Hitman developer IO Interactive makes layoffs to secure future Hitman developer IO Interactive has made an unspecified number of layoffs in an attempt to secure its future.

---

YoYo Games wants to inspire young game devs with GameMaker education package YoYo Games wants to encourage more people to explore the world of game development by putting together an education package featuring GameMaker Studio 2. 

---

Blog: 9 things I learned making N.O.V.A. I believe in order to gain the clarity and perspective necessary to evolve, each of us needs to reexamine his work every few years. This article is the first in this effort, and treats one of my first big success.

---

1 7 Japanese RPGs game developers should study We reached out to some game makers and asked them to name some JRPGs that they believe all devs should study. They provided us with a diverse list of their highly personal picks.

---

8 Striking voice actors say some game companies are agreeing to royalties SAG-AFTRA has spent over six months striking against 11 video game companies; it now claims other game companies are totally onboard with its demand for residual payments based on a game's sales.

---

  Departed Kerbal Space Program devs now work at Valve A number of the Kerbal Space Program developers who departed KSP studio Squad in 2016 now work at Valve, according to former Valve staffer Roger Lundeen.

---

  Video: Lessons learned making Ark: Survival Evolved in Early Access At GDC 2017, Studio Wildcard's Jeremy Stieglitz and Jesse Rapczak speak at length about Ark: Survival Evolved's dev strategy for Early Access on Steam, as well as Xbox and PlayStation 4.

---

2 Rockstar delays Red Dead 2 to 2018, giving devs more breathing room this holiday Citing a need for "some extra time", Rockstar's delay means one less highly-anticipated game launching this holiday season, a period that's typically packed to the brim with high-profile releases.

---

  Get a job: Insomniac Games is hiring a FX Artist Insomniac Games is looking for a talented artist to create effects to work and assist in gameplay, environment, and the cinematics of its games as a member of its team in Burbank, CA.

---

9 Valve's ownership of Dota 2 is set to be decided by a jury A jury is gearing up to settle a lawsuit involving Valve, Blizzard, uCool, and Lilith Games over the legality of games created in the Dota universe and Valve's ownership of the IP itself.

---

14 Don't Miss: How VR devs are tackling locomotion in virtual space For all the freedom we imagine VR can provide, there's still a significant confining factor: the amount of real-life physical space around you. Here's how devs are tackling the issue of locomotion in VR.

---

1 The early games and tech that inspired a generation of game devs Polygon sat down with over a dozen long-time game creators to explore how their childhood fascinations with coding, early video games, and board games led to their now prolific careers in game dev.

---

8 Blog: Does your video game have too many words? If your game has 100,000 words, you could have done the same thing more effectively with 50,000. If your game has 500,000 words, you could have done better with 150,000. Here's how.

---

3 Blog: Next-gen cel shading in Unity 5.6 Our best chance to get a PBR friendly cel shading art style in Unity 5.6 was by creating a new deferred shader and a custom BRDF function. Here are the steps we took to get it working.

---

  How Alexis Kennedy is writing the next Dragon Age "One day will be breaking the story on the whiteboard wall for a proper scrawly arrows serial killer effect. Then it's one day creating a skeleton of the quest with placeholder text in the editor."

---

Keyword expands art service line-up with $6M Strongbox purchase Game service provider Keywords has been splashing the cash again, this time picking up art asset specialist Strongbox for $6 million. 

---

4 Why creating an internal wiki could do more harm than good "I guess when the company gets bigger I'll have to establish wikis and make those kind of things. But you know it's very uninspiring to actually go and read a wiki."

---

Blog: How we designed a third-person VR experience The challenges of developing our first VR game. Theseus is a third person experience, so how did we approach cameras and UI?

---

1 Aaero designers agonized over being 'too Rez-like' The makers of the indie rhythm action game Aaero initially resisted making a necessary change to how shooting worked in their game because they didn't want to be accused of being "too 'Rez-like.'"

---

  Video Game Deep Cuts: Gnog Bunnies Love Snipperclips This week's best longread/standout articles & videos about games include Gnog's quirky gameplay, Second Life bunny tragedy, and Snipperclips' surprising third-party story, among others.

---

  There's now 45 million people gabbing about games on Discord The chat app company is reporting a total of 45 million users are now present on its platform, with an average of 8.9 million people logging in each day.

---

  How Rain Games built on Teslagrad's fiction to make World to the West Catch up on our conversation with the lead designer of Teslagrad and World to the West about building on indie success.

---

  Get a job: Be a UI Artist at Telltale Games Minecraft: Story Mode dev Telltale Games in San Rafael, CA seeks a UI artist to design, create and implement user interfaces across multiple platforms and languages.

---

  Video: We failed at publishing competitive games so you don't have to At the GDC 2017 eSports Day Iron Galaxy chief Dave Lang showcases how the company tried (and mostly failed) to form a "competitive games" publishing label, sharing lessons learned along the way.

---

2 Why Chinese industrial firms are snapping up game studios: 'You can buy profit' Curious devs may appreciate a recent Bloomberg feature digging into why, exactly, Chinese industrial firms (specializing in everything from mining to chickens) are buying Western game companies.

---

[Read More]