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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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26 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.

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  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."

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26 '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?"

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  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.

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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.

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6 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.

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3 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.

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  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.

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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.

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  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.

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  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.

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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.

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  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.

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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."

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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."

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57 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.

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  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.

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9 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."

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  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."

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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."

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