Game Dev

Game Informer ends after 33 years

Game Informer, one of the most subscribed game magazines that started all the way back in 1991, has just published its last issue.

For the last 3 decades they provided in-depth coverage, reviews and all sorts of insights into the games industry. It was always a big thing for a game to get covered on the front page of Game Informer.

Sadly it appears the website has been completely wiped and only has a farewell message, I hope it's just a temporary thing because this just happened. Hopefully in the future they will have the website back as a nice archive. At least you can still find it on the Wayback machine.

Game Dev

Start small, and stay small!

Here's a really interesting Reddit post on a topic that I personally very much agree with. Start with a small scope making small games, that's common advice, but then keep doing exactly that. You don't HAVE to "graduate" to making multi-year games after making multi-month games, you can keep the scope small and just keep building fun small games forever.

This post is written by one of the developers behind Minami Lane, a nice cozy game that has been very successful.

One of the main benefits is simply cost. If you spend 5 months working on a game you likely just need a couple hundred or a few thousand copies sold to break even. Whereas on a 5 year game you need tens of thousands of sales which is really tricky to achieve.

Making multiple smaller games also helps you test out lots of ideas and maybe find one that people really enjoy where you can then spend some more time working on a sequel.

The post is very well written explaining lots of the benefits of this approach, definitely give it a read.

Tech

Subscribe... to your mouse?

Logitech, the company that makes tons of peripherals, is apparently thinking about selling a mouse with a subscription service, the forever mouse.

The idea being that a mouse requires software updates (does it?) but the hardware doesn't need to change, so in order to support constant development of those software updates they cannot just sell something once.

Is this premise correct? Does a mouse require updates? Since they work by default even without their special software it tells me those updates aren't really required. I only replace my mouse when it stops working, I think I've had 4 different ones in 30 years.

One interesting tidbit of information in that interview is when she says "only about 50 percent of people use a mouse and a keyboard today" which I guess makes sense given how prevalent touch devices are nowadays, but to me as someone who uses a desktop 95% of time I find that stat fascinating.

When it comes to software we are never going back, Photoshop is a subscription, Unity is a subscription, Office is a subscription, but for hardware, especially a mouse, I can't imagine people will want that.

Fun

No Man’s Sky Loading System Debug

Here's a fun video showing a debug camera moving super fast in No Man's Sky where you can clearly see their loading system in action, and see how fast it is.

In a few seconds it can easily load/unload multiple completely different planets along with all the levels of detail in all the objects.

If you pay close attention you can naturally see some pop-in (the loading is fast but not instant) and the grass/terrain/detail rendering showing up, but in normal gameplay it just looks beautifully perfectly smooth.