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As more Americans have discovered the joys of tending virtual farms and crushing pixelated candy, the game industry has grown from a niche market to a seemingly endless frontier of possibilities. Little Johnny is no longer the only one staring at an LCD screen through dinner.

The rise of mobile and sim games has coincided with another trend: Gamification. Games are slowly becoming part of every aspect of our lives; Foursquare is an app that blurs the line between game and social network.

When speaking at a TED Talk lecture, psychologist and game designer Jane McGonigal said, “When we play (more…)

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Software engineering is a perpetually evolving field. Its evolution has been a cyclical game of chicken-and-the-egg. As software engineering methodologies evolve, so do the capabilities of the technology that they are able to produce. And as technology becomes more mature and sophisticated, this further drives the need for software technology to keep evolving.

There is no denying the fact that the skills that software engineers had to learn and acquire back in the 1970s are radically different than the skills that software engineers must learn to master today, in the 21st century. The core fundamentals of software engineering design concepts remain basically same, but the tools that are used to implement software engineering solutions are what evolve.

If you fast forward from the 1970s until today, you will find that the needs of software engineering today are in fact radically different than those of just a mere decade ago. No more obvious is this than with the emergence of the Internet as a mainstream medium of communication, information sharing, trade and commerce, education, and entertainment.

If you were a software engineer in the 1990s, you were probably big on programming applications and games on the Windows platform. Back then, it was all about designing self-contained applications that didn’t rely on communicating with other computers.

But today, software engineering is an entirely different beast: Today we have cloud computing. Today we have software programs that live entirely on the Internet. We have software applications that save and retrieve data from other computers across the Internet.

Unless you as a software engineer have learned to adapt to the changing requirements of today’s Internet-based applications, you will become quickly obsoleted.

And then there are smartphones. The ability to write programs that are meant for use on iPhones, Androids, and Blackberries are at the forefront of software engineering today.

The software engineer of yesteryear is now an endangered species. Unless you are able to adapt and learn how to design applications that leverage smartphones and cloud computing, you will not be able to survive in this industry.

This is a guest post by Sandra McFarley. She has worked with software for 5 years. She also writes for many software and tech sites including this site and sites like http://www.texasinternetproviders.com

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When you are designing the perfect game in your mind, the first things to consider are setting and plot. These two things will make up a major portion of how your game is perceived by players, and will be a measure of how much they enjoy interacting with it.

One of the most common pitfalls that game designers fall into is a plot device called ‘deux ex machina’. In Latin, it literally translates to ‘an unlikely resolution’. Today we use the phrase to mean plots in which the plot climax is resolved much too easily or in an unlikely (more…)

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A good game is just like a novel; you want to tell a story in an engaging and interesting way. So when you sit down to create a setting and plot, there are a couple of simple steps you can take to move the process along.

First off, what genre is this story? If you want to tell a fantasy story is it a medieval fantasy world, or are you going to tell a story set with a Renaissance flair? Something science fiction perhaps? Choose a rough time period (more…)

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The earliest video games did not have much in the way of character development. They mostly contained simple, straightforward characters and a goal to fight towards, such as collecting fruit in Pac-Man or getting to the castle in Super Mario Brothers.

As the years passed, video games and their characters became more complex. From this complexity came intense plots and character backstories. That has continued to the present day, with game genres ranging from RPGs to puzzle games including fascinating (more…)

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Old school Gamers know What To Look For In The Modern RPG. It isn’t just a pretty damsel and distress, although, that doesn’t hurt the experience.

While graphics are nice, and an epic score can set the mood, these attributes don’t build depth, and they pale in comparison to what really matters. Players know that an RPG game lives or dies by its story. A compelling storyline can whisk the gamer away, and fire up the imagination. If a role player has a vested interest in the tale, and feels something for a fully fleshed out hero and party, (more…)

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Along with the vastly rapid increase of technology has evolved another form of entertainment, that of video gaming. Although video games have been around for only a short amount of time, video game design and technology has steadily evolved into what it has become today. From the old school to the modern hits of the gaming world it is clear that not only does the video gaming industry have a secure future but that it also has (more…)

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