Picks of the Week 14

Happy Easter for you all! Nice to see after a few weeks break. This weeks links feature a little bit about Artificial Intelligence in games (that’s a little bit close to what I am studying currently here in Spain) as well as the normal indie related articles. Enjoy your final day of Easter and the coming week!

• Aigamedev.com is giving online classes during the weekends. Before that was only for paying subscribers, but now the live stream is FREE for everyone! The classes are really worth your time, whether you are a hardcore ai programmer or not. For more info, read the announcement.
• Continuing with the artificial intelligence in games. The open challenges in first-person shooter AI technology is yet another interesting article from the aigamedev.com site. There is a clear explanation on the problems and give a good look on what should be fixed. Another good AI post.
• DevMag had an article on how are puzzle games designed. This introduction has some history of puzzle games as well as an explanation of how to design the mechanics and also some extra links to continue your search for the perfect idea for a puzzle game.
• Gamasutra on the other hand published an article on Crowdfunding perspectives. The post features both successes and failures on getting your audience to support financially your game development. There are few good sites (although they suffer from the only-life-in-america -disease). However, if you are still interested, check out 8-bit funding (this one is for everyone in the world, not just for Americans).
• ArsTechnica discussed the problem of early reviews and indie game sales. Try not to give out pieces of games for reviews, unless you really have something to sell. The people will forget easily and for cheap titles (in my opinion 0-5 euros) they will just go and buy out the game straight after the review – or maybe never.
• GameTrailers featured a video from this years GDC in San Fransisco. In this video the creator of Syparty explains the idea behind the game and you can see some video of the gameplay. Interesting concept, I am waiting eagerly to see how this turns out to be.
• A new game called Terraria is coming out soon. Indiegames.com posted an article showing gameplay of Terraria. Seems like 2D version of Minecraft, yet it features a lot more than that. Read the post and check the video for more info.