FEATURES

Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning

Making an open-world role-playing game isn’t easy—especially if your studio is used to developing strategy games instead. Despite two acquisitions, senior management shuffles, and numerous false starts, Big Huge Games turned out a big huge game indeed. This postmortem explains how usability testing, production processes that kept developers accountable, and a good relationship with Electronic Arts made Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning happen.

11th Annual Salary Survey

We’re back with our 11th annual game industry salary survey! Whether you’re an indie developer, contractor, or a salaried employee, we’ll help you find out how your earnings stack up against the average, how Europe and Canada stack up against the U.S.-based developers, and which development discipline brought home the most bacon in 2011.

Fire, Blood, Explosions

Creating effects for open world games is a significant challenge in Prototype 2. Senior rendering coder Keith O’Conor walks you through how the Radical Team built a particle effects system that made things burn, bleed, and blow up even better than before.

Needs More Blur

A good depth-of-field effect can help your player focus on the important things in a cutscene. Serge Bernier explains how he was able to reproduce the photographic “bokeh” effect with the PlayStation 3’s SPU.

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