m Kevin Zuhn, the Creative Director on Octodad: Dadliest Catch. I was also the Project Lead on the first Octodad. As director of creativities, I’m ultimately responsible for what content goes into the game, and for communicating the vision of the game to the rest of the team. In that respect, much of my job involves taking in all of the wacky ideas we Young Horses spit out and shaping them into an Octodad game. I also lead the design team (and get hands on in level design), I do the high-level writing of the game’s story, and I model a lot of the objects and furnitures that you’ll find scattered around the world of Octodad!’”

So, You Want To Take Your Indie Game To PAX On A Budget (Andy Moore)
“Earlier this week, BitFlip Games made a blog post saying that their PAX booth cost them $12K. Afterwards, they edited in a preface that says PAX is still one of the cheapest conferences, and they meant it as positive praise for the conference… but the rest of the article doesn’t read like that… So I wanted to share my story and my costs, as a shoestring Indie Developer.”

Doing It Wrong (Maia Blog)
“…But I’m not sure what I’ve learnt from all this. I don’t have a demo out, I’m still refusing to take preorders and my media releases are patchy. I’m yet to write a single press release. The website is painful to read and makes irritating noises. In fact, by conventional standards, I’d say I’m probably doing everything wrong.”

Why I Love Indie Devs (Reddit)
“Why I love Indie devs: told Lazy Brain about a lack of windowed mode in a game and he sends me an updated version in less than an hour.”

Introducing The Apex (Starbound)
“For millenia the Apex were close to human in appearance until breakthrough research into accelerated evolution lead to the creation of the “Vestigi-Evo Process”. The VEP allowed the Apex to trade physical devolution for intellectual evolution.”

State Of The Game (ScrumbleShip Blog)
“In the past year ScrumbleShip has gone from a barely functional tech demo to something much more. We’ve begun to simulate personal interaction in space with handheld lasers, suits, suit oxygen, suit energy, reaction mass and health. We’ve improved the visual look of the game by adding hundreds of blocks, adding animations, creating a lighting system, adding a HUD, and increasing the render distance by a factor of ten…”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Home Grown

In today’s Developer Links: high dynamic range lighting, Sony’s approach to working with indie developers, and yet more developers’ takes on the Steam Greenlight fee.

‘Evolving Every Day’ – Sony’s Approach To Working With Indies (Gamasutra)
“Sony has earned a reputation for funding daring indie games — especially lately. Dyad and Papo & Yo, in particular, have picked up plaudits in recent weeks. Of course, this is not an accident, says Sony’s Adam Boyes.”

Good Morning Gato # 97 – Oppa Gato Style (Ska Studios)
“We went to PAX! Gato sends her regrets that she was not able to attend as she was tied up all weekend in an international business meeting. Be extra sure to click all the clickables in this week’s Good Morning Gato. You wouldn’t want to miss a single brilliant gem.”

$100 (Thinking In Rectangles)
“So yeah, there’s a big debate this week about greenlight’s $100 fee. I thought I’d come on here and type up my fully formed opinion, because I continue to put my foot in it on twitter. I think others are saying far wiser and more interesting things on the subject, but I want to put my own opinion up, then shut up..”

The Video Game Kickstarter Report – Week of September 9 (Zeboyd Games)
“The biggest new video game kickstarter in the past few days is for a Homestuck Adventure Game. It’s at $853k ($700k goal) with 26 days left which already places it as one of the top 10 highest grossing video game kickstarters. To be honest, I’ve never heard of Homestuck before now but apparently it’s a rather popular webcomic with a weird sense of humor.”

Musing On Iterative Creative Perfection (Cliffski.com)
“The film ‘wanted‘ was on TV here again recently. I’ve seen it maybe 4 times now, and although it has lots of men shooting guns, for once it’s a film like that I really like, mostly because the actual gun bits are irrelevant. It’s a film about breaking out of a rut, in a job/relationship/life you hate, and becoming someone important and doing something you believe in. No wonder I love it.”

