PlayFab Raises $7.4 Million in Series A Funding Led by Benchmark Playfab, a cross-platform tool provider to enable games to better operate as service, has secured further funding.

---

  Corona Labs releases its mobile SDK for free As part of their acquisition by Fuse Powered, Corona Labs has announced their mobile SDK is now free.

---

  Perforce Software launches Helix collaboration platform Popular version control software Perforce has launched Helix, a larger-scale collaboration platform.

---

  Postmortem: Failbetter Games' Sunless Sea Failbetter Games co-founder Alexis Kennedy takes you behind the scenes of what went right (and wrong) during development of the studio's darkly comedic roguelike game Sunless Sea.

---

  Our tutorial doesn't work. What next? A redesign blog: "How many people got overwhelmed and just stepped away because of the sheer number of tutorials? We have no way of knowing."

---

  Sony's Project Morpheus release window announced During Game Developers Conference week, Sony announced a commercial release date for its virtual reality headset, codenamed Project Morpheus.

---

  Valve chases VR and in-home game streaming with new hardware Valve is keeping busy at GDC this year with debuts of a Steam Link set-top streaming box, a final Steam Controller, a fresh crop of Steam Machines and a new motion-tracking system known as Lighthouse.

---

4 Valve debuts Source 2 for free in bid to compete with Epic, Unity Valve is officially debuting its long-rumored Source 2 engine at GDC this week alongside a host of other new technologies, and it's expected to launch at a competitive price: free.

---

1 Storybricks shuts down in the wake of SOE sale The developers of the Storybricks artificial intelligence engine are closing up shop and moving on to other projects after parting ways with Daybreak Game Company (formerly SOE) and Everquest Next.

---

  The secrets behind This War of Mine's emotional impact 11 Bit Studios Pawel Miechowski talks about how disrupting players' expectations, studying their decision-making process and creating opportunities to imagine helped make This War of Mine acclaimed and impactful.

---

1 Writing presence: How good storytelling helps a VR game feel real It's hard enough to make a VR game that's comfortable and satisfying to play for extended periods of time; how do you tell a good story in the process -- and why should you bother?

---

12 The rise of games you (mostly) don't play "Idle games," or games that virtually play themselves, are a nascent genre that sometimes become unexpectedly popular. Anthony Pecorella with Kongregate explains.

---

7 Is the game to blame? Video game playing and anti-social behavior "Nearly all studies that claim the playing of violent video games leads to more anti-social behavior highlight correlations and not causation. I don’t believe any study has ever demonstrated absolute causality."

---

31 Don't Miss: My hardest bug ever A coder on the original Crash Bandicoot explains how his first big game almost shipped with a destructive save-wiping bug -- and how he and the team at Naughty Dog eventually solved it.

---

  Space Oddity: Deconstructing the curious design of Gravity Ghost Ivy Games' lush 2D space physics puzzler Gravity Ghost wears its nonviolent nature on its sleeve, but creator Erin Robinson says it has its roots in one of the earliest shooters ever made: Asteroids.

---

  Narrative tips for mobile games Veteran multimedia narrative designer Christy Marx offers key takeaways from her experience with Zynga's CastleVille for telling stories in mobile games, with all their challenges and limitations.

---

6 How I broke into the game industry and became a designer This blog post from 2K Games designer Harrison Pink slaughters misconceptions about what it means to work in the game industry while offering a personal look at what it takes to get a job in triple-A.

---

1 Unity focuses on small teams doing big things at its GDC event Unity's GDC press conference was geared toward not just showcasing Unity 5, but marrying the company's longtime message of democratized development with a focus on how damn good Unity games can look.

---

  The successor to OpenGL has a name: Vulkan It's the next generation of OpenGL, and like OpenGL it will be an open standard; unlike OpenGL (with its OpenGL ES variant) Vulkan will natively support mobile platforms.

---

47 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.

---

  5 game design lessons learned playing Grim Fandango Remastered "We all have favorite games and within those games, moments that make them special. Thanks to the release of Grim Fandango Remastered, I’m able to relive that journey."

---

39 '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?"

---

2 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.

---

2 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.

---

7 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.

---

[Read More]