Game Development Resources Library

This is the week of the United States' Independence Day so, in light of that, I'm presenting entertaining stories (even though the fourth isn't until Friday).

The eleventh annual Independent Games Festival sent out its yearly call for submissions yesterday and it's, as usual, something that any independent game developer should be looking at for a game submission. Last year's grand prize winner was Crayon Physics Deluxe, with Audiosurf taking the audience award, and Synaesthete taking the best student game prize. Major games in past IGFs have been Everyday Shooter (now on Steam and the Playstation Network), Darwinia, Gish, and so many other fantastic independent games that are now "must plays."

In today's story which is spawned from gamers being idiots comes a Blizzard comment from this past weekend which preemptively predicted that fans of Diablo and Diablo 2 would be upset about the presence of actual color in the screenshots and gameplay videos for Diablo 3 that have been released thus far. The absurd part is that gamers have created a petition at a site which places host to all sorts of stupid; the angry Diabloers call thier petition: "Renewed artistic direction for Diablo 3" which has, as their banner bullet point Diablo 3's offensive presence of a "Cartoon'ish art direction, obviously influenced by the Warcraft universe, Diablo isnt Warcraft." The petition author also included some screenshots which demonstrated how the game should look; to this end, I present exhibit A, exhibit B, and the difference between "necromancers choice" and "wow gayness" in exhibit C. The following image, though, takes the absolute cake by analyzing how scientifically scandalous one of the rainbows in the released screenshot is.

I simply do not have words.

For anyone who has yet to hear of Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw's remarkable Zero Punctuation videos (which are vulgar and not recommended for my more puritanical readers) I pity you and you should remedy the lack of Yahtzee in your life right now. This week, Croshaw took the topic of "gaming web comics" and analyzed the absolute amount of garbage that exists on the Internet in the form of gaming comic humor; specifically, Croshaw takes shots at Tim Buckley's Ctrl+Alt+Delete. I make no pretense to be "fair and balanced" but this is an accurate comparison of humor methods: bad and good. I'm fully prepared to be flamed for this.