How do you make a social game that can bring elements from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time or Tomb Raider to a relatively casual audience? Answer: lots of testing, lots of iterating, and lots of Indiana Jones. Zynga Boston lead designer Seth Sivak shows us what went right and wrong with Zynga’s casual-core-bridging Indiana Jones Adventure World.

Our big technology survey for 2012 focuses on the engines, tools, middleware, platforms, and services that mobile and social game developers are working with—as well as the tech they wish they were working with.

If your MMORPG’s players are spending more time staring at cooldown meters than the monsters they’re fighting, you’re doing it wrong. Bluehole Studios’s Seungmo Koo explains how they pulled off Tera’s truly real-time “free-targeting” combat system without breaking their servers.

During a single weekend, over 900 developers across 30-plus cities worldwide made more than 300 games as part of the “What Would Molydeux?” game jam. Read about what went right and what went wrong with organizing a massively popular game jam in just under three weeks.