jonathan mak

Sound Shapes: The Kotaku Review

Though there’s a smorgasbord of audio pulsing through it, Sound Shapes won’t make a musician out of you. What it does is more esoteric and impressive than that. This new PlayStation Vita game lets you feel what it’s like to live inside a song.


Everyday Shooter’s Evolution Arrives On NGP As Sound Shapes

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of the most interesting, most surprising games coming to Sony’s new portable is the one from the man behind Indie darling Everyday Shooter.


Obsession In Game Design

What obsessions plague our top independent game designers today? What theories keep them up at night? What possibilities blow their minds, challenge their presumptions and make them sound like a bunch of philosophical hippies after two bottles of ice wine and carton of black bean hummus?

Kellee Santiago (fl0w), Jon Mak (Everyday Shooter) and Pekko Koskinen (LudoCraft) told us of their obsessions during our first session of GDC’s Independent Games Summit. And these simple ideas that make their minds spin forced us rethink games a bit as well.


NPR Has Good Taste In Games

I’ve made fun of NPR more than my fair share, but Heather Chaplin recently did an interesting piece regarding the “games that got away.” About 7 minutes of radio gives credit to three incredible games we’ve seen this year: Portal, Everyday Shooter, and Desktop Tower Defense.

It’s worth listening to just to hear Jonathan Mak call Everyday Shooter a “celebration of geometric sexuality.” And, of course, I don’t know that any Kotaku readers have overlooked any of these three games—but in case you have, yeah, it’s time to check them out. I just wish that the radio piece said a little less about GLaDOS, since her evolution of character is one of the most fascinating and surprising (yet gloriously inevitable) elements of Portal. Still, hopefully well-written stories like this on NPR help these games sink into the mainstream consciousness as much as they have our own.

Video Games that Got Away [npr]


Kotaku Is Hiring a PHP Developer!

Take pride in writing clean code? We’re looking for an autonomous PHP developer to join our rapidly-growing team at Allure Media. Apply within.

World of Servers