1 Design 101: Balancing games "While the whole industry talks about 'balancing games' there is surprisingly little consensus on what that actually means. Debates run wild."

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  'Nintendo has its own way' - How it makes games and works with external devs Gamasutra speaks to producer Risa Tabata and Kensuke Tanabe, who oversees the company's externally developed projects, to learn about Chibi-Robo and, more generally, how Nintendo views dev partners.

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  Humble Bundle sheds staff at San Francisco HQ "Despite strong revenue... our past hiring was too ambitious and we had to make a hard call last week," says COO.

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  MaxPlay's new game engine aims to be 'Google Docs for game devs' A new challenger stepped into the game engine arena today: MaxPlay, a game technology company that aims to entice developers into using its “cloud-based” collaborative game development platform.

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  Get a job: Hi-Rez Studios is hiring a Game Systems Programmer The folks behind Smite and Tribes: Ascend need a game systems programmer to join the development team at Hi-Rez Studios' Alpharetta, Georgia headquarters and work on their new project.

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  Game devs in Northern Ireland can now get Greenshoots funding Microsoft's Greenshoots game development funding & guidance program is expanding this year and starting to offer £100,000 in grants to developers in Northern Ireland.

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  Handling the buggy release Zombie Vikings: Damage control is just the beginning "Both the community and press have responded well to our transparency. Direct communication with the fans has lead to huge support, which helped us fix the game and make it even better."

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35 Don't Miss: Alien: Isolation and the evolution of horror sim design SOMA's Thomas Grip tackles the latest Alien game in this classic 2014 post: "I think that horror simulation is the sort of design we want to strive for when making horror games."

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5 7 characteristics of a successful game studio "From valuing software over presentations and showing respect for your player base, these are seven important elements teams--both large and small--should keep in mind."

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4 Dev makes all Black Ops 3 campaign levels playable from the get-go This year's Call Of Duty game will have a single-player campaign that can be played however you like, as devs say traditional level progression is an 'archaic mentality' that's unnecessary.

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  Qualcomm sells off its mobile AR game platform Vuforia for $65M Heads up, augmented reality game makers: Qualcomm is selling off its Vuforia AR business to American tech company PTC for a cool $65 million.

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  This Week in Video Game Blogging: From The Beginner's Guide to Prison Architect This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us topics ranging from the self-reflexivity of Davey Wreden's The Beginner's Guide to an analysis of the systems of Prison Architect.

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  Allison Road Kickstarter canceled after Team17 signs developer UK-based developer Lilith has pulled the plug on the Kickstarter campaign for its P.T. inspired horror title, Allison Road, which will now be published and financed by Team17.

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15 Blog: You won't finish your game "You won’t finish your game. No, really. You probably won’t. Just give up now because you are wasting your time."

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3 UK government launches £4 million Prototype Fund The UK Government has launched the Video Games Prototype Fund, a £4 million funding pool that will help small developers find their feet and create promising prototypes.

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9 Architecture in video games: Designing for impact in The Witness Deanna Van Buren, the architect who collaborated with Jonathan Blow on The Witness, explains how her art could contribute to games that feel and look more real and compelling.

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  Composing the music for a game about a gladiator school "We decided to write music that was culturally inspired by different geographical areas of the far reaching Roman Empire."

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3 How a front page Reddit post affected the sales of an indie game "Reddit was definitely a nice surprise in a dire moment for us, but by no means are we out of the slump yet. We are still, however, trucking on."

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  Mixing suspense, absurdity and FMV in A Stranger Comes Calling Paul Franzen's FMV game A Stranger Comes Calling begins with a mysterious knock on the door. Then it spirals out in a lot of bizarre and hilarious directions.

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20 Anti-scam Steam Curator group seeks to police game devs At least one Steam Curator has formed explicitly to place warning messages on the Steam pages of games from developers they believe to be guilty of scamming or otherwise mistreating customers.

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  Get a job: Boss Key seeks a Senior Network Engineer Cliff Bleszinski & Arjan Brussee's new Raleigh-based studio is hiring an experienced network engineer to work on its upcoming sci-fi shooter Lawbreakers alongside the team at Boss Key headquarters.

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1 Firewatch designer calls on devs to speak up to their governments Campo Santo's Nels Anderson wants to see the game industry's concerns better represented in government, and he's gone so far as to launch his own local "voter mobilization and information initiative."

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  The unlikely creative relationship behind Minecraft: Story Mode How did Telltale and Mojang turn the ultimate sandbox game into a narrative adventure? By taking inspiration from stories that Minecraftplayers create...and from the movie Goonies.

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  Video: How video games can better handle feints and misdirection At GDC Europe 2015, TinyBuild's Mike Rose speaks to what video game designers can learn (and potentially steal) about bluffing and misdirection mechanics from the most devious board and card games.

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15 Don't Miss: The neuroscience driving survival horror game design How do survival horror games work on our brains? Neuroscientist M. Tajerian unpacks the mechanisms behind the scares in Amnesia, Dead Space and Silent Hill in this classic 2012 feature.

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