Jenova Chen, creator behind the multi award-winning student game Cloud and flOw, co-founder of thatgamecompany,  is dedicated to expanding the emotional spectrum of video games and making them available for a much wider audience. And how did Jenova “make it” as an independent developer? With a lot of support and a drive for innovation.

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Tamir Nadav, formerly a programmer who has marked his path out as a game designer at KingsIsle, has been involved in the industry for over 5 years with his enthusiastic networking abilities. He’s always up for an interesting conversation and pitches in with events like Women In Games International, which promotes the inclusion and advancement of women in the games industry, worldwide.

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On my personal scale video game art and the impressiveness of its implementation are easily rated. I’ll tell you now that it is a personal scale—not anything based in numbers or calculations and yet I believe it is relevant. The scale is not based on intrinsic artistic value because I do not believe my own evaluation to be the ultimate assessment of artistic worth. I’m pretty simple: the artistic value of a game is better judged by how many people I show the game to because I think that they will be impressed by it. This goes for double points when I start to share games with people who don’t care about video games one iota.
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Ready for a Retro-Future with customizable characters and a wide range of new creative “homemade weapons” to blast away your nuclear waste enemies? The time is almost here! But until then, there’s a range of concept art and sneak peek screenshots. In this interview we feature character artist Dane Olds, who is responsible for weapons as a character artist for Bethesda’s much anticipated Fallout 3.
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Independent game development is, by and large, a solitary activity. Collaborations take place across countries, and even if your team is in the same city, chances are you communicate mostly by email. Consequently, I know other developers mostly by their games.

All that changes once a year at an event simply known as “Mittens.” It was founded eight years ago by a group of indie game developers who knew each other from the internet. Every year they pick a different location to meet and hang out for a week. This year we rented a chateau in France. For 26.

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Although we specialize in game art and design, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk with Blaine Christine, Producer at BioWare Austin. Sadly we didn’t get any good juicy bits about the mysterious unannounced forthcoming MMO (are you thinking what I’m thinking?) but we did get ourselves a case of BioWare job envy. Blaine’s is a classic story from QA to Producer.

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In 1977, kids were listening to Rush, smoking cigarettes and a few of the lucky ones had even gotten to second base with the girls, all of which left Bioshock creator Ken Levine wondering “where am I at this point?” Well last week thousands knew exactly where he was as we gathered for his opening keynote speech at PAX 08 offering us a peek at his inner-nerd and a few lessons on coming to terms with our own.
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In a departure from anything art and class specific comes a story of horror. Well, really it’s horror borne out of a mistake that oddly enough encouraged me to write a small bit. Inspiration comes from odd places and I promise if you stick with me then we’ll make it to a point that involves art, video game and film.

I usually keep my promises. Okay, I try to keep my promises.

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The Game Developers Conference holds its next event in San Francisco next March, but will miss one of its best.  The event organizers have announced that after 5 years working on the Game Developer Conference and Game Developer Events,  Jamil Moledina is leaving in pursuit of other interests.

The announcement states Meggan Scavio will pick-up the reins as Event Director.  She looks to continue and enhance the GDC’s relationship with the developer community which sounds promising as she is an 8-year veteran.
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Maurine Starkey is a founding member of Westwood Studios. She has worked as an art instructor, lead artist, art director, creative director, producer and game designer for over 24 years, plus continues to paint, sculpt, storyboard, and illustrate books, paper games, and comic books. (more…)