Unity 5 released with upgrades, full-featured free version This morning, Unity released the latest version of its engine, which it announced a year ago -- and Gamasutra talks to CEO John Riccitiello about the competition, and his plans for the company.

---

17 'But it's not historically accurate!' - Diversity in historical games "If the perception that a straight, white male cast is 'historically accurate' can be dismantled with a little research, where does that common perception come from?"

---

  Man in the Moonbase: History of a clandestine project How Humongous Entertainment's Moonbase became cult-hit Moonbase Commander: A slice of untold game industry history from someone who was there.

---

1 Exploring what it takes to make a funny game Why is comedy in games so rare -- and so hard to get right? Developer Zoe Quinn took the stage at GDC today to explore the topic and offer fellow developers a few potential ways to make funny games.

---

5 Autodesk enters the game engine business at GDC 3ds Max maker Autodesk is making its first foray into the game engine business this week at GDC in San Francisco, where it will demo its upcoming Stingray engine to developers on Wednesday afternoon.

---

2 What to do before you start building a free-to-play game Ethan Levy explores better ways to design F2P games and reminds F2P developers to be as rigorous in their business design as their are about their game design.

---

  How Divinity: Original Sin resurrected a fallen series At GDC 2015, Swen Vincke, creative director of the critically acclaimed co-op role-playing game Divinity: Original Sin, described how the game brought Larian Studios back from the brink of disaster.

---

8 500 games launched per day on iOS last year (and other digital sales facts) With digital marketplaces becoming increasingly crowded, Mike Rose, of tinyBuild dug into the current state of indie sales expectations for digital platforms.

---

  Narrative and design insights from 80 Days' writing lead At GDC 2015, Meg Jayanth, lead writer of acclaimed mobile adventure game 80 Days, shared insights into how the team at Inkle created a deeply narrative, highly nonlinear and satisfying story.

---

  This Week in Video Game Criticism: From the Semiotics of PlayStation to the Pitfalls of Jiggle Physics This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Riley MacLeod on topics ranging from a look back at the first PlayStation controller to the pitfalls of jiggle physics.

---

2 Online community and culture wars: What do we know? What can we learn from the significant community challenges the gaming community faces? Online gaming veterans Raph Koster, Gordon Walton and Rich Vogel share fascinating sociological lessons.

---

  Reactive game dev: How Serious Sam 4 became The Talos Principle Croteam kicks off the GDC 2015 Independent Games Summit with a talk on how the Serious Sam studio taught itself a new way to make games as it embarked on its first puzzle game: The Talos Principle.

---

2 @ Play: The return of Toejam & Earl The return of roguelike column @Play! "Toejam & Earl is a game that is dear to my heart. Although it is a slow-playing Sega Genesis game, it has excellent design and gameplay."

---

3 The lay of the land: A critical look at Dark Souls II's DLC "Dark Souls II, as a world, is a kind of tracing of the prequel: generalities are carried over while arrangements and subtleties have been lost."

---

55 Unreal Engine 4 is now free-to-download for everyone You'll still pay a royalty on any commercial projects you make, but say goodbye to subscription fees -- the popular engine is now completely free to try.

---

  UK retailer Game expands into eSports with Multiplay acquisition U.K. retailer Game has announced a deal to acquire Multiplay, a long-running U.K.-based video game event firm, for £20 million (~$30.1 million USD) as it expands into eSports and digital PC games.

---

8 Match game mechanics: An exhaustive survey An exhaustive look at 2D matching puzzles: "We played and analyzed many match games to deconstruct their mechanics. In this article we share our findings."

---

  The art of abstract game design "As soon as you decide to make a game abstract, you immediately raise the learning curve of your game. This can be mitigated by clever thematic choices and use of visual metaphors."

---

2 Preparing for Steam Greenlight with a Concept Page "The main lesson I learned with this campaign is that the Concept audience probably does not represent the Greenlight audience. Despite that, I still believe that using Steam Concepts is worthwhile."

---

5 Double Fine's 'heartfelt and personal' Hack 'n' Slash: A postmortem Project lead Brandon Dillon walks us through what went right and wrong during development of Double Fine's Hack 'n' Slash, an open-world exploration game about hacking and reverse engineering.

---

8 Valve, HTC have a new VR headset coming out this year Valve Software and mobile phone maker HTC announced on Sunday the "Vive," a high-end VR headset that plugs straight into a PC.

---

14 Blog: What is the purpose of game development? "'What is the purpose of game development?' I will take a leap beyond game development and quote Alejandro Jodorowsky: 'What is the goal of life? It's to create yourself a soul.'"

---

  Renegade kid's Jools Watsham (Xeodrifter) on the Metroidvania What's the appeal of the genre? Read here the expanded full-length interview with Renegade Kid's Jools Watsham -- find out everything he had to say about why the Metroidvania matters.

---

  Riot clarifies stance around League of Legends streams When a pro Korean player called "Faker" was being streamed against his will, and in violation of his promotional contract, Riot was forced to jump in.

---

  Get a job: Nix Hydra is hiring Game Designers The team that built Egg Baby is looking to hire on novice and experienced designers to work on developing games in Nix Hydra's Los Angeles, CA studio.

---

[Read More]