Illustration by Jenny Graf, made with Barles Charkley’s Shut Up & Paint! The 41st Ludum Dare is this weekend, and, like me, many of you are probably getting excited about the opportunity to make something new this weekend. Game jams are game development distilled into its purest form and are a wonderful thing. Some of you may be feeling like you’re not ready, or like you’re destined to fail. If you’re not sure if it’s for you, I’d encourage you to just give it a try! It will only cost a couple of days' time. There are no budgets, no stakeholders, and no one is expecting to be topping any charts. Game jams are about expression, and there are no rules about what your game needs to be in order to “succeed.” Your game is whatever you make it to be. What is a game jam? A game jam is a game-making event where participants have a limited amount of time to make a game. That’s it! Game jams have been around for

Hello, my name is David Finseth and I am a Technical Artist at Synapse Games. I work across multiple games to create visuals that require some technical and artistic components. A big part of my job is working on particle effects for our mobile games. I am very passionate about this work and wanted to share my process and some tips for creating these effects with you. Particle effects are a unique tool that can add interactivity and responsiveness to your games. They excel at creating a lot of movement and impact. Particle effects can be used to create magical fireballs, swirling dimensional portals, or for directing the player's attention to a glowing treasure chest. First, I am going to break down the process that I go through when I make particle effects in Unity. Later I will go over some technical tips and tricks. Most of these examples are from work that I did on the games Spellstone and Animation Throwdown. The Process Breaking down the requirements: The first thing I do when I start to make a particle

pictured: Thumper Dark Souls is more likely associated with anguish than euphoria as a series, but it -- and other notoriously difficult games -- are where we can find some of gaming’s most pleasurable moments. If you work through your urges to throw your controller at a wall, you might be lucky enough to experience the joy that keeps us all coming back for more “YOU DIED” screens. We’re going to delve into what leads to these experiences, why they feel so good, and how they can be designed. That feeling? It’s called “flow.” Named by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in the 1970s in response to interviewees describing the feeling as being carried along by water, flow is a deep, pleasurable immersion in the activity you are engaged in. Most commonly used in reference to creative pursuits like painting or performing music, this experience is absolutely found in games as well. To find yourself in a state of flow, first there are some parameters: You know your goal You know how to accomplish your goal You are receiving feedback

Before your game can be released into the wild, first it needs to survive the rigors of the internal QA process. Ideally this process will go smoothly, but there are a few common problems that can delay testing, which this article will explain. These are things that we believe should be considered early in development. They may seem minor, but they can stall out a release in a big way, especially if you’re developing in a different time zone from your publisher. For some context, let’s start with a common release cadence: Alpha > Beta > Release Candidate > Release. Publishing QA receives builds at the Release Candidate stage. As much as we enjoy contributing earlier in the development process, this article is focused on the end of the release process. This assumes common blockers and crashes have already been found and fixed in the Alpha and Beta stages. First-Time User Experience The first thing your users will see, obviously. Here’s the thing, they’ll only see it once -- QA will go through this experience at