Heads up, devs: Eleven Ventures is a new game-focused investment firm This week marks the public debut of Palo Alto, CA-based Eleven Ventures, a new venture capital firm that aims to partner with startups in "high-growth sectors" like VR/AR, eSports, and video games.

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  Get some great tips to improve your level design skills Level design can be a tricky task, so we tried to improve our skills while getting great advice from some top-notch game developers from across the globe.

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  Video: Crafting epic, interactive music for Final Fantasy XV At GDC 2017 Square Enix audio programmer Sho Iwamoto takes the stage stage to explain how the Final Fantasy XV team designed a custom system to allow for interactive music that still sounds epic.

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  Get a job: Hidden Monster Games seeks a Sr. JavaScript Game Developer Hidden Monster Games is on the lookout for a Sr. JavaScript Game Developer to join its studio in the Netherlands.

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  Twitch Affiliates will soon reap the rewards of paid subscription tiers Twitch is beefing up the benefits it offers to streamers that partake in its Twitch Affiliates program and making the streaming platform more profitable for those that qualify in the process.

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1 Blog: Should your engineering lead be fired? Here is a checklist that represents the minimum bar of what else you should expect from your engineering lead.

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1 Arkane Studios president Raphael Colantonio stepping down After 18 years with the studio he helped found, Raphael Colantonio is departing Arkane to spend time with his family.

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29 Don't Miss: Learning to love handicaps in competitive games Rubberbanding and randomness can level competitive games' playing field, but they also cause problems. In this timeless 2013 feature, designer Keith Burgun examines handicaps as a design alternative.

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5 Blog: The many questions surrounding Genital Jousting Genital Jousting is a popular and somewhat shocking game about penises penetrating each other. The devs weigh in on why they are making it and their anxieties about possibly making a bad sex game

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  AbleGamers's Player Panels aim to give game devs insight on accessibility The charity organization has created a new program that seeks to put game developers, publishers, and researchers directly in contact with disabled players and accessibility experts.

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  Get expert guidance on building for VR and AR at VRDC Fall 2017! VRDC organizers want you to know about two great sessions at VRDC Fall 2017, one from VRTK dev Harvey Ball about building better VR games in Unity and the other about designing great AR experiences.

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  Blog: Why you should build custom hardware for your mobile game What we learnt by building custom hardware for our game Swing King and the Temple of Bling, and what other mobile developers could pick up from it.

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  Chat about good level design with the pros at 1PM EDT We're experimenting with some level design in the SnapMap tool and talking about best practices for the field at 1PM EDT on Twitch.

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  Guillemot family raise Ubisoft stake to fend off Vivendi Ubisoft founders the Guillemot family have raised their stake in the company in an effort to fend off a potential Vivendi takeover. 

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7 Blog: Defaulting to zero when coding In this blog post I argue for using 0 as the default and "nil" value in multiple parts of the code.

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2 Report: Augmented reality startup CastAR has closed its doors Augmented reality startup CastAR, which was founded by former Valve employees Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson, has shut down. 

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  Playdead co-founder Dino Patti helps form new studio, Jumpship Playdead co-founder Dino Patti, who left the Limbo developer last year after a purported conflict with business partner Arnt Jensen, has established a new indie studio called Jumpship.

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1 Blog: Let player imagination fill in the game design blanks Our senses can only capture sliver of reality. We must constantly fill in blanks to properly create a mental image of the world, and it's important to understand that process when crafting games.

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Game Design Deep Dive: Visualizing Cryptark's 2D sci-fi world "Rather than looking back at the past with retro pixel-art styles, I want to apply modern techniques and technology and see what new visuals can be made." - Jesse McGibney, Creative Director at Alientrap

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  Splatoon dev: 'Being an eSport wasn't something that we were ever really considering' "We also realized that if we were going to have competitive play, it would need to be supported by a great community," Splatoon 2 producer Hisashi Nogami tells Glixel in a new E3 interview.

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  Nier director's new mobile game tops iOS charts in Japan Yoko Taro is best known right now as the director on Platinum's Nier: Automata, but he's evidently also contributed to a F2P mobile game, SINoAlice, currently topping Japan's iOS earnings charts.

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  Mario + Rabbids, Wolfenstein II among 2017 E3 Game Critics Awards noms This year Ubisoft's Mario + Rabbids Battle Kingdom, Monolith's Middle-earth: Shadow of War, and MachineGames' Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus came out on top, with four award nominations each.

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  Get a job: Infinity Ward seeks an experienced UI/UX Director The folks at Call of Duty dev Infinity Ward seek an experienced UI/UX director to join the team working on "a new, exciting project" at the company's Woodland Hills, CA studio.

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  Video: How procedural level design works in Eldritch Eldritch creator David Pittman speaks at GDC 2017 about procedural generation in games, how you make good use of it in terms of level design, and when you should (or shouldn't) use it at all.

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  How a Retro Studios prototype laid the foundation for Metroid Prime Before the studio was acquired by Nintendo, designer Mike Wikan played a major part in creating the first level of the game that would eventually be reworked into Metroid Prime.

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