Lida
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Posts by Lida
Making Flash Games into a Platform
Jun 25th
Today, I finally announced a project I’ve been working on. It is a service called “AlwaysOn SaveGames” that provide remote storage of save data similar to Valve’s SteamCloud but open to Flash developers. You can read the announcement for more details, or the about page for an overview of what I am trying to provide. More >
Why Sky High Development Budget is Good for Publishers
Jun 22nd
The cost of developing a game has increased exponentially over the past few years. The first game I worked, ‘The Punisher,’ had a development budget of six million dollars. I would say that’s in the middle range of development cost during that time. Nowadays, just marketing a high profile game will cost that much, with More >
Cast of Characters pt 1 : the Burnout
Jun 18th
If you want to work in the games industry, know that it is filled with geeky guys. Be prepared to put up with a certain amount of ‘eccentricities.’ In this series, I offer up a sampling of the types of people you might meet in your journey. The first personality I’d like to talk about More >
The Games Industry Needs More Competence Not ‘Innovation’
Jun 12th
One of the perennial complaints leveled against the games industry is that the industry is ‘Stagnant’ and needs more ‘Innovation.’ I’ve fallen into that train of thought myself a couple of years ago during the period known as ‘The Time of Brown Military Shooters.’ Gradually, I came to another realization, what I really want to More >
Dear Developers: button layout loading screens must go
Jun 9th
I recently downloaded a bunch of demos from the Playstation Store to check out some of the games I’ve missed. After playing through a bunch of them, I noticed that all of them included a loading screen that tells you what each of the buttons do, the “Button Layout” screen. Here is an example of More >
The Lies We Tell : We never lie
Jun 5th
Actually, I lied in the title, everything you hear from video game marketing and press releases are 100% the literal truth, as everyone knows. However, they are crafted to tell the truth but make people see more in the statement than there actually is. They do this through lies of omission or lies by implication. More >
The Publisher/Game Studio Relationship
May 26th
Since the blog is called “Inside the Game Developer Studio,” I should talk a little bit about what a game studio is. A game studio is where the eternal dance between the money, the monkey, and marketroids takes place (that would be publisher, developer and marketing in layman’s terms). Given those things and add an More >
The Economic of Video Games : the royalty question
May 23rd
New York Times recently ran a story about how the voice actor for the protagonist in Grand Theft Auto IV only earned $100k for his work while the game has already grossed over $600 million. So how does the games industry reward the people who made the games? The short answer is not well. Compensation More >
MVC is just another pattern, not a Platonic ideal
May 22nd
There was been lots of discussion about the MVC pattern in the programming blogs recently. A lot of it has to do with the rise of Rails to bring MVC in the forefront of web development. What is interesting to me is that while design patterns in general have been looked down upon, somehow MVC More >
Remembering E3 : why it was the best of times and worst of times
May 22nd
Ah, E3. (the show formerly known a Electronic Entertainment Expo) Gamers know it as the avalanche of new game announcements and an orgy of screen shots and breathless coverage by the geek world at large. Here is an insightful documentary on what it was like to be at E3, which you should checkout before reading More >