The New Yorker has a fascinating profile of Will Wright — the man behind Sim City, The Sims, and the upcoming Spore.

The article starts of with a brief history of game development and then moves into the life and career of Will Wright.

Reading this makes me even more anxious to try out Spore. I can’t wait.

Apparently I’m not alone in my love for platform games. Gamasutra has just published a 32 page feature covering the top-selling platform games of today and the past – A Detailed Cross-Examination of Yesterday and Today’s Best-Selling Platform Games.

If you’re interested in writing your own platform game, or just learning what makes the best platform games so much fun, I encourage you to spend some time reading this article.

This year the elements are Emotion, Emblem, Economics, and Europe. Entries must use all four of these elements. Entries are due November 30, 2006. So far there aren’t a lot of prizes, but hopefully more will be added later.

There are very few limitations on the entries in this contest. Basically, they just have to work on a Windows PC. They can be written in any language — C++, Java, Flash, etc. and can use any framework you like — DirectX, OpenGL, SDL, etc.

If you’re interested in game programming contests, you might also want to look at the Ludum Dare 48H Contest and the 72 Hour GDC. These contests focus more on making a game in a short amount of time — 2 or 3 days.

Let me know if you enter any of these contests. I’d love to feature your entry here.

There’s a lot to be learned from other people’s code, even if they aren’t professional programmers. I’ve even picked up ideas from looking over assignments turned in by my students. It’s amazing how many different ways there are to solve any given problem.

With this in mind, I thought it might be helpful to list a few open source games that you can look at for inspiration. Before we get started, keep in mind that even though these games are open source, they are not in the public domain.

That means you can’t just copy and paste code from any of these projects unless you’re willing to comply with their license. In the case of the GPL, that means you’ll need to release the code for program as well.

Probably the most popular open source games are the Quake series from id Software. You can download the source to Quake 1, 2, and 3 from the id Software FTP server. Other first person shooters include Cube and it’s “next-gen” offspring Sauerbraten.

If you’d rather fly than run, be sure to download the FlightGear flight simulator. Also, No Gravity is an open source 3D arcade space shooter.

Maybe you’re more interested in making a 2D game. For platform games, check out the Super Mario Brothers clone Secret Maryo Chronicles. If you prefer strategy games, look at The Battle for Wesnoth and FreeCiv.

If none of the above games interest you, there are a few more places you can look. The Open Directory Project maintains a list of open source games. There is also a Sourceforge project called OSSwin that maintains a list of open source games for Windows.

Jenova Chen is a student in Interactive Media at the University of Southern California School of Cinema and Television. He has designed two of the more interesting games I’ve played lately.

His first game to attract attention was called Cloud. In it, you play a young boy who flies around gathering up clouds and redistributing them in the sky. It’s really a sort of zen-like experience.

His latest work is called Flow. You start off as a simple microorganism swimming in a blue sea. The object of the game is to eat and evolve, while trying to avoid being eaten.

Both of these games seem simple at first glance, and that’s what makes them so impressive. The controls are intuitive and the concepts are easily understood.

I’ll be keeping an eye on Jenova’s blog. It will be interesting to see what he does after graduation.

That’s just what these Carnegie Mellon grad students discuss in their Gamasutra article: How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days. They forced themselves to live by these rules for a semester:

1. Each game must be made in less than seven days
2. Each game must be made by exactly one person
3. Each game must be based around a common theme

The article lays out all of their tips and tricks for getting a game made in under a week. This is a great way to test new gameplay ideas. If it’s not fun after a week, you can move on to something else next week.

They don’t mention it specifically, but I would imagine having a good framework for developing games is a prerequisite. Most of their games appear to use OpenGL (GLUT) for video and BASS for audio, but SDL would probably work just as well if not better.

Once you finish reading the article, you can head over to the Experimental Gameplay Project, download a few of the games, and then sign up to participate.

I recommend Attack of the Killer Swarm, Tower of Goo Unlimited, and On a Rainy Day. These should give you a nice overview of just what is possible with only a few days development time.

Let me know if you create a game for the project. I’d love to feature it here.

The idea behind MegaTexture is to use one giant texture to cover the entire terrain. The example given in the article is 32,000 by 32,000 pixels. Current video cards obviously can’t directly use this texture to render the terrain, but this does allow game artists to create very detailed terrains.

The article doesn’t provide any technical coverage of the technique, but it is still an interesting read. Here’s a quote that caught my attention concerning terrain rendering:

Geometry level of detail on terrain…there have been thousands of papers written about it, and I honestly don’t think it’s all that important. The way the hardware works, you’re so much better off setting down a static mesh that’s all in vertex and index buffers, and just letting the hardware plow through it…

I remember spending a lot of time a few years ago trying to figure out things like ROAM for rendering terrain. Even back then it was usually faster to just dump all of the triangles on the video card and let it sort them out.

The screen shots in the article look great. I can’t wait to try this out in person.