We are going to have another round of Game Critique Club over on the makega.me forum starting April 1st. As I post this, there are currently three slots still available. If you have an interest in receiving two weeks of critique on one of your games in exchange for doing the same for 4-6 others over the course of the next couple of months, check it out.
http://forum.makega.me/t/game-critique-club-round-2/1564

Just saw this notice for the Bad Box Art Jam over at gamejolt. March 25th - 27th.

http://jams.gamejolt.io/badboxart/gallery-of-trash

48 hours seems like WAAAAY too much time to put a game together. But the game boxes they chose for the jam are pretty outrageous. I'd say it's well worth a look.

I'm off work that weekend so I will see if I can make a game for each of the box arts they have in their Gallery...

Apparently, the song "Happy Birthday" was copyrighted by a company. That's why you've never seen it sung in movies during birthday scenes. HOWEVER, it's copyright is ending on 14th March, 2016, due to a class action suit levied against the copyright holders. Might we want to celebrate that day with a Glorious Trainwreck event?

Here's where I learned the news:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/02/happy-birthday-to-you-is-finally-free.html

...THEN I checked on Snopes just to make sure:
http://www.snopes.com/2015/09/22/happy-birthday-public-domain/

Hey guys, I’m starting an audio design and music composition studio with some very talented musicians and engineers and we’re looking for a game developer to work with so that we can use the end product on our showreel. It’s a chance to get some really high quality music (of any genre!) as well as some publicity on your game for free.

If your interested just send an email to :)

For those of you undecided of your (next?) game-dev tool of choice, this website may help:

http://freegameslist.weebly.com/game-creation-tools.html

Personally, I'm not motivated enough to learn actual coding or an honest-to-goodness programming language, so easy-to-use SDKs like MMF2 (CT Fusion nowadays) have been my go-to for about 10 years now. I think I'm gonna pick up one of these FPS engines and see what kind of interesting stuff I can do with them... Lots of open-source and no-cost art tools in there as well.

Have fun, folks! :D

Found this on The Internet Archive the other day.

https://archive.org/details/1078-weird-textures

There it's downloadable as a CD-sized ISO file, but the actual textures are only ~55MB (and are echoed in different formats: JPG, GIF, TGA, IFF, PIC). So I've uploaded the JPG versions of them somewhere hopefully a bit more handy. You should get a little preview of each image, and be able to download them all in a batch or one-by-one.

https://mega.nz/#F!woJE1T6b!8Rxdf2NRQyoIp5yxdJMBYw

This Axis Game Factory's been sitting in my Steam library for a while and maybe it's time to play with it. Seems to be a simple 3-D game making thing, with lots of assets and things included. Not sure how stuck into making games in particular genres you get.

http://www.axisgamefactory.com/

Has anyone else used it?

Also, I have an extra copy if anyone wants it.

I'm currently fixated on the notion of developing a game featuring the public domain character Fantomah:

http://pdsh.wikia.com/wiki/Fantomah

What should I pursue?
- a platformer
- an interactive fiction story
- turn-based strategy/tactical overhead map
- something else?

I'm also toying with the notion of having the player be the 'bad guys' and having Fantomah foil their plans with her incredible powers. Frankly, I'm more interested in creating over-the-top, imaginative situations using Fantomah's powers than I am in developing a realistic action game. Re-imagining the character so more metaphor emerges is also high on my list of goals. Experimenting with game formats that are unfamiliar to me is totally okay at this point.

Any thoughts or opinions on this? How would YOU like to see the Fantomah story delivered in a game, if at all?

If anyone's interested in having some voice acting done for their games, let me know and I can likely do a little somethin' somethin' for ya.

I've been doing more of that lately for my own game projects - with my own equipment at home - and find it incredibly fun and creative. If you think your project could be helped with that sort of thing, keep me in mind and send me a message.

This exists.
http://www.patreon.com/ragzouken

They bundled up some games made with it here:
http://ragzouken.itch.io/the-humble-kooltool-bundle

Thought y'all might want to know.