Her Story takes home the top honor at IndieCade 2015 awards show Last night indie dev Sam Barlow's Her Story earned the Grand Jury Award at the annual IndieCade 2015 award show, which also recognized game makers like Brenda Laurel, Ben Esposito and Naomi Clark.

---

  Q&A;: Wickerman explores what tabletop games can teach video game devs 'We think video game developers certainly can learn a lot from tabletop,' say Chris Hardwick and Dan Cordell. They love the 'gray areas' in paper and pencil games that give a DM leeway to improvise.

---

  Get a job: Amazon seeks an experienced Game Programmer Got a few years of game dev coding experience and a shipped title under your belt? Amazon Game Studios wants someone like you to take a lead role alongside the team at its Seattle, WA offices.

---

1 Blog: Effective use of timers in game design "There are a lot of components of games that can be used to heighten tension, some more common than others. In this blog post, I will be elucidating one such often overlooked mechanic: the humble timer."

---

1 Video: You're Doing It Wrong - 10 pieces of advice on game design Game designer Frank Lantz cheerfully excoriates popular game design practices in his "You're Doing It Wrong" rant during the GDC 2014 Rant Apocalypse.

---

  Sources of inspiration for mobile game map art "Here I give a few ideas of where our team finds inspirations for map art. And of course the world is so rich and vast, there’re inexhaustible subjects you can dig into."

---

3 Microsoft shifts to touting Xbox Live user counts over console sales Microsoft is trying a new reporting strategy for its Xbox games business that will see it focus on "engagement" by touting Xbox Live user counts (rather than Xbox console sales) going forward.

---

1 An indie startup's debut game expo "This was our first expo showing off our own game, and so this information leans towards the novice side of demoing games in public. We did quite a bit of research and prep beforehand."

---

1 Report: Sony reducing first-party game dev for PS Vita During a recent interview with Japanese website 4Gamer, SCE senior vice president, Masayasu Ito, all but confirmed the death of first-party games on the PlayStation Vita.

---

  Don't Miss: The world design of Assassin's Creed: Syndicate Assassin's Creed: Syndicate's world director Jonathan Dumont opens up about the challenges of recreating some of history's most iconic landscapes.

---

3 Solo indie dev: Rookie lessons learned "This is a letter to myself five months ago; the guy who sat at his desk at work, reading articles about game development and wishing he could be on the other side of it."

---

  Warren Spector on creative direction and design ideas "Well, ideally, you don't even start a project that doesn't at least have the potential to be great. If you start out with a clear enough vision... it's just a matter of grindingly hard work."

---

2 Working time among video game developers: Trends over 2004-14 A decade of research into the amount of time developers really work, culled from surveys given to game developers and crunched by academics who know the subject intimately.

---

  Twitter upping its Unity game with tweeting and Crashlytics support Twitter now aims to integrate well with Unity, letting users tweet directly from games -- and its Crashlytics tool is adding Unity support as well.

---

  Xbox sales fall slightly, while Xbox Live users and revenues rise The Xbox One may not be the dominant console this generation, but Microsoft is seeing slight revenue gains -- mostly due to Minecraft, it seems.

---

  Vivendi ups its stakes in Ubisoft and Gameloft, may buy more stock Vivendi buys more stock in the two publishers with an eye toward "a strategic vision of operational convergence" -- just days after Ubisoft management called the initial buy "unsolicited and unwelcome."

---

  Get a job: Artillery is hiring a VFX Artist California startup Artillery is looking for a VFX artist to help bring color and life to Project Atlas, the PC RTS it's developing with eSports personality Sean "Day[9]" Plott at its Palo Alto HQ.

---

3 Assassin's Creed dev: We need to challenge our attitudes on diversity Senior Ubisoft staffers open up to Develop about some of the things they learned from Assassin's Creed: Unity's troubled launch as they prepare to debut Assassin's Creed: Syndicate this week.

---

3 Q&A;: Why Games Workshop is shaking up how it works with licensees Jon Gillard, head of licensing at Games Workshop, explains how the miniature wargaming company licenses its tabletop games, and what they look for in the videogame developers that they work with.

---

6 Don't Miss: Making the survival horror classic Alone in the Dark Preceding Resident Evil & Silent Hill, Infogrames' Alone in the Dark proved a landmark survival horror game. In this classic video postmortem series creator Frederick Raynal explores how it was made.

---

  InXile opens new Louisiana studio with the governor's blessing Wasteland 2 developer inXile is expanding this year, as studio chief Brian Fargo and Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal announced this week that it will open a sister studio in New Orleans by December.

---

1 How Bonnie Ross became the Halo chief Bloomberg Businessweek published a profile of 343 Industries boss Bonnie Ross on its website today that's worth reading for insight into how both the studio and its chief operate.

---

  Magic: The Gathering's Richard Garfield on getting design from good to great "It’s very easy to look at a mechanic you like, look at it by itself, and think that it’s worth it, but when you look at the project overall, you’ve got to figure out where to cut your complexity."

---

  Game dev parents, rejoice: Childcare services return for GDC 2016 Game Developers Conference officials are excited to continue their partnership with leading childcare provider KiddieCorp to offer GDC 2016 attendees access to an on-site children's program.

---

4 Tips for making a quality game on a tiny budget "As I'm developing my first commercial game on my own, I don't promise to have all the answers -- but I've gathered some advice that might help you!"

---

[Read More]