FEATURES

For Better or Worse: A Quality of Life Update

In 2004, a then-anonymous letter writer, “EA_Spouse,” penned an angry and outraged treatise to the game community chiding Electronic Arts for forcing employees to work egregious amounts of overtime. In the months that followed, development studios, the IGDA, and other outspoken individuals stood up and voiced their opinion of what it means to be in this obsessively dedicated line of work, with most of them calling for industrywide change, too. Nearly three years later, has any of it stuck? Or has the call to action petered out?

Inking the Cube: Edge Detection with Direct3D 10

Detecting outlines and edges is particularly useful when a video game uses cell-shaded characters. In this technical feature, Intel's Joshua Doss explains how Direct3D 10 allows programmers to shift the whole process over to the GPU.

Postmortem
Big Huge Games’ Catan For Xbox Live Arcade

The executive team at Big Huge Games had been dreaming for years of working in the triple-A console game market. Then one day Microsoft came along and offered the group an opportunity to develop an Xbox Live Arcade game, based on the Settlers of Catan license. Though traditionally a real-time strategy game maker, Big Huge jumped at the chance, viewing it as a low-cost way into the console world, where some of the risks could be mitigated. Read on to find out if the company got more than it bargained for!

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