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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1 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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1 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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1 Nintendo plans to produce 'significantly more' than 2.3M SNES Classic Editions Nintendo says it plans to produce more SNES Classics than it did for the NES Classic Edition last year, but that it doesn't plan to sell the retro console beyond 2017.

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9 Don't Miss: The 7 greatest graphics innovations brought about by the SNES 'The SNES was the golden age of pixel art,' says Eric Barone, creator of Stardew Valley. 'It had enough complexity to look interesting, but was limited enough that you had to be creative with it.'

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  Experiencing a protagonist's personal hell in The Town of Light This harrowing game, set it a real mental hospital that was closed in the 1970s, turns your stomach not with blood or gore but with a deep understanding of its protagonist's personal hell.

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  Nintendo is bundling a never-before-released game with the SNES Classic UPDATE Like it did with the original NES last year, Nintendo has announced plans to revive the Super Nintendo as a mini, plug-and-play game console, but only for a limited time.

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1 Survey: 31% of VR/AR devs are working on a platform exclusive 31 percent of the 600+ VR/AR professionals surveyed in this year's VR/AR Innovation Report say they're working on platform-exclusive projects. You can learn more in the full (free) report!

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  Life of Pablo: Charting the rise of Backyard Baseball's best player "The one that can't speak the language and might normally not be picked is the best player. It would be, like, a little secret you'd have to discover."

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Blog: A postmortem of our first commercial game, Dynasty Feud In this blog post we share our thoughts on the development of Dynasty Feud and why we think the game did not work.

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5 How Nex Machina could replicate vintage arcades using microtransations The Nex Machina developers might soon try to emulate the classic arcades of yesteryear by implementing a new mode that charges players 25 cents per life. 

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  Blog: A practical example of system design in practice A tangent-free, short (for me) practical example of applied system design on a fundamental game element: projectiles.

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  Blog: The challenge of defining your design Cloudhead's resident VR game designer Max Arnold looks at how you can inform both your players and your own design by knowing how to define your project.

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A TumbleSeed postmortem - what we got wrong, and how we fixed it Now two months after launching TumbleSeed we've had enough time to ponder what went wrong and have put together an update to address it.

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