Best of Member Blogs: From TOjam To Upward Trends

Author: by Staff

In our weekly Best of Member Blogs column, we showcase notable pieces of writing from members of the game community who maintain Member Blogs on Gamasutra. Member Blogs can be maintained by any registered Gamasutra user, while invitation-only Expert Blogs -- also highlighted weekly -- are written by selected development professionals. Our favorite blog post of the week will earn its author a lifetime subscription to Gamasutra's sister publication, Game Developer magazine. (All magazine recipients outside of the United States or Canada will receive lifetime electronic subscriptions.) We hope that our blog sections can provide useful and interesting viewpoints on our industry. For more information, check out the official posting guidelines. This Week's Standout Member Blogs - TOJam #4 - Friday - 300 feet of Ethernet, Brown Clouds, and no Water (Jim McGinley) The fourth Toronto Independent Game Festival Jam, a.k.a. TOjam, took place last month, and TOjam co-organizer Jim McGinley recounts in entertaining, punchy fashion how garbage became a problem and how the toilet lids weren't quite heavy enough to hold down the tarps on the roof that were supposed to be blocking the sunlights. For his effort, Jim will receive a lifetime subscription to Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine. - Verticality Is The New Co-op? (Martin Nerurkar) Member Martin Nerurkar points out the literally "upward" trend of "verticality" in video games. Game designers are now building their 3D worlds up and down instead of back and forth, as can be seen in games such as Bionic Commando, Dark Void, Crackdown and Infamous. An emphasis on verticality isn't a necessarily new, but there certainly is an influx of new games placing a strong focus on ups and downs. - The Story About Shaders Part IV (Neil Gower) Freelance programmer Neil Gower wrote a four-part series (follow the links back from Part IV) about getting artists to create shaders in order to shorten the art pipeline. Gower admits that it's still a "fairly technical activity," but argues that "the code-writing barrier is pretty well gone." - Plan Of Attack (Adam Bishop) Member blogger Adam Bishop tackles the complex issue of used game sales, and instead of exploring ways that game makers can counteract the sale of used games on the retail battlefront, he lists a few traits that makes games worth keeping. But injecting those traits into a game is a complicated issue in itself. - A Song For Kentia Hall (Jaime Kuroiwa) In the spirit of the real old E3, Jaime Kuroiwa contributes a scant four stanzas in this poem for the long-gone Kentia Hall.