Come listen to the pilot episode of our new GamesPlusPodcast as Chris and Ruben discuss gaming industry news, SXSW ScreenBurn, Flixel Game Jams in Austin, and male nudity in Heavy Rain and Dante’s Inferno. Trust us, this is very NSFW, NSFC, NSFKFC, and any other acronym you can tag on to NSF.

How do you make game development something anyone can do? SXSW ScreenBurn Panelist Michael Agustin is attempting to do just that with GameSalad. He discusses his company and his panel Anyone Can Make a Video Game.

At the San Francisco GDC Adam Saltzman, co-developer of the popular iPhone game Canabalt, has announced that Flixel will be ported from Flash to the iPhone.
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Just a reminder to any Austin game devs out there, Phil Knoll’s second Flixel Jam will be kicking off this Saturday. The six hour game jam will kick off at 10:00am at the Austin Carver Branch Library. The hectic game development will continue until 4:30pm when a solid prototype for a game will be completed.
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From globalgamejam.org

Attention game developers, the second annual Global Game Jam will be kicking off next weekend, January 29th – 31st. Game developers around the world will be coming together to make games over the course of three days.
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Game tutorials can be bad: walls of text, help icons hidden in far off corners of a player’s screen. It doesn’t have to be this way. Industry veteran Sheri Garner Ray discusses how to teach even players reluctant to try new things.

In this day and age, emergent gameplay and narrative are two of the hottest things in games. Today we’ll look in-depth at each of these two terms and explore both how a player can experience them and how a designer can create these two experiences.

Want to make video games with other aspiring developers? Live in Austin? Check out Game Jam.

Paul Benjamin gives us a peak behind the curtain and talks to us about writing video games.