Successful game makers share indie biz tips at GDC 2015 Speakers from Double Fine, Ouya, Devolver Digital, TinyBuild, Finji and more will be sharing their lessons learned as successful indie game makers during GDC 2015.

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15 Trailer trouble: Dealing with pixel-art backlash Two days ago, we released our first "big" trailer. It got a lot of views, but a very vocal minority downvoted it, and got extremely mad about our use of pixel art. Here are some of our learnings from the experience.

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  Which of your new users are about to churn? "The most significant churn occurs right after install regardless if it’s on a mobile device or on the web. The first hours, not to say minutes, of game play, are critical."

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  Horror in the Making: How Red Barrels outlasted Outlast Development of Red Barrels' Outlast was as intense -- and at times as horrifying -- as the game itself. Studio co-founder Philippe Morin writes about the ups, downs, and ultimate success of the survival horror game.

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  Steam Workshop creators can now sell content for non-Valve games Valve has begun supporting paid, curated Steam Workshops for non-Valve games, starting with Chivalry: Medieval Warfare and Dungeon Defenders: Eternity. If your game is on Steam, this is a big deal.

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1 Valve's economist is now the finance minister of Greece Economist Yanis Varoufakis, known best in game development circles for his work as Valve's economist-in-residence, is now the new finance minister of Greece.

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1 Nintendo returning to profits, but is still struggling to sell hardware Nintendo had a profitable quarter, and is on track for a full-year profit -- but the company is still fighting to make up lost ground amidst weak sales of the Wii U and 3DS year-on-year.

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  Get a job: Blizzard is looking to hire a VFX Artist The Hearthstone team seeks a visual effects (VFX) production artist to develop new effects, from concept through implementation, at Blizzard's Irvine, CA headquarters.

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  Hear game dev tips from Xbox frontman Phil Spencer at GDC Phil Spencer, head of Xbox and gaming at Microsoft, will be delivering a sponsored hour-long talk at GDC 2015 on how developers can best make games across the Xbox One and Windows 10.

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25 Don't Miss: The top 10 weird children of games and neuroscience In this classic 2011 feature, indie game developer and former neuroscience researcher Erin Robinson takes a look at ten particularly interesting studies to see what they can teach us as game makers.

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  5 'small but important' tips gleaned from the Global Game Jam "Realizing these aspects of game jams helped us a lot, so maybe it will help you too," writes Donald Kooiker, Global Game Jam participant from two-person team Duckbridge.

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  Video: Analyzing the phenomenon that was TwitchPlaysPokemon Speaking at GDC Next 2014, game researcher Alex Leavitt offers a data-rich analysis of the TwitchPlaysPokemon phenomenon and what it means for game makers.

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  Finnish game company Rovio has lost its games chief Jami Laes, who up until recently served as Rovio's EVP of games, has left the company as it struggles to maintain its financial successes.

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1 A clever way to handle the Global Game Jam theme, 'what do we do now' "Instead of taking the theme and trying to fit a game concept around it, we decided to literally apply the theme to the process of building the game." Find out how they did it!

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  Get practical production tips from an EA researcher at GDC 2015 At GDC 2015, an EA researcher offers practical advice on how you can apply player research data to your late-stage efforts to tune your game and "move the needle" to hit that perfect sweet spot.

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7 Game jams, and the difference between hacking and engineering Lessons learned when coding late at night on a tight deadline: "The issue of hackers vs. engineers is often framed as a question of identities, as a clash of cultures. I don't think that's healthy."

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  A diary of compromises: The process of making Girl's Flu for Global Game Jam One Global Game Jam participant looks back at the process involved in creating Girl's Flu, a 2D adventure game.

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  DirectX 12, PlayStation 4 sponsored sessions coming to GDC 2015 GDC organizers highlight a few notable sponsored sessions from Sony, AMD and Autodesk on PlayStation 4 community features, making DirectX 12 work for your game and the tech of Destiny.

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  Road to the IGF: Drool's Thumper Marc Flury and Brian Gibson of Drool detail how they made the powerful audio of their IGF nominated game, Thumper.

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  10 tips for game jamming, fresh from the Global Game Jam After learning a lot last year, one jammer writes that "problems arose on all sides, different problems of the previous year." Here's what he learned this time around.

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4 Game Design Deep Dive: The unique touchscreen action game controls of Helix Michael Brough, creator of games including 868-HACK and Corrypt, explains how he arrived at the unique control scheme of his iOS action game Helix.

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  Perforce integrates P4D with Unity thanks to new open-source tool The popular version control package is now on the Unity store with a new, free, open-source integration tool.

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  Get a job: Monolith Productions seeks a Lead Designer, Narrative Award-winning Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor devs are hiring a lead designer for the narrative on its next project -- to take the game's story from conception to execution.

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8 Don't Miss: When AAA developers went indie to make Endless Space Amplitude, creators of the space-based 4X indie game Endless Space, reflect on the game's journey from conception in a 4th-floor Paris apartment (no elevator) in 2011 to its final 2012 release.

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5 Unreal Engine 4 arrives on Ouya Unreal developers, take note -- you can now build Unreal Engine 4 games for the Ouya microconsole thanks to a new branch of the UE4 source code.

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