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The Top 30 Developers

The editors of Game Developer and sister publication Gamasutra have teamed up once again to bring you another yearly installment of our Top 30 Developers list, where we give shoutouts to the devs that did something new, or better, or both.

Locomotion

We demand photorealistic vistas and more-real-than-real particle effects from our games, but we still settle for subpar locomotion. Your game won’t look real until you understand how you can use weight, momentum, and body mechanics to inform your character animation.

Haunt

Haunted houses are scary, but not as scary as the prospect of making a Kinect XBLA game that has to appeal to both casual and core audiences, has zero marketing support, and requires crosslingual coordination between a Japan-based developer (NanaOn- Sha), a UK-based developer (Zoe Mode), and an American publisher (Microsoft). How’d they do it? Read the postmortem to find out how Haunt devs nailed the Kinect controls, endured countless cuts, and got an assist from Double Fine Production’s Tim Schafer.

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