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What Went Wrong?

Over the years, postmortems start to echo each other. The same problems are encountered, and fixed, or dealt with. Here, we've compiled the 10 most common difficulties of the last three years for your reading (and cringing) pleasure. Just as the Salary Survey is intended to be waved in the face of your boss come raise time (or to hide if you're paid more than the average), this feature should hopefully go part of the way toward fixing some common development mis-steps.

Interview: Yuji Naka

Yuji Naka was once one of the biggest names in Japanese game creators, as the man behind Sonic the Hedgehog. Since his era of prominence, Naka has made a purposeful shift from manager back to creator, and is now launching a series of simple, easy-to-play games for the Wii. In this interview, conducted at the recent Tokyo Game Show, we discussed his new company Prope, as well as his latest work, Let's Tap, which doesn't even require the players to touch the controller.

Postmortem: Twisted Pixel's The Maw

Twisted Pixel went from an under-construction warehouse to a urologist's office during the development of The Maw, and lived to tell the tale. Here, the author discusses the difficulty of Lua and Luabind memory allocations and XML load times, not to mention the difficulty of greenlighting a new project to begin with.

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