January Comes Too Soon

Been a little tardy in updating the main weblog recently, but the January 2006 issue of Game Developer arrived a little while back, showcasing an adorable Stubbs The Zombie-themed cover that has the eponymous undead hero chomping on a trophy from our Front Line Awards for game tools.

As for the February issue, which is just wending its way to the printer, the cover and postmortem features Harmonix/Red Octane's extremely awesome Guitar Hero, with the Harmonix-ites describing exactly how many guitars they trashed while making one of the most enjoyable games of 2005. Also, we have a great article from the Naughty Dog guys on making Jak X: Combat Racing from full production start to gold master in just ten months, despite never having made a fully fledged combat racer before - some great stuff on production techniques in here.

The rest of the issue includes some other goodness, including a piece on the state of casual games that interviews PopCap, PlayFirst, Yahoo! Games, and other bigwigs in the space, and even a story on the Independent Games Festival Grand Prize finalists (yay, Darwinia, Dofus, Professor Fizzwizzle, Weird Worlds, Wildlife Tycoon) for this year.

Talking of which - as Chairman of the IGF, I've been working really hard on co-ordinating the judging, and apart from the amazing Main Competition finalists, we also announced the Student Showcase finalists and the new Mod Competition finalists - everyone who can should come to GDC 2006 in San Jose this March and check out all the games, because there's some awesome titles emerging from the indie scene of recent.

Otherwise, you may see the linklog slowing down a bit of late, and that's because, with Gamasutra plus the magazine plus the going-well GameSetWatch plus the IGF, plus helping Archive.org and trying to keep going with Monotonik and LegalTorrents, something (that wasn't my sanity!) had to give. Phew.