A budding video game developer shares the trials and tribulations of what goes into being one.
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
Spiders: "We're going to cut straight to the chase so you're not left wondering: After a long period without clear answers, we have received confirmation that Spiders is being liquidated.
What does it mean? This means the company as a whole no longer exists. We'll cease our functions immediately. The planned DLC will release via Nacon, and then-- well, that's it.
We're sorry that it's come to this and would like to thank each and every one of you for your support over the years.
If you have any questions or run into issues with your games, please contact Nacon directly as we'll no longer be able to reply."
One of the more interesting concepts to me it 2D rectagles [sprite objects] on slopes.
Try putting a square on a triangle. Most games put it in the middle of the character, some on the inner pixel of the character leaving the entire character except one pixel off the slope, and some put it into the hit detection on the outside pixel letting the player walk into the block before the slop starts getting moved up on. There's many different types, but those seem the most used, those 3.
One example is Kirby for the NES which has 3 slope types and does it by changing the standing animation for those to conform to the slopes. It hit detects in the middle so even if it conforms to the slop, it will still float or be into the ground when the character is on the edges of a slope that goes into another surface.
Sonic for Genesis puts the slope hit in the middle of sonic on his feet, and then on flat surfaces move the block standing detection to the outside dots. That's why you can move off a sloped hill and then fall down 1 block and land inside the hill.
MC Kids for NES puts the hit point in the middle for the hill and that's it. Simple and straightforward, although half the character is always floating in the air.
No solution is perfect, some take more characters, some don't do anything, and it's a very interesting topic to me. You can of course just use characters for all combinations of slopes, but for games on older platforms that's not plausible, and today is still a wasteful way of doing it.