Richard Moss

www.polygon.com

Assassin’s Creed: An oral history

Ahead of the 11th main entry in the series, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, releasing this week, we tracked down nine people who worked on the original game and talked to them about how it all began. What follows, in their own words, is a story about discovering a concept with near-infinite potential and then struggling to realize even a fraction of it.

samsungnext.com

The state of the AR industry, according to those in it

There are many reasons to be bullish on augmented reality, as development frameworks continue to improve and businesses experiment with new use cases for the technology.
But what’s it like to actually work in AR at the moment? What are AR developers excited and concerned about? And where do AR developers see the medium going in the near and medium-term future?
To answer those questions, we spoke with three developers and two of Samsung NEXT’s own experts about the state of the AR market.
Earl...

gamasutra.com

The making of Dark Castle: An excerpt from The Secret History of Mac Gaming

What follows is a chapter from The Secret History of Mac Gaming, a new book written by Gamasutra contributor Richard Moss. In this chapter, Moss charts the origins and impact of Silicon Beach Software's seminal game Dark Castle.
Charlie Jackson had a dream to play sport for the United States national team. Which sport didn't matter too much, so long as he could be on the team. The dream came to him in college, when two of his rowing teammates each made a different United States team — one for...

gamasutra.com

Reversing the sunk cost fallacy: Devs recount what shouldn't have been cut

Toward the end of 2017, we ran a story on sunk cost fallacy in game development.
It featured around a dozen developers describing the price they paid for ignoring red flags and continuing to work on bad features or entire projects that were set for failure simply because they'd invested so much time, money, or energy into them.
A short time after the article went live, we got a suggestion from Axiom Verge developer Tom Happ to do a follow-up piece looking at the issue from the opposite direct...

arstechnica.com

“The least-worst idea we had”—The creation of the Age of Empires empire

I spoke to several of the two dozen or so people who worked on the original Age of Empires about how it was made. I asked them to reflect on the series' triumphs, successes, failures, and legacy. This is a compressed retelling of their many stories, focusing on the early days—the building of the foundations that are so central to both the Age story and each of the Age games—but spanning the full breadth of the series' life.

lifeandtimes.games

Episode 11 - Bomberman

On June 11th, 2018, character designer and artist Shoji Mizuno passed away. He was a key figure back in the 1990s at the now-defunct Hudson Soft, a renowned Japanese games publisher — having directed art or design, or sometimes both, on more than a dozen games in the popular Bomberman franchise as well as providing original character designs for the Beyblade anime series.
Since this year is also the 35th anniversary of the release of the first Bomberman game on the MSX, I thought now would be...

lifeandtimes.games

Episode 10 - Dogz

Frustrated by the unjustified furore that surrounded his tame interactive movie game, designer Rob Fulop turned to Santa for help. And with a clever business model he and his team at PF Magic invented a new kind of game, one in which you adopt and care for a digital animal -- a virtual dog or cat, or something more exotic, with a personality and needs and quirks not unlike a real one.

samsungnext.com

How the Internet of Things could make healthcare more proactive

It’s widely accepted that living healthy means eating well and getting plenty of exercise, but quantifying the effects can be a challenge and even dealing with many health issues requires a visit to the doctor. Recent advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) are beginning to change that, however.

We can now use data — including numbers, charts, and analytics — that lend insights into people’s general health, fitness, and well being. Those insights, in turn, could guide us to improved health o...

ludiphilia.net

The Hide & Seek World Championship

On the Nascondino World Championship, a yearly hide and seek tournament that attracts teams from all around the globe. I talked to Alan Jones, the co-captain of the Australian team, the Nascondingos, and Giorgio Moratti, one of the organisers of the competition, about how it works, what it's like, why it exists, and where it's headed next.

lifeandtimes.games

Episode 7 - The Tomb Raider Grid (part 1)

Every aspect of the original Core Design Tomb Raider series (and by extension the franchise's success post-Core) comes back to the grid that lies beneath it — the majority of the puzzles; the platforming; the cavernous chambers and ruins and outdoor areas that provide a sense of isolation, of solitude and discovery; and Lara Croft's iconic acrobatic movement style.
And yet it never would have happened if not for one pragmatic choice made by a programmer early in the game's development.
This is the st...

gamasutra.com

The sunk cost fallacy: Devs describe how it almost destroyed them

Sometimes game development goes wrong. It happens — technical problems emerge, designs can sound better on paper, early decisions can cause difficulties later on. It's just a reality of the craft that you will have failures and mistakes during development.
But what if you refuse to accept that a feature or project needs to be dropped or changed?

lifeandtimes.games

Episode 6 - ROM Hack

At the dawn of emulation and the World Wide Web, a group of fans discovered the Nintendo and Super Nintendo games that never made it over from Japan. One of them decided to hack into a few of these and translate them, unofficially, with help from some friends -- starting with Final Fantasy II for the NES.

exchange.telstra.com.au

Anousheh Ansari: Let our choices reflect our hope — and not our fear

When engineer and businesswoman Anousheh Ansari was a little girl, growing up in Iran in the 1970s, she loved to sleep outside and stare at the sky wondering, “What’s out there?” Could it be that somewhere, on a distant planet, there’s another girl looking up at the sky thinking about the same thing?

Ansari dreamed of going to space, and it was that dream — and those moments when she watched the stars at night — that gave her peace as her country underwent a revolution she couldn’t yet compre...

lifeandtimes.games

Episode 3 - Colour Cycling

This is the story of illustrator Mark Ferrari, whose artwork was so good it forced Lucasfilm Games to figure out how to make a graphics technique called dithering compress to fit on floppy disks — in the process winning awards and triggering the use of dither in the wider games industry — and who pioneered the use of two background illustration tricks that gave the illusion of animation. He became world-renowned for his colour cycling and palette shifting techniques, which could be used to ma...

gamasutra.com

The state of the VR industry: devs weigh in

Virtual reality has had a shaky 18 months. After years of hype about the world-changing potential of its second coming (following a dud first wave in the 1990s), its poster child headset the Oculus Rift launched to a lukewarm reception. Other high-profile headsets — Rift's high-end PC rival, the HTC Vive; Sony's PlayStation VR; and Samsung and Google's mobile rivals, Gear VR and Daydream, respectively — have sold better, but still consumer takeup remains modest.

Sony reported in June that Pla...