Gamasutra Member Blogs: From Friends To Daddies

Showcasing highlights from Gamasutra's Member Blogs, our weblog writers examine reward structures, Big Daddies, C++ friends, and hobbyist manifestos. 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. Here are the top member blogs for the week: This Week's Standout Member Blogs - Combining Reward Structures With Narrative Bits (Altug Isigan) Reward schedules and narrative cycles in games are often closely-related -- but how closely related they are depends on the game. In this analysis, Altug Isigan compares Diablo and Tetris to examine the relationships of their narratives and rewards. For his effort, he will receive a lifetime subscription to Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine. - Hobbyist Game Developer Manifesto (Soren Andersen) Jumping off the Indie Game Design Dos and Don'ts recently published on Gamasutra by Meat Boy creator Edmund McMillen, Soren Anderson goes even indie-er with a ten-point manifesto for hobbyist developers. - Accessing privates without 'friend' (C++) (Ofer Rubinstein) Do you understand this piece's title? If so, you might be able to follow Ofer Rubinstein's programming example, and the ensuing technical discussion in the comments. - Postmortem On Our First Game: Fall Of Atlantis (Ka Wang Wu) It's always helpful to read what fellow developers experienced on the road to completing a game. In this postmortem, Ka Wang Wu chronicles his student team's creation of the iPhone puzzler Fall of Atlantis. - From Out of the Shadows (Justin Keverne) Hey, game developers: stop putting garbage stealth sections in your games. That's garbage. Justin Keverne agrees. Separately, he also wonders whether the Big Daddies were the true moral heart of BioShock.