User acquisition and attribution: The basics "You might say the right strategy is just to blanket the web in ads, but who’s to say you’re not overpaying for all the sources that did work -- and, if you’re pricing ads, who’s to say your ads aren’t undervalued?"

---

  'I'm still creative!' - Game industry vets rally against ageism David Mullich and a group of other game industry veterans shared advice on beating ageism in the game industry and offered concrete examples of how our industry can improve today at GDC 2015.

---

  Suviving LocJam: Localizing a game on the quick Game translators were offered a nice interactive story, Grandpa. A creepy atmosphere and a disturbing twist gave us translators good material to test both our technical knowledge and literary talent.

---

1 How to manage level background assets for a 2D smartphone game "The purpose is to get things in order and save production time and budgets. In producing background art, our team use 2D or 3D pre-render solutions ... so we have both 2D and 3D assets to manage."

---

4 Want people to care about your studio? Get your story straight "My belief was that if we had a strong and original game, that would be the thing to talk about. Journalists want to tell stories, interesting stories and preferably new stories that haven’t been told before."

---

1 Weaving Super Mario Galaxy's tunes together "Creating medleys is hard, probably one of the hardest tasks of an arranger. You have to please the fans and, at the same time, try something new and innovative."

---

1 Women share their #1ReasonToBe in games, in a powerful GDC panel Eight women received standing ovations after describing their experiences working in the video game industry at the #1ReasonToBe panel at GDC in San Fransisco last night.

---

6 Warren Robinett reflects on his 'signature' game: Adventure Game industry veteran Warren Robinett reflects on some of the curious challenges he faced in developing Adventure, his seminal Atari 2600 action adventure game, today at GDC 2015.

---

4 'We should have been more audacious' - A Civilization: Beyond Earth retrospective Firaxis was too concerned about alienating players of previous Civilization games when creating the most recent title in the series, Beyond Earth, the game's lead designers said at GDC 2015 today.

---

6 Saving video game history begins right now At Game Developers Conference 2015, Jason Scott, archivist at the Internet Archive, urged developers to start preserving their history immediately.

---

  How games can shape American culture - and vice versa Mushroom 11 developer Julia Keren-Detar gave a brief a history of early American board games today at GDC, and showed how the games we make influence (and are influenced by) culture.

---

  One Life Left vs. Gamasutra Podcast #1: Pipelines 'n' Tubes Guests from Naughty Dog, Campo Santo, Vlambeer, Undead Labs, and much more join One Life Left and Gamasutra for fun stuff, smart stuff, and random stuff from GDC 2015.

---

4 CryEngine sticking to $9.90 subscription, working hard to improve Gamasutra speaks to Crytek's director of production, David Bowman, about the company's efforts in the last year to broaden its user-base, improve tools and capabilities, and speak to its community.

---

  The future of Morpheus, according to Sony's Shuhei Yoshida Gamasutra sits down with Shuhei Yoshida, Sony's President of Worldwide Studios, to talk about the state of Project Morpheus and what developers should know about making PlayStation VR games.

---

4 Git for Unity developers "I tried to keep the tutorial as pragmatic as possible, covering the most common usage of Git. See the links throughout the article for some deep dives into different aspects of Git."

---

  Being smart, being stupid with Hitman Go's design At Game Developers Conference 2015, Daniel Lutz, game director at Square Enix Montreal, explained how designing with constraints in mind helped lead to the success of the stealthy mobile game Hitman Go.

---

15 Don't Miss: A Game Design Deep Dive into Amnesia's 'Sanity Meter' Amnesia: The Dark Descent's "sanity meter" feature was born out of darkness. Creative director Thomas Grip explains the evolution of the meter's design.

---

2 Steam Machines and a Steam Controller have hit the Steam store As GDC rolls on, Valve has listed a seemingly final version of the Steam Controller and an array of third-party Steam Machines on its Steam storefront.

---

  5 reasons NOT to outsource art "There are a lot of advantages to art outsourcing, and for many projects it's a really great option, but outsourcing isn't always the best option for every project (or every part of every project)."

---

  Don't save your bullets: Darkest Dungeon's Red Hook on Early Access We talk to Red Hook Studios, makers of Darkest Dungeon, about how to manage to successful Early Access game, and not saving your big guns for later.

---

1 Dynamic 2D character lighting in Unity "All in all we’re currently having 3D spot and point lights for ambient lighting, 2D volumetric lights for backlight refractions and 3D point lights for dynamic backlight effects in our scene."

---

  Programming blog: Vector hosted lists "Hosting a list in a vector ain't rocket science, but I think it's a good technique to have in mind when designing data structures generally, and it's definitely a worthwhile topic."

---

1 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."

---

1 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.

---

  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.

---

[Read More]