For some months now, I've been playing a bunch of Bullet Hell Games. For those unfamiliar with the genre: It's a subgenre of 2D shoot'em ups, characterized by a whole bunch of bullets being on screen all the time. These games require pattern recognition, concentration, dodging skills and some memorization. Also, they are totally awesome and you should play them, which is why I will review every single game of the genre I played so far in the coming days. But first of all, I'd like to tell you w...

I've tried for a long time to ignore this whole #GamerGate thing, but I can't go on with it anymore. The movement has become a serious threat to variety in games, to independent game journalism, to freedom of speech on the internet, and to everybody who dares to stand up against them. At the same time, there is a lot of justified, well-researched criticism of the movement, the criminal network at its very core, the methods used by the more rabid GamerGators (a word I just made up. Neat, huh?) a...

...aaand the game is online. In fact, it has been since Monday (one day later than I wanted it to) and you can play it at Kongregate. Finding good names is always hard for me, so it's called "Snipe'em up". Enjoy!

What I've learnt: Integrating social APIs is far easier than I feared it was - or, at least, it is with the Kongregate API. Unity is awesome, but I knew that before. Getting visibility (and, thusly, feedback) on Kongregate ...

It's been a couple of days since the last update, and I'm making good progress so far!

Only one devlog for the first two games of my challenge, because I haven't gotten around to do much. It's weekend, dammit. Also, I'm still recovering from The Move™.

Progress so far:

Those stars spawn one bullet every .1 second from one of their tips, and rotate clockwise through all the five tips. Also, the whole star is rotating at variable rates. They're the only enemy I have so far and were inspired mostly by the Star brush in Gimp. T...

Great, just great. I missed another Ludum Dare because it coincides with moves, sicknesses or important tests every. single. time. So here's what I'll do: As an aspiring antisocial game dev, I'll just do my own game jam. Until Sunday, September the 7th, I will develop a game and I will publish it whether I think it sucks or I don't. With about eleventy RPGs, video games, board games et cetera I have started and never finished, it just seems like the thing to do.

So I'll develop a minimalist Bu...

My first videogame ever was this weird edutainment thing called "Dinoropa". It was co-funded by the german ministry of foreign affairs, and it tried to make children learn stuff about Europe, in particular about the twelve members of the European Union. Did I mention this game is old? Also, there are dinosaurs, which have nothing to do with anything.

Unfortunately, this game doesn't really seem to have a spot in gamers' hearts nowadays. Probably because it is not really good even for 1994's st...

This is not the first time I review Stars without Number, the old-school SciFi sandboxing RPG by Kevin Crawford (Sine Nomine Publishing), but with my growing experience in role-play gaming I feel I missed some real important things the last two times. So, again, let's have a look at what makes SWN special.

We'll skip the boring parts, like the character creations (it's D&D. Take 3d6 and roll them. Got it?), combat rules (Take a d20 and I'll tell you if you hit!), gear (pistol goes bang, laser ...

There's been a bit of discussion about VASSAL in the ASL community, started by this blog post (warning: auto-play music). The central hypothesis of this is that ASL is a social game (to which I agree) and that VASSAL gets in the way of that (to which I disagree very strongly).

I am a digital native. I have been on the internet for about ten years now, I used Twitter before it was cool and IRC greatly helped ...

Today, I got a phishing e-mail.

I hope you have never been subject to such a shocking event for yourself, and apologize if the horror of my tale gave you a heart attack.

Well, this one looked a bit more legit than most of them, and it was certainly audacious: A mail claiming to be from Yahoo and sent by a Yahoo user. It somehow passed my spam filter, so I decided I might as well tell Yahoo about it, so they might unleash their mighty rage upon the morally bankrupt offender. For sure, there wo...