1 Five tips for making better loot experiences in games In tabletop games, the art of collation determines how players receive randomized items when buying blind-item packs. According to designer Eric Engelhard, those systems can work in video games too.

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  How Teamfight Tactics was designed to target former League of Legends players At GDC Summer, Teamfight Tactics design lead David Abecassis broke down how Teamfight Tactics was designed to appeal to League of Legends players who've drifted off from high-level play.

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1 Inside the twisting, turning development of Hardspace: Shipbreaker At GDC Summer Blackbird Interactive’s Rory McGuire and Elliot Hudson reveal how the studio came up with a great original game idea and, through some hard pivots, turned it into Hardspace: Shipbreaker.

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  A data-driven primer for publishing agreements "I've realized that developers are at a two fold informational disadvantage: First, they don’t know what key publishing terms mean and second developers don’t know what is standard and what is not standard.”

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  Zynga to acquire prolific hyper-casual game studio Rollic for $168 million Zynga has entered into an agreement to acquire Rollic, the Istanbul-based hyper-casual mobile game developer behind games like Go Knots 3D and Tangle Master 3D.

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  Using emotion to drive social play in Sky: Children of the Light Thatgamecompany 'feel engineer' John Hughes explains how emotion drives the social play at the core of Sky: Children of the Light. 

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  AbleGamers enlists Ryan Reynolds to highlight its mission, call for donations "They’ve helped thousands and thousands of people all around the world as an international charity," explains Reynolds. "But there are still thousands of more people that are waiting to get equipment that they desperately need."

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  Using procedural destruction to unleash chaos in Control Explaining how Control's procedural destruction system was developed during a GDC Summer talk, Remedy's principle VFX artist Johannes Richter said the process began with understanding 'granularity.' 

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  King's Sabrina Carmona offers practical tips to get more women leaders in games “If you are in a leadership role and you are responsible for building teams like me, you have to play your part in this,” Carmona told GDC Summer attendees. “Because you actually have the power."

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  Animal Crossing: New Horizons has sold over 22 million copies Animal Crossing: New Horizons has sold over 22 million copies in under five months, according to the latest numbers from Nintendo.

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1 Fortnite developer Epic Games secures $1.78 billion in funding Epic Games has secured $1.78 billion in fresh funding that takes the company's post-money equity valuation to $17.3 billion.

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  The Nintendo Switch has crossed 60 million lifetime sales The Nintendo Switch has sold over 60 million units worldwide, according to the latest figures from Nintendo.

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  Switch hardware and Animal Crossing driving growth at Nintendo The Nintendo Switch is still driving growth at Nintendo, which has just released its financial results for the three months ended June 30, 2020.

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  Blog: Using Wikipedia as an interactive narrative device An examination of how using Wikipedia as a narrative medium can provide novel approaches to interactivity and non-linearity.

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1 Why you should rethink how your company handles in-house harassment At GDC Summer, Double Loop Games CEO Emily Greer challenged developers to rethink the fundamentals of why harassment happens in the workplace.

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1 To jumpstart creativity or your game dev career, focus on finishing something At GDC Summer today Tribe Games founder Charles McGregor shared anecdotes and practical advice to help would-be game devs go pro or keep their passion for game-making hot. His top tip? Ship something.

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  Get a job: Insomniac Games is hiring a Senior Character TD Character TDs at Insomniac are responsible for working with the talented team to design, implement and maintain the animation and rigging pipeline.

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3 Don't Miss: What went right (and wrong) during the development of Spider-Man (2002) In this reprint from the August 2002 issue of Game Developer magazine, Spider-Man dev Jamie Fristrom (Energy Hook) writes about what went right and what went wrong with the game's development process.

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  Steam launch helps push Detroit: Become Human past 5 million lifetime sales This figure includes sales on both PC and PlayStation 4, though it's not mentioned if numbers from the game’s stint as a PlayStation Plus freebie are included in the 5 million milestone.

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  Culture, advocacy, and trust: Building the foundations for a successful QA team QA is a vital part of the game development process, but, as Private Division executive producer Kari Toyama explains in her GDC Summer talk, QA’s contributions and even presence is often underappreciated.

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  King London art director on creating an aesthetic for a global audience If beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, then landing on the right art direction for a game that could be played by thousands or even millions of people must be something of a nightmare.

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1 Blog: Expression-bodied members to reduce your code verbosity Continuing with our Modern C# for Unity Game Development series, today I'm going to show you how to reduce the verbosity of your code with C# Expression-Bodied Members.

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1 Legible font (still) one of the biggest accessibility issues in games Game accessibility has come a long way in recent times, but there are still important areas in need of improvement. Not the least of which is making game text easier to read for a wider range of people.

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  Call of Duty franchise helps Activision Blizzard to record Q2 results Activision Blizzard has announced record second quarter financial results thanks to bumper engagement figures led by the Call of Duty franchise. 

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1 How Pokemon Go evolved in response to the COVID-19 pandemic When COVID-19 exploded across the globe, Pokemon Go players needed to stay inside. Here's how Niantic helped them do that while still playing the game.

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