Game Developer April Issue Showcases Free Realms, Salary Survey

Author: by Staff

The April 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine, the sister print publication to Gamasutra and the leading U.S. trade publication for the video game industry, has shipped to print and digital subscribers and is available from the Game Developer Digital service in both subscription and single-issue formats. This issue's exclusive postmortem delves into Sony Online Entertainment's youth-targeted free-to-play MMO Free Realms, a year after its launch. The article, crafted by creative director Laralyn McWilliams, offers insight on the challenges and successes experienced by SOE's San Diego studio during and after the game's public debut. It is introduced as follows: "Despite years of experience building MMOs, SOE found itself in uncharted territory when it decided to create a kid-friendly, casual virtual world. Old assumptions had to be cast aside and new methodologies adopted to create a game that young players would take to heart." Also featured in the issue is a summary of key information from the ninth annual Game Developer Salary Survey: "How much is your job worth? For our annual survey we crunched the numbers across discipline, experience, gender, and region, as well as new stats for the independent developer sector." Survey highlights will be available on Gamasutra in the near future, and full, extensive survey analysis will also debut for separate purchase via Game Developer Research. In addition, development veteran David Crane, one of Activision's original founders and the creator of Pitfall, discusses his history and current activity in a new interview: "As one of the original Gang of Four who left Atari to form Activision, David Crane helped lay the foundation for the game industry that we know today. We caught up with the die-hard coder and found him at work on iPhone development." Other notable features include 2K Marin (BioShock 2) designer JP LeBreton's in-depth look at what today's industry can still learn from Doom, and Nicholas Vining's case study of a new scripting language Erlang. In addition, our regular columnists and special guests contribute detailed and important pieces on numerous areas of game development -- this issue, we include Bungie's Steve Theodore on going solo, Jari Komppa on porting classic DOS games to modern Windows systems, BioWare's Damion Schubert on designing consequence, Vincent Diamante on subversive audio design, Matthew Wasteland with his monthly humor column, the Good Job! column on industry career moves, tool reviews, and more. Worldwide paper-based subscriptions to Game Developer magazine are currently available at the official magazine website, and the Game Developer Digital version of the issue is also now available, with the site offering six months' and a year's subscriptions, alongside access to back issues and PDF downloads of all issues, all for a reduced price. There is now also an opportunity to buy the digital version of April 2010's magazine as a single issue.