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Postmortem - Ubisoft Montreal's
Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2 had extremely lofty goals. The aim was to create a first-person shooter with an engaging and truly dynamic narrative, in a vibrant persistent living world. After three and a half years of development, creative director Clint Hocking shares the hits and misses of this fascinating and rather under-discussed franchise reboot.

Dirty Coding Tricks

In this tell-all article, eight programmers share harrowing tales of last-minute hacks performed to ship or save game projects. These often humorous anecdotes contain a lot of lessons for programmers, but should also be quite amusing for anyone who's ever worked with one.

Ground From Smoke

Why build general terrain the hard way, when you could have a particle system generate it for you? Korneliusz Warszawski proposes that particle-based terrain generation can save both coders and artists plenty of time.

Subtractive Design

The idea behind subtractive design is to start with the core of what a game should be about, and then cut away everything that doesn't fit as the game progresses. This method, or something like it, is what led the Ico and Portal teams to such critical success.

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