My professional path took a significant turn when I began engaging with the media and later with the world of virtual reality and interactive video games. Upon arriving in London in 2009, I was frequently called upon to answer press and media inquiries about Japanese history. These engagements, ranging from news reports to documentaries, broadened my horizons and provided an opportunity to share my knowledge with a wider audience. One of the earliest and most memorable of these engagements was as a historical advisor to a major studio film production centered on early modern Japan.

The latest season of Respawn Entertainment’s battle royale game Apex Legends introduces a beloved shooting style made iconic in the 1980s and ’90s by filmmaker John Woo: dual-wielding pistols. Ever since Chow Yun Fat slid down that banister in Hard Boiled, game developers have tried over and over again to capture that particular mix of style and action—but in a medium that has all kinds of shooting genres (top-down, first-person, third-person, etc), it’s a surprisingly tricky mechanic to get right.

Hey there, game developers. It’s that time again: Game Developer is seeking submissions for developer-written blogs on a specific industry trend, and we want to hear from you. This time around, we’re digging into the wide world of Photography and Video Games. For the next three weeks, August 19 through September 6, 2024, we are hosting an open call for developer-written blogs about Highlighting Photography Games and Mechanics, which will run from September 16 to September 24, 2024.

What should it feel like to be a wizard? That’s what I had to figure out when I began prototyping IRONSTRIKE, my VR co-op action roguelite. Adding magic was a frequent request from the players of IRONSTRIKE’s prequel, Ironlights, so I knew from the beginning that I wanted to include some kind of spellcasting system. But it couldn’t just be a matter of selecting spells from a glorified menu. I wanted to go beyond radial menus or one-step gestures and design something that took real advantage of VR.

At a Glance Some spoilers for Tactical Breach Wizards ahead. I love Suspicious Developments’ Tactical Breach Wizards and Subset Games’ Into the Breach (not as much as editor-in-chief Danielle Riendeau does, but hey I do my best). Both games boil down the essence of grid-based turn-based tactical games like Firaxis’ XCOM series to simple simple, efficient forms, and each gives players some degree of autonomy to test out different moves before committing to a full turn.

To tell the story of making Tactical Breach Wizards, you really need to start with the (excellent) name. As Suspicious Developments’ founder/director/designer/coder/writer tells it, the name existed long before the game did. When he was a journalist at PC Gamer, he and his pals joked about what a “fantasy” version of the many military games on the market might look like. In an era marked by the breach-and-clear combat themes of series like SOCOM U.

When I was 18 years old, I began making a tabletop RPG called Mechanical Dream. It was a brand-new universe. It wasn’t set on Earth, nor was it Earth-like. There were no elves or orcs—I wanted to do away with common tropes—nor were there humans. It had new species, new flora, even new physics; the world was a 30,000-mile, disk-shaped ‘planet’ lit by an orb called the Pendulum. Even though it was a fictional universe, it was grounded in coherent science—I must’ve read 300 or 400 books on biology, astrophysics, and god knows what else to make everything consistent.

Are you in the mood for a tiny writeup of a tiny talk about tiny screens at AMAZE Sheffield? Then it’s your lucky day, because that’s precisely what alternative controller game designer Julia Makivic rustled up. Running a through a list of some of her favorite and most despised tiny screens during a fleeting Hyper Talk, Makivic sought to pass on some wisdom to other developers fascinated by the prospect of building video games that incorporate bitesized displays.

Psst. Over here. Do you know a cheeky sort with a passion for unbridled mayhem and adorable two-dimensional llamas? Alright then. Best tell them to have a gander at Arco. The new tactical action game from publisher Panic and development troupe Franek Nowotniak, Max Cahill, Jose Ramon Garcia, and Antonio Uribe is out today–and all signs suggest it’s going to be a doozy. It’s a sweeping tale of revenge where decisions can shape the outcome of an adventure laced with magic and forged in bloodshed.