31w ago - Giant Sparrow Game Designer Ben Esposito has shared a video today spotlighting the art and design as part of their The Unfinished Swan developer diary.

To quote: Like a lot of folks, I first saw the tech demo for The Unfinished Swan when it made the rounds online in 2008. The idea stuck in the back of my head but it wasn't until later when Giant Sparrow put up a job posting that I decided: I had to make that game.

I had just graduated from college without much professional experience, so I did what I do best and made a game for them. You can check it out here if you'd like. The video cuts off because the end of the game says "Call me" and has my phone number on it.

It got the attention of the Giant Sparrow team, and I ended up flying out to Los Angeles to work on the game. I was elated and a little shocked, but I came to learn that at Giant Sparrow, the player experience always comes first - and my little game was designed to create a very specific experience.

Now, in October 2012, The Unfinished Swan is out in the wild (well, to PlayStation Plus members) and we're proud that we were able to make a truly experiential game.

68w ago - Today Designer, Producer and Community Manager Peter Bartholow of Reverge Labs has posted up a developer diary video below showcasing the feature-rich PSN fighter Skullgirls.

To quote: Previously on the PlayStation.Blog, I introduced you to Skullgirls' story and characters and discussed its unique gameplay systems. Today, with the game racing towards completion, I'm here to shed a little more light on the game's features.

Even though Skullgirls is a downloadable game for PSN, we've got a feature set consistent with a full-priced fighter.

• Story Mode
• Arcade Mode
• Tutorials
• Practice Room
• Ranked and Unranked Online Play
• Custom Soundtracks
• PS3-exclusive Trophies

Story Mode

The world of Skullgirls is vast and full of colorful characters well beyond the eight playable characters we'll have in the game. These characters will show up throughout the characters' stories, which are told with a series of short vignettes, and are told with over 200 pieces of unique art, character portraits and new music.

Check out our new Story mode trailer above, which features Skullgirls' awesome attract mode and glimpses at some of the characters' stories.

127w ago - FluffyLogic Designer James Parker has shared week four from their developer diary profiling Eat Them for PSN today.

To quote: I want to talk to you about Power Bars. I know, interesting stuff! It's all rock and roll here at top flight game developers FluffyLogic.

One of the aims of the game is to maintain the pace throughout. We want the game to be pick-up-and-play - so session times will be short but the nature of the game will encourage repeat play.

We are aiming for an old-school arcade feel and we want people to sneak in one more game before school, or when coming back from the pub, or between courses at a swanky dinner party!

A game that is played in five minute chunks needs to be pacey and efficient - there's no time for standing around when you should be beating the daylights out of a skyscraper or chomping through a bus load of tourists.

The other thing that's important is eating people; if monsters aren't eating, the game doesn't live up to its name and whoever came up with the title it is going to go away disappointed.

So this brings us to power bars. In the E3 version of the game there are separate...

129w ago - Fluffy Logic Designer James Parker has detailed the controls for Eat Them! controls on PSN today.

To quote: I'm working on Eat Them!, which Ana has been telling you about recently, and I'm here to say a few more extra in-depthy words about how making a game like Eat Them! actually happens on a day to day basis. Today - CONTROLS!

A game can have the greatest technology in the world, the most incredible art assets, and USPs that would have marketing people salivating into their espressos, but if the controls feel wrong - if the player isn't properly connected with the game - then everything else will be wasted.

One of the first things you do when designing any game is download a picture of the DUALSHOCK 3, cribbed from Google images, fire up your favorite drawing package, and put little lines all over it connecting buttons to boxes that describe their functions.

At this stage, as an experienced designer, you make an educated guess at what's going to work for your game. The reality is, until you get the game on the Test Kit, the controller in your hands and you actually try the thing, you may as well have been drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa.

Because customisation is a big factor in Eat Them!, each monster's capabilities are going to be slightly...

131w ago - FluffyLogic Producer Ana Kronschnabl has shared part two today in their ongoing Eat Them! PlayStation 3 developer diary series.

To quote: So where are we? Well we have obviously done a fair amount of the game, since we demoed it at E3. Prior to this point we had spent a lot of time getting the basic structures of the game in place.

We use Sony's 3D engine PhyreEngine as the basis - it's a great engine and it gives us the important nuts and bolts of a game system, which frees us up to focus on making special graphical effects and gameplay.

One of these is the cartoon -shader effect which we have spent a fair amount of time developing and refining. We are using it to create the game's distinctive visual style. This was a time consuming process that involved our main graphics programmer and a couple of artists working together, trying to get the art tools into the PlayStation 3 and looking good.

The basic system takes the 3D models of the landscape and the monsters and draws a black line around them, as if they are flat on the page like a comic drawing. What makes it a complex process is that it's not a flat drawing, it's a 3D world that moves constantly, so our graphics tools have to draw this look on the...