Australia’s national museum of screen culture, ACMI, has curated a new interactive exhibition that will showcase how Melbourne studio House House created Untitled Goose Game. The exhibition will open on September 17, 2024, and run until February 16, 2025. It will feature previously unseen concept art, sketches, and other design material presented alongside playable early builds of the game. “Through colorful displays and comedy-focused curation, Honk! Untitled Goose Exhibition keeps nothing under glass—designed with families in mind, it includes sound effect buttons, flipbooks and other playful displays,” said ACMI on its website.

Cosmets. Bewls. Pipers. Gleebs. These aren’t the mutterings of a lunatic, but rather a mere handful of creatures you’ll be able to charm and collect in Flock, the next title from Wilmot’s Warehouse and I Am Dead developer Hollow Ponds. Flock is a chill adventure about exploring a wondrous world atop a giant bird (or maybe you’re just very small?). On your travels, you’ll have the chance to discover and nurture a flock of creatures that will trail in your wake, swirling and chirping in all the colors of the rainbow.

PlayStation has found its very own cute platformer mascot in the modern age with Astro, the hero of the Astro Bot series from developer Team Asobi. He burst onto the scene in 2018 with the critically acclaimed Astro Bot: Rescue Mission for PS4 and PlayStation VR. His follow-up adventure, Astro’s Playroom, was released in 2020 and came pre-installed with every PS5 console. Those two games both debuted as demonstrations of major technology rollouts for the company.

Cacao Cafe sees players cooking up treats and setting up shop for their customers, except they do so during the time of Maya and Aztec cultures, utilizing ancient cooking techniques to make their food. Game Developer spoke with Sipsop from Creativa GS, creator of this historic cooking experience, to learn about what thoughts went into creating a cooking experience set in this era, the ways they created gameplay around ancient Mexica cooking techniques, and how they carefully selected the recipes players could use to capture their culture while also working within the tight timelines of a game jam.

Cooking is probably one of the last leisure activities that we can do for its own sake; firstly, cooking is something that most of us kind of need to do in order to, you know, eat, so it is kind of a necessity. But it can also be a creative exercise, and one that, exceeding the eventual domestic disaster, will always give a satisfying result; a result that will improve your skills and knowledge for the next round.

When Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in 2017, it was hailed as a groundbreaking achievement in open-world design and technical development. Its complex systems allowed players to creatively solve puzzles and tackle the many challenges they faced and oh boy did some people get creative. Some players exploited the physics to the point they became bona-fide digital stuntpeople. Logs became surfboards. Guardians became target practice. And then there’s whatever the heck these players were doing.

The Independent Game Festival (IGF) recognizes indie designers each year, showcasing some of the best work in the space—culminating in the IGF awards at GDC each year. Game Developer runs a series of interviews called the road to IGF with most of the nominees, looking at what goes into their creation. Now that we know the winners of the 2024 showcase, we’ve compiled a few of their thoughts on their prized creations, from design insights to unlikely sources of inspiration to the importance of telling their stories how they like.

At GDC 2024 in San Francisco, luminary game developer Jordan Mechner spoke at length about the creation of (one of) his first major works and a foundational stone of modern-day gaming, Karateka. Mechner, who was also behind seminal titles like Prince of Persia and The Last Express, used images from a comic book-styled book he is publishing about his early years in the industry in combination with his actual journal entries from the mid-80s to recall the struggles and triumphs of getting Karateka to market.

At GDC 2024, Isaac Olander, CEO and art director at Swedish-based studio Tallgran, gave a panel on the current state of representation for Black characters, with a particular focus on why Black hair continues to be a tricky thing to nail for games. Having produced 3D models for titles like League of Legends and Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man series, Olander’s work emphasizes authenticity and showcasing style and personality—with the assertion that having both is indeed possible.