The value of 'rubber banding' as a casual engagement driver "Theoretically, you can say the concept and effect of rubber banding is a high engagement driver in casual games and is less effective in hardcore games."

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  Shadow of Mordor takes top prize at Game Developers Choice Awards Monolith Productions' open-world action game netted the Game of the Year award this evening at the 15th annual GDC Awards, which also honored titles like Monument Valley and people like Brenda Romero.

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  Outer Wilds wins top honors at the 17th annual IGF Awards The celestial exploration game netted Team Outer Wilds the Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Best Independent Game (and it's accompanying $30,000 cash award) at tonight's 17th annual IGF Awards.

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  How Creative Assembly Brought Fear To Alien: Isolation Alien: Isolation creative director Alistair Hope speaks at GDC 2015 about how Creative Assembly focused on building a horror game, not an action game, through deliberate design choices.

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1 Weta Digital, Epic Games, and the future of film, games, and VR Weta Digital head of R&D Alisdair Coull and Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri talk about the creation of the Smaug VR demo, the convergence of film and games art, and the opportunity for devs in VR.

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1 Balance balls make better games? Tips from Swery65 The always-spirited Swery65 offered a bevy of surprising and insightful development tips on everything from making better motion controls and creating more empathy to getting along with your team.

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  Teaching AI to eat with two hands from the fridge "Granted, there are plenty of software systems more complex than this. So, wouldn't you concede, Dear Mr. Naysayer, that this task of eating out of the fridge was hard after all?"

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1 Carmack's perspective on the future of mobile VR game development Oculus CTO John Carmack spent nearly two hours today speaking to GDC attendees about the ups and downs of mobile VR development, and what developers can do to make better VR games.

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  Hands-on: Full-room SteamVR highly-impressive, even as a prototype Valve Software was on hand at Game Developers Conference 2015, doing behind-closed-door demos of full-room SteamVR, and even in prototype form, the company's offering is already impressive.

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6 EA shutters venerable SimCity studio Maxis Emeryville The venerable studio, originally founded as Maxis Software in 1987, has been shut down as EA consolidates ongoing development of The Sims and SimCity to its other Maxis satellite studios.

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2 Xbox's vision for a cross-platform future Microsoft plans to create a single, unified platform for game developers with the forthcoming launch of Windows 10, which will have Xbox Live integration to allow for cross-play across devices.

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2 Analyzing Monkey Island 2 puzzle dependencies and game balance "What makes a good puzzle chain? How can charts and graphs help you get the right feeling if the puzzles you wrote work as intended concerning the overall game experience?" This post answers that question.

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9 Epic's Sweeney: Unreal Engine is at the epicenter of a graphics-intense future At GDC this morning, Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney gave a talk that essentially had one main point: As realtime, photorealistic graphics rise in importance, Unreal Engine will be at the forefront of that movement.

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5 Blog: You don't always have to commit "In games, it feels like when you make something, it is supposed to be all the way. That if you make horror, the horror has to be pitch-black... but the world doesn't work in absolutes."

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1 Unity won't be sold, and is planning for a VR future: John Riccitiello speaks Unity's CEO holds court with Gamasutra, dismissing the possibility of an acquisition, charting the future of the engine, and talking about what sets the company apart. Oh, and yeah, he talks pricing.

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3 Complexity and complication in game design (Also: Why I love Go) "Let me tell you about Go. The rules are very, very simple. The possibilities, the implications of each single move, are more than any human can grasp."

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  Games as a service company PlayFab raises $7.4 million Playfab, a cross-platform tool provider to enable games to better operate as service, has secured further funding.

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1 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.

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

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  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.

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10 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."

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  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.

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  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.

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10 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.

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3 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.

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