Awesome article series about economies in MMOs

I don't know a whole lot about online economies and how to balance them, but I have experienced as a player most of what Simon mentions in his article and his solutions seem doable.  I don't know that I will ever tackle a project that would require a complex economy, but it was still a great read!

Making games tailored to mobile devices

Develop had another article that discusses how we are using mobile hardware in game development.  The gist of the article is that the best games take advantage of the unique capabilities of mobile devices.  I have seen way too many games that were originally designed for consoles or computers but are ported over to a mobile device so that the controls end up being horribly clunky.  I think I have been a victim of this mentality especially when using the preview feature in ShiVa3D.  My game is focused on mouse control at the moment and I have found myself loosing touch with the nuances of a touch interface.  I may have to find an Android device I can borrow so that I can start testing on the actual device.  I don't want to wait until the project is nearly done only to find out that my interface doesn't really make sense for a touch screen.

Making money on Android

Develop has an interesting article up titled What's the best way to make money from Android Games?  It definitely has some good points especially about freemium games, but the best info is that it can be pretty difficult to develop for Android because of all the different handsets and firmware combinations that are possible.  If you add to that the fact that the Android emulators are notoriously slow so that testing games is nearly impossible, then you definitely have one king-size headache brewing.  I guess I will just have to see for myself.

Real-time development

I read this great article on Develop-Online. You guys have probably figured out that I am a HUGE fan of iterative development.  What really drove the concept home for me is the fact that I have been working on a Blackberry app for work and I am doing it in Java.  The problem with Java development on the Blackberry is that you run your code in simulators that take forever to startup and load the app.  There are ways to reduce this time, but when compared with Blackberry Webworks development, it is a huge time waster.  In Webworks, there is a browser based simulator named Ripple that allows you to redeploy an app by simply hitting the refresh button in the browser.  ShiVa functions along the same lines because you can run the game in the IDE on-the-fly.  You don't have long compile times or a long wait while the simulator loads.  More than anything else, that has been the single most important feature in ShiVa and makes development so much easier.

The challenges of game balance

I think Understanding Balance in Video Games is a good article that points out some of the things that game developers need to think about in regards to game balance.  What I like about articles like this one is that it may not explain how to achieve game balance, but it at least gets you thinking about the issues.  I had not thought about some of the finer details of game balance and I also think I am beginning to understand where complexity comes from in a game.  Take Radioactive for instance, the game mechanics are fairly simple because the physics engine does most of the work, but the levels can be fairly difficult to balance properly - how many objects do you include within a level, what types of objects do you have, and what is the physical layout of the level?  When you consider that every collision surface within the level is potentially part of the solution, it can be difficult to add the right amount of challenge so that the level is not too easy and not too hard.

The Belly of the Whale: Living a Creative Life in the Games Industry

Here is a great article by Bob Bates about working in the games industry.  I felt it had a lot of good insights into the psychology of game developers.  It was also interesting to hear how things are "on the inside" since I have never worked for a game company.

Challenges with the diversity of the Android Market

For those of you interested in hitting the Android market, Gamasutra has an interesting article about the Android market.  I have to be honest, the idea of publishing to the Android is a bit intimidating, but only because there are so many different form factors to test.  The same goes for Blackberry, but to a lesser degree.  The nice thing about ShiVa is that everything scales to whatever resolution you are running in.  Of course you still need to check that things aren't too small, etc, but at least from what I have seen so far it works pretty well.  I'm hoping that the same can be said for Corona since that will be my next project.

In-game Achievements Analyzed

There's a good article on Gamasutra about how to use in-game achievements and their impact on the players.  Achievements are definitely something that I would like to eventually put into my games because there are plenty of cases in which I am going back and trying to find all of the achievements within a game even after I have "finished" a game.  Personally, I hate when there are achievements that can only be earned once so that you can't go back later.  Most of the time I am playing a game I am not focusing on the achievements until I finish the game and it sucks to find out you can't go back to that achievement unless you start the whole game over again.  I would be interested to hear about your ideas of successful achievements.