Friday Flashback #30: The Return From The PAX (Broken Rules)
“We’re back home! After a few tumultuous days in Seattle, indulging the crazy event called PAX Prime 2012, we’ve finally returned home to use the knowledge we’ve gathered for good. But before we let you know about this week’s achievements, we’d like to present you some of the feedback we’ve received.”

Flow – A Coroutine Kernel for .Net (AltDevBlogADay)
“This post will present a small library called Flow that abuses .Net’s IEnumerable functionality, providing a Kernel for cooperative multitasking based on the concept of coroutines.”

Tech Feature: HDR Lighting (In The Games Of Madness)
“Hello my name is Peter and I’m the new graphics and engine programmer. New is not really the correct word since I have been working at Frictional for a year now. During this time I have updated the engine and added a lot of new graphic features. This will be the first of my blog posts descripting the changes that have been made.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Open Wide

Microtransaction monetization, vector fields, and different ways to create loops in a programming language might not be some of the first things that come to mind concerning indie games, but they are topics that indie developers might have to deal with—and today’s Developer Links have got you covered.  (Rest assured there are articles about less esoteric matters, too.)

Steam Greenlight: Developers Speak Out (Gamasutra)
“Steam Greenlight launched last week to a huge influx of entries. If you follow many indie developers on Twitter, you will have no doubt seen your fair share of both love and hate for the initiative. Crowds of developers happy to get their game closer to being on the system were buffeted by tides of frustration at Greenlight’s shortcomings. Now that things have started to settle down, Gamasutra looked to grasp the general feeling among developers: is Greenlight good news for the indie scene? Will it actually help consumers show Valve which games they want on Steam, or is it yet another database to throw your game into and then never see any real good come out of it?”

What Topiary Should I Put On Top Of The New Courtyard Map? (SpyParty)
“The true purpose of this post is to test the new CAPTCHA system I installed, after getting sick of reCAPTCHA letting in 40 spam comments a day.¹ So, if you’ve never commented on the blog before, please chime in below so I can test that it works.  If you have commented before, then you shouldn’t notice anything different and shouldn’t see the CAPTCHA.  Edit: it looks like the new CAPTCHA works fine, thanks everybody!  The ostensible purpose of this post is to brainstorm what topiary shape should go on top of the center pillar in the new experimental Courtyard map, pictured here:”

C/C++ Low Level Curriculum Part 9: Loops (AltDevBlogADay)
“This post covers the 3 built-in looping control structures while, do-while, and for as well as the manual if-goto loop (old school!); as usual, we look in some detail at the assembly generated by the compiler looks like. Did I forget about the new range-based-for loop that was added in the C++11 standard? Nope. If you have access to a C++11 compliant compiler you’re more than welcome to look at that yourself – think of it as homework…”

Next Generation Monetization: Supremacy Goods (Gamasutra)
“Is your microtransaction-based game set up for failure or success? Consultant and writer Ramin Shokrizade discusses a new class of goods that is likely to damage the health of your user base — and in this article, posits rules for goods as well as taking a hard look at how some games function.”

The One Hundred Dollar Question (Jonas Kyratzes)
“It all began when Valve announced that Greenlight, the vote-based submission system for Steam, would now come with a $100 price tag for developers. The money wouldn’t go to Valve, but to a popular (with gamers) charity called Child’s Play; the point of the fee was not to enrich Valve, but to stop all the bogus and unprofessional submissions that were flooding the system. A few developers said ‘$100 is a lot for some people.’ Then all hell broke lose, and my understanding of the indie scene was permanently altered.”

The Art of Journey Available For Preorder (thatgamecompany)
“Good news, everyone! The Art of Journey is finally up for pre-order at Bluecanvas!  The first 750 orders get copies that are signed by both Jenova Chen and Matt Nava!  Signed copies are still available, but they’ll likely run out quickly.”

