Articles by David Bolton

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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…
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  0x10c Could Be a Game to Rival Minecraft

  Independently produced Ox10c will be a multi-player online space game based in a parallel universe along the lines of Elite, and will follow the same development pattern. According to its creator…
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  Hammurabi 2: Develop the Game, Build Your Civilization

  Hammurabi is a classic '70s video game that has been redone dozens of times in many programming languages. It's a very simple game where you rule a city, buy and sell land, buy seed to plant the…
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  Google Go and How It Works

  Google Go is a systems programming language (just over two years old) invented at Google and which can best be summed up as the new C: It's simple, easy to learn, and very fast to compile. (The G…
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  Setting Up a Web Game: Part 2

  This is the second in a series about setting up an online multiplayer game called webgame, where I share my insights into architectural, business and technical decisions. You can read the first i…