Erin Robinson Swink tapped as creative director of UC Santa Cruz game masters program The independent developer (Gravity Ghost, Puzzle Bots) joins the faculty of the respected Northern California video game program at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

---

  Miyamoto on action game design and difficulty "One of the issues with action games is how to make something that can be enjoyed by all skill levels... the best method is when the player can adjust the difficulty himself while playing."

---

2 Patent owner sues EA, Activision, Zynga, and more over sports games Reports suggest that Virtual Gaming Technologies, LLC is aggressively pursuing a number of publishers over patents relating to realtime data reporting in games.

---

  How to protect your mobile game from holiday season hacking "Let’s look at the most common cheating/hacking scenarios during the holidays. We’ll also explore security measures you can implement to ensure that you keep fraud and cheating from happening."

---

  Get a job: Hi-Rez Studios seeks an experienced Character Rigger The studio responsible for Tribes: Ascend and Smite needs an experienced character rigger to take a senior position at Hi-Rez Studios' Alpharetta, Georgia HQ and work on their new project.

---

1 Survey: American men and women play games in roughly equal measure The Pew Research Center reports that, contrary to popular perception, men and women who play games in the U.S. do so in roughly equal measure -- 50 percent to 48 percent, respectively.

---

  GPUOpen is AMD's new open-source game dev toolset Graphics hardware firm AMD announced a 2016 initiative at its Radeon Technologies Group Summit earlier this month that will see the company launching a new open-source development toolkit: GPUOpen.

---

  Bungie experiments with selling level boosts for Destiny The folks at Bungie have quietly added Destiny level boosts to the PlayStation Store, which means Destiny players can now pay to skip through a large chunk of the game.

---

4 Best of 2015: Honest tales from the trenches of AAA game writing Game writers TJ Fixman, Marianne Krawczyk, and Tom Bissell gathered on a panel moderated by Naughty Dog creative director and writer Neil Druckmann to talk the craft of game writing.

---

  Report: Cut loose from Konami, Kojima is starting his own studio There's a brief report published (in Japanese) on the Nikkei website this week that claims Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima has officially left Konami and is working to establish his own studio.

---

  My process for sound design in Unreal Engine 4 "In this work I will not use the famous audio middleware (Wwise, Fmod) and will achieve the same results only with Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) built-in audio system."

---

2 Gamasutra's Best of 2015: Christian Nutt's Top 5 Games Christian Nutt shares his top 5 games for 2015 -- and games big and small make the cut. What holds them together? An attention to exploring existing game designs in new ways.

---

  Hear how Bloodborne's music was made at GDC 2016 With GDC 2016 coming up, organizers are excited to announce new talks for the show that will take you behind the music of Bloodborne and inside the chart-topping success of Dots.

---

  2,489 days after launch, Noby Noby Boy has finally been completed Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi's strange, stretching, solar system spanning, exploration game Noby Noby Boy has finally been completed.

---

  UK organized crime unit arrest edu-game hack suspect Officers from the UK's South East Regional Organised Crime Unit (SEROCU) have arrested a man who they believe was involved in the recent VTech hack.

---

1 Disembodied hands scale a cliff in new Crytek VR title, The Climb Crytek has announced that it will be supporting the Oculus Rift by releasing its new VR title, The Climb, exclusively on the device.

---

17 The story of a pretty decent game failing "With just over two weeks of sales, Zombie Match Defense has made a mere $1,979. That’s not nearly enough to make up for the almost year of development that it took to create."

---

5 A Subtle shader: Making an invisible thing visible in Unity How do you make an invisible character stand out from the background? This quick blog showcases the effect and provides a Unity .shader file you can use.

---

3 Becoming a game producer "I want to talk a little bit about common assumptions people have about applying for a Game Producer job and how best to prepare for an application. But first I want to touch upon the subject of motivation."

---

  Publisher, developer Agatsuma Entertainment to shut down Best-known for cult platforming franchise Umihara Kawase and 3DS title Code of Princess, the developer and publisher is closing its doors.

---

9 John Romero shares PC Super Mario Bros. 3 demo vid The demo, coded by John Carmack and Tom Hall, was originally created to entice Nintendo into signing a publishing deal for a PC version of the game with the up-and-coming id Software.

---

  Get a job: Roblox is hiring an experienced Engineer The outfit responsible for game creation/publishing platform Roblox is looking to hire an experienced C++ coder to serve as a senior engineer on Roblox Studio at the company's San Mateo, CA HQ.

---

  For those behind bars, video games are a rare but welcome escape A new essay published on Longreads explores the value video games hold for prison inmates past and present, as well as some of the quandaries that come from letting prisoners play escapist games.

---

  Video: Balancing the metagame in eSports and fighting game design At GDC 2015 Spry Fox's Alex Jaffe shares a practical approach for using game theory and matchup charts to suss out the imbalances in competitive games, so you can take steps to balance their metagame.

---

19 Best of 2015: The undying allure of the Metroidvania Gamasutra's Christian Nutt speaks to a swath of developers about the "Metroidvania" genre -- what drew them to it, and its potential. Includes new comments from Symphony of the Night's Koji Igarashi, too.

---

[Read More]