A very indie Thanksgiving "There are many other people in the game industry whose efforts make this possible, and they receive little thanks for their work. I'd like to draw attention to some of these unsung heroes."

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13 Don't Miss: Avalanche's model for video game boat physics In this 2014 feature Avalanche senior coder Jacques Kerner (Just Cause 3) walks us through coding "a simplified model that captures the important features of a boat" in this meaty programming piece.

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  Blog: The fanatic and his RPG "In early 2004, a middle-aged man with the Fallout-derived moniker 'Vault Dweller' wrote a brief forum post that began, 'Long story short, I’ve decided to make a game...' By late 2015, he had posted some 30,000 more messages."

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  Classic Postmortem: Star Wars Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron II Factor 5's arcade-style action game was release 14 years ago this month. Here's an in-depth postmortem that first appeared in Game Developer magazine.

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  Blizzard quadruples Hearthstone World Championship prize pool The prize pool at next year's Hearthstone World Championship, which sees 16 players compete to become world champion, has been increased to $1 million.

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2 Solo iOS dev by an AAA vet: Lessons learned along the way "Swing Racers is a 3D racing game on iOS where you pull your car around the house with a rubber band -- the idea came from a dream I had. Here’s a write-up on the things I’ll do differently on the next project."

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  The technical composer: Using Elias for adaptive music in games "In this article I am going to set up the system in Elias, along with a new feature called 'tonal stingers' which allows us to add leitmotifs to our music."

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1 On Thanksgiving, what are game devs thankful for? It's the Thanksgiving holiday here in the U.S., and on Twitter, we asked devs to tell us what they're thankful for. We've compiled a list of responses -- feel free to add yours!

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  Video: How to become fireproof - Surviving internet negativity Harper has braved YouTube comments and forum posts for years, and using logic and empathy, this GDC 2014 talk helps you craft mental armor that can resist flames and save money on therapy bills.

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  Get a job: Sanzaru Games seeks a Lead Designer "The Lead Designer will be responsible for spearheading the creation of gameplay systems, narrative, scenario authoring, and quality for our upcoming projects. This role will also include directing other designers."

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30 Don't miss: Psychology is fun In this thought-provoking piece, researcher and author Clark takes a look at how psychology and can must be applied to game development, to produce works that engage audiences -- offering up concrete examples.

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3 The psychology of the 'near-win' "The near-win is a concept used in gamification to create emotion and motivate people into repeating a behavior. It is often used in black-hat gamification to manipulate others."

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1 Creating a checkpoint system in Unity "In this tutorial we will create a system of checkpoints that can be applied at any level of our game quickly and easily."

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  Top designers share their personal techniques at GDC 2016 As GDC 2016 approaches, organizers announce two new talks on game design and the importance of graphic design from veteran devs at studios like Ubisoft, Monolith, Insomniac and more.

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  Classic Postmortem: Myth: The Fallen Lords Bungie's Myth: The Fallen Lords was published 18 years ago today. Check out this in-depth postmortem of the real-time tactics title from Game Developer magazine.

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6 Blog: What engine do you use? "In game development, we are the beautiful well-respected people who look good doing what we do, and inspire aspiring developers to invest in the same brands."

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  How one Unity 5 port threatened a studio's entire future "Doing episodic development on a story-driven and graphics-heavy game with a team of ten people is a harrowing task. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone."

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  Worldwide PlayStation 4 sales just surpassed 30 million The PlayStation 4, which is currently available in 124 countries, has now sold over 30.2 million units worldwide since launching in November 2013.

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  Keeping mobile players engaged with holiday content “Our in-game holiday events don’t necessarily lift our install conversion rate, but we know that users brought in during the events are highly engaged.”

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4 Devs weigh in on key innovations in Fallout 4's crafting system 'The game bends over backwards to share authorship. There is no grid. It prescribes no sense of right or wrong. The game trusts me to make horrific and wonderful things.'

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  Testing your game? Test EVERYTHING else too! "I already asked my testers for feedback, why not turn that into a dialogue? Heck, why not extend it further to other areas? Marketing and business development folks have been doing market testing for decade, after all."

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2 League of Legends' new loot system isn't open to 'toxic' players Riot's lead designer of social systems, Jeffrey Lin, details the company's "new carrot for playing with friends and for being a positive player in the game."

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  Get a job: Google is looking for a mobile and VR Graphics Engineer Google is looking for a graphics engineer to work on "high quality, interactive, animated short stories" delivered via its Google Spotlight Stories platform to smartphones and VR devices from Cardboard to Rift.

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10 Don't miss: The genre blender - Experiments in multigenre multiplayer A team at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center launched a project to determine how to get multiple game genres -- racing, first person shooter, and puzzle -- to blend into one socially competitive experience.

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1 Video: League of Legends - Building an eSport How do you design a game to be competitively rigorous, strategically diverse, skill-based, entertaining to play, and exciting to watch? Riot's Ryan Scott and Frank Lantz discuss nurturing League of Legends into an eSport.

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