MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Everybody’s a critic,” goes the old adage and, in the age of the YouTube comment and customer review, rarely has it seemed more veracious. Examine the Steam or Amazon page for any title and you’ll find hundreds – if not thousands – of players offering their helpful insight into how …
Read More »How Studio OwlBear is breaking the ice
The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.” So begins William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, a seminal work that helped launched the cyberpunk genre of science fiction. It’s a movement that analyses the effects of tech on society and stars hackers, criminals and …
Read More »One teacher’s battle to make a game
Last year, Oxford-based physics teacher Nicholas Spargo quit his job to work full time on JRPG passion project, Melancholy Republic. He isn’t your typical indie developer. In fact, he had no experience of games development and even less of coding. I haven’t done a course in it or anything,” says …
Read More »A PC developer’s tale – William Pugh on making The Stanley Parable
In October 2013, an experimental game from a developer called Galactic Caf emerged on Steam. It was The Stanley Parable – a fullly fleshed-out version of a Source Engine mod of the same name. The title was developed by two-man team Davey Wreden and William Pugh. But Pugh wasn’t always …
Read More »Sofa, so good: How Screencheat flies in the face of modern multiplayer
On paper, the concept for Australian developer Samurai Punk’s new multiplayer title is a simple one. Screencheat is a split-screen shooter where everyone is invisible and you have to screencheat,” explains director and artist Nicholas McDonnell. Yet, for those who didn’t grow up on a diet of Goldeneye, Timesplitters and …
Read More »From game jam to E3 in six months – the story of Acid Nerve and Titan Souls
In December 2013, three developers gathered to take part in online game jam Ludum Dare. They were UK-based programmer and lead designer Mark Foster and music and sound designer David Fenn, and Andrew Gleeson, an artist from Australia. In time, they would take on the studio name Acid Nerve. The …
Read More »Football crazy – the story behind SoccerManager.com
When you think about football games, your mind probably drifts to FIFA, or perhaps PES and Football Manager. You probably don’t think of Soccer Manager Worlds, a ten-year-old franchise developed by the aptly named SoccerManager.com. Created by the Gore brothers, Andy, Steven and Chris, Soccer Manager is a free-to-play browser-based …
Read More »Kiss and tell – indie label Kiss on streamlining the publishing process
Kiss is a company built on the principle of making the process of getting games to market as painless as possible. The firm was founded in 2012 by industry veterans Darryl Still and Peter King. In the past Still had worked at Atari and launched the publisher’s ST, Jaguar and …
Read More »The Great Escapists – developer Mouldy Toof on the indie prison game
Alongside Tomb Raider, Halo and Quantum Break on stage at Microsoft’s Gamescom 2014 press conference was a pixel-art title called The Escapists. It’s an indie game set in a prison and has been developed by one-man studio Mouldy Toof, aka former roofer Chris Davis. Having my game shown to the …
Read More »Plain sailing for Yacht Club Games
In 2014 a retro-themed NES-style platformer launched onto Wii U, 3DS and PC. The game was called Shovel Knight, a title funded via Kickstarter and made by a team of veterans of California-based developer WayForward Technologies. The first time they all worked together was on old-school fighting game Double Dragon …
Read More »