A Data-Oriented, Data-Driven System For Vector Fields – Part 1 (Bitsquid)
“A vector field is a function that assigns a vector value to each point in 3D space. Vector fields can be used to represent things like wind (the vector field specifies the wind velocity at each point in space), water, magnetism, etc. To me, wind is the most interesting use case. I want a system that can be used for physics (trees, tumble weed, paper cups), particles (leaves, sparks, smoke) and graphics (grass). I also want the system to be capable of handling both global effects (wind blowing through the entire level) and local effects (explosions, air vents, landing helicopters, rising hot air from fires, etc). But I don’t want to limit the system to only handling wind. I imagine that once the system is in place, it could be put to other interesting uses as well.”

Super Hexagon Launch Week Roundup (distractionware: devblog)
“So, er, wow. So much has happened that I don’t really know where to start, but here goes. Super Hexagon has been an absolutely huge success – both critically and commercially.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Cloth Cover

From today’s Developer Links, you can learn things like tactical level design, how to contact the press, or, for the more technically minded, how to use OpenGL with Native Client and a possible avenue for homebrew development on the Vita.

I’ve Written A Big Text: “How To Contact Press” (PixelProspector)
“I’ve just written a piece called “How To Contact Press (And Increase Chances To Get Press Coverage)”. You can find it over here.”

Want To Donate To Support Indie #Gamedev Greenlight Fee? (AltDevBlogADay)
“@dejobaan stepped up tonight and offered a $100 loan to an awesome indie #gamedev that really needed the money to pay their Greenlight fee to help make their dream happen. A few of us followed his excellent example (including @BenKuchera) and offered to do the same.”

The Metrics Of Space: Tactical Level Design (Gamasutra)
“What makes good level design? PhD and educator McMillan — who’s worked with Ubisoft to create a curriculum for game design — examines how point of view effects players, showcasing a variety of gameplay scenarios which show different tactical choices players may be confronted with.”

Too Many Ideas (Cliffski.com)
“I had, I thought, pretty much decided what game I was going to do after I release my expansion pack for Gratuitous Tank Battles. it’s the third idea I had for a new game. And then, there I was watching a TV show which is (in some ways) relevant to one of my other ideas, and I was musing over doing that one instead, and then lo! believe it or not, a TV ad appears which reminded me of the other idea.”

Bringing Regal OpenGL To Native Client (AltDevBlogADay)
“Porting your game to Native Client and Android just got a lot easier. The new OpenGL portability library ‘Regal’ emulates legacy GL features such as immediate mode and fixed function pipeline. Regal is the ‘Write Once, Run Everywhere’ GL library. Read on for more details on Regal and how it got ported to Native Client.”

Inconceivable (WeMakeTheCopsLookDumb)
“I’ll admit, I was caught by surprise and increasingly upset by the number of people I’ve encountered on the internet who couldn’t possibly conceive of a scenario whereby you own a computer, you own all the development software and you make videogames but you can’t possibly have $100, closely followed by the ‘if you’re serious, you’ll have $100 dollars’ crowd. I know it’s not said with any sort of malice and I know that a lot of it comes out of a genuine inability to understand how that’s even possible. Jonas has touched upon the broader scope of things but as I touched on, angrily, on Twitter earlier I’ve learned exactly how it’s possible. I’m not going to go too in depth but the past 2 years of my existence are how it’s really, really, not inconceivable that such a scenario should arise.”

Indie Tools: Impact (IndieGames.com)
“Impact is unlike the other Indie Tools I have been writing about, mainly in that it is a JavaScript game engine that allows you to develop HTML5 games for desktop and mobile platforms. It is thus an environment that is mainly meant for programmers, even though it does provide certain tools that anyone can use.”

Hack Opens The Door For Homebrew Development On Vita (Ars Technica)
“No matter how hard Sony and other console makers try to lock down their hardware, industrious hackers seem to always find some way to run their own homebrew code on the systems they buy. The PlayStation Vita appears to be the latest system to have its software protections fall, with the announcement of the Usermode Vita Loader project (UVL).”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Multiplatform Platformer