Gamasutra Features

This week, Double Fine launched Double Fine Happy Action Theater, a Kinect-based game and the first in its second set of small projects -- a shift into little games the studio made after 2009's Brütal Legend. In this interview he reflects on those, and talks Kinect tech, too.

In this feature, the first in a series of articles, experienced iOS developer Jeremy Alessi walks us through the initial prototype and production of his latest game, friendly.fire, which is designed to take advantage of mobile play patterns.

Appy Entertainment, the developer behind Trucks & Skulls and FaceFighter, recently launched its first free-to-play iOS game. Studio brand director Paul O'Connor picks apart the successes and failures in getting to grips with the casual and F2P space simultaneously.

Amid the heated discussion over "copycatting" and plagiarism in the games industry, Brian Reynolds, industry veteran and chief game design chief at FarmVille house Zynga talks to Gamasutra about inspiration, rip-offs and how he feels Zynga drives innovation in this exclusive interview.

Remedy's managing director Matias Myllyrinne talks about bouncing back from the surprise slump of the original Alan Wake with American Nightmare -- an Xbox Live Arcade title with shifts in tone designed to win an audience unconvinced by the original.

PapayaMobile CEO Si Shen shares her take on the future of mobile games and discusses the company's new Games Academy, "a program for elite developers who want to create innovative and profitable mobile social games."

In December, Markus "Notch" Persson handed the reins of Minecraft development to Jens "Jeb" Bergensten, and in this interview, he explains what the future holds for the massively popular indie game and what he expects to concentrate on as far as additions go.

The former SVP of engineering of Moblyng, developers of Social Poker Live, explains the ins and outs of getting network traffic up and running over spotty cell connections using HTML5.

The story of how the popular and acclaimed indie strategy game took shape, straight from Mode 7 Games joint-managing director Paul Taylor -- including both how the game exceeded the team's expectations and how they were unprepared for its success.

Usability and user experience studio Vertical Slice and developer Relentless Software have collaborated on a study to discover what it is that turns friends against each other in games, through understanding how player types affect the forms of social interaction.

The mind behind the Guilty Gear series speaks to Gamasutra about what he sees as the future of the idiosyncratic fighting game developer, saying, "I want it such that the fighters we make can't be duplicated by overseas developers."

His studio grabbed the industry's attention with The Chronicles of Riddick -- an immersive, atmospheric, and adventures first person game that has become the go-to title for "better than the movie it's based on," and Starbreeze CEO Mikael Nermark discusses if the studio is in danger of being pigeonholed.

Developer, educator, and author Ian Bogost is back with his latest Persuasive Games column, in which he explores the phenomenon of Indie Game bundles -- what motivates their creators, their buyers, and what effect they may have.

The rise of the free-to-play business model has drastically changed the landscape of game development, and in this feature, designer Pascal Luban takes a look at the design elements which free-to-play elements designers can address and looks at future trends.

IP lawyer Greg Lastowka looks at what Mojang has achieved with its massively popular game -- not just creatively, but in terms of shattering the boundaries between player and developer, and what that means in the current internet age.

As the popularity of mobile games continues to snowball, Ngmoco Sweden's Ben Cousins discusses how, in the years to come, we'll see mobile game teams expanding to the size of console game studios.

In this extensive new interview, Dan Gorlin, the creator of the 1982 Apple II classic tells the story of its original development, ruminates on the PC game scene of the 1980s, explains why the '90s reboot failed, and discusses why the new Choplifter HD is the first reboot to work.

The racing genre is changing shape, as developers of titles like Split/Second (Black Rock) and Blur (Bizarre Creations) are shuttered -- and now move toward the PC as the new platform of choice. Gamasutra investigates.

In this article taken from Game Developer magazine, game designer Simon Strange introduces a method for increasing or decreasing player tension in games without altering their fundamental design elements -- a way to tweak a game in order to profoundly change its function.

HTML5 is poised to blow open game development and smash app stores and native applications -- or is it? Gamasutra speaks to game developers and Google about the advantages and shortcomings of the new standard.