Category: Blog


June 14th, 2022

Welcome to Ara: History Untold

Hi everyone! 
We’re super excited today to kick off the first of our new dev diaries series, detailing our journey with Ara: History Untold.  Ara’s been many years in the making, and the team can’t wait to share with everyone all the hard work they’ve put into the game and start a discussion with you about all the new features they hope you’ll love.  (Seriously, years of zip-lipped darkness – they can’t wait to actually start talking about all the things with you all.) 


May 25th, 2021

Stop the Music!

A few years back a very prolific friend of mine told me that when he was on deadline, he would play Who Let the Dogs Out? by the Baha Men on a continuous loop until he completed the assignment. He also drank more Diet Coke than any human being I’ve ever met, which I guess […]


May 17th, 2021

Dude, Where’s My Genre?

This blog was written by guest author and Oxide game designer Meghan Straus.   Over the many years that video games have been in development, genres have seen rises and falls in popularity. From the surge of MMOs in the mid-2000s to the uprising of battle royales for literally every shooter in the last decade, there’s no telling what might grab people’s attention next. […]


May 8th, 2021

Be Very Quiet…

This blog was written by Emily Turner, Designer at Oxide. Before quarantine, work was the thing I did for approximately