Articles by David Bolton

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  Book Review: "Beginning Facebook Apps Development"

  Facebook launched its game platform five years ago and the world of casual browser games has never looked back since then. Most Facebook games are still written in Flash, for example, Farmville a…
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  Why A Minecraft Subscription Makes Sense

  Minecraft's Indie developer Markus "Notch" Persson, Founder of Mojang AB, unfortunately won't be at E3 this week to talk about the blowout performance of the Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition. Last mont…
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  Coding Challenges Can Get You a Job

  Some companies run programming challenges to sift out the wheat from the chaff, and the prizes often include job interviews. Facebook has been running one such online test, allowing two hours to…
• 'Detroit': The Auto Simulation Game I Want to Play

  Some game genres only exist as desktop games, board games, or mobile games, and not as multiplayer games. Even with the best artificially intelligent player, though, there's something special abo…
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  iRacing: A Commercial Racing MMO Simulation

  iRacing is both an entertaining game where you race against others, and a training tool for the real life racers who contributed to its development. In April 2010, more than half of the current I…
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  Zynga Fights 'Ville' Competitors

  Zynga threw a one-two-punch at its competitors recently over the use of a "Ville" suffix, potentially casting a chill over any game developer who dares to add a "Ville" at the end of their game n…
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  Micromanaging Games or Employees - Bad Idea Either Way

  It's funny how bad ideas in the workplace also are bad ideas for games. Take micro-managing, for example. I like playing castle type strategy games. The web (and later mobile) strategy game genre…
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  Bitcoin As Revenue Source for Free-to-Play

  Bitcoin is a digital currency that uses P2P networking, cryptography and digital signatures to conduct transactions without relying on trust. It uses cryptography to generate a digital signature…
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  Setting Up a Web Game - Part 3: The Server

  In my previous Web Game post, I described my game server technology stack. It's a conventional HTML/CSS/PHP website, but uses PostgreSQL as the database and has a C# Game Processing Engine that i…
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  Version Control Systems for Beginners

  It amazes me that for the first 20 years of my 31-year programming career, I only used a Version Control Systems (VCS) once: a two year job in aerospace where they used a mainframe package called…