Weta Digital, Epic Games, and the future of film, games, and VR Weta Digital head of R&D Alisdair Coull and Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri talk about the creation of the Smaug VR demo, the convergence of film and games art, and the opportunity for devs in VR.

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  Balance balls make better games? Tips from Swery65 The always-spirited Swery65 offered a bevy of surprising and insightful development tips on everything from making better motion controls and creating more empathy to getting along with your team.

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  Teaching AI to eat with two hands from the fridge "Granted, there are plenty of software systems more complex than this. So, wouldn't you concede, Dear Mr. Naysayer, that this task of eating out of the fridge was hard after all?"

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  Carmack's perspective on the future of mobile VR game development Oculus CTO John Carmack spent nearly two hours today speaking to GDC attendees about the ups and downs of mobile VR development, and what developers can do to make better VR games.

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  Hands-on: Full-room SteamVR highly-impressive, even as a prototype Valve Software was on hand at Game Developers Conference 2015, doing behind-closed-door demos of full-room SteamVR, and even in prototype form, the company's offering is already impressive.

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2 EA shutters venerable SimCity studio Maxis Emeryville The venerable studio, originally founded as Maxis Software in 1987, has been shut down as EA consolidates ongoing development of The Sims and SimCity to its other Maxis satellite studios.

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2 Xbox's vision for a cross-platform future Microsoft plans to create a single, unified platform for game developers with the forthcoming launch of Windows 10, which will have Xbox Live integration to allow for cross-play across devices.

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  Analyzing Monkey Island 2 puzzle dependencies and game balance "What makes a good puzzle chain? How can charts and graphs help you get the right feeling if the puzzles you wrote work as intended concerning the overall game experience?" This post answers that question.

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4 Epic's Sweeney: Unreal Engine is at the epicenter of a graphics-intense future At GDC this morning, Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney gave a talk that essentially had one main point: As realtime, photorealistic graphics rise in importance, Unreal Engine will be at the forefront of that movement.

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4 Blog: You don't always have to commit "In games, it feels like when you make something, it is supposed to be all the way. That if you make horror, the horror has to be pitch-black... but the world doesn't work in absolutes."

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  Unity won't be sold, and is planning for a VR future: John Riccitiello speaks Unity's CEO holds court with Gamasutra, dismissing the possibility of an acquisition, charting the future of the engine, and talking about what sets the company apart. Oh, and yeah, he talks pricing.

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2 Complexity and complication in game design (Also: Why I love Go) "Let me tell you about Go. The rules are very, very simple. The possibilities, the implications of each single move, are more than any human can grasp."

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  Games as a service company PlayFab raises $7.4 million Playfab, a cross-platform tool provider to enable games to better operate as service, has secured further funding.

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1 Corona Labs releases its mobile SDK for free As part of their acquisition by Fuse Powered, Corona Labs has announced their mobile SDK is now free.

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  Perforce Software launches Helix collaboration platform Popular version control software Perforce has launched Helix, a larger-scale collaboration platform.

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  Postmortem: Failbetter Games' Sunless Sea Failbetter Games co-founder Alexis Kennedy takes you behind the scenes of what went right (and wrong) during development of the studio's darkly comedic roguelike game Sunless Sea.

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9 Our tutorial doesn't work. What next? A redesign blog: "How many people got overwhelmed and just stepped away because of the sheer number of tutorials? We have no way of knowing."

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  Sony's Project Morpheus release window announced During Game Developers Conference week, Sony announced a commercial release date for its virtual reality headset, codenamed Project Morpheus.

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  Valve chases VR and in-home game streaming with new hardware Valve is keeping busy at GDC this year with debuts of a Steam Link set-top streaming box, a final Steam Controller, a fresh crop of Steam Machines and a new motion-tracking system known as Lighthouse.

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9 Valve debuts Source 2 for free in bid to compete with Epic, Unity Valve is officially debuting its long-rumored Source 2 engine at GDC this week alongside a host of other new technologies, and it's expected to launch at a competitive price: free.

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2 Storybricks shuts down in the wake of SOE sale The developers of the Storybricks artificial intelligence engine are closing up shop and moving on to other projects after parting ways with Daybreak Game Company (formerly SOE) and Everquest Next.

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  The secrets behind This War of Mine's emotional impact 11 Bit Studios Pawel Miechowski talks about how disrupting players' expectations, studying their decision-making process and creating opportunities to imagine helped make This War of Mine acclaimed and impactful.

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1 Writing presence: How good storytelling helps a VR game feel real It's hard enough to make a VR game that's comfortable and satisfying to play for extended periods of time; how do you tell a good story in the process -- and why should you bother?

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19 The rise of games you (mostly) don't play "Idle games," or games that virtually play themselves, are a nascent genre that sometimes become unexpectedly popular. Anthony Pecorella with Kongregate explains.

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8 Is the game to blame? Video game playing and anti-social behavior "Nearly all studies that claim the playing of violent video games leads to more anti-social behavior highlight correlations and not causation. I don’t believe any study has ever demonstrated absolute causality."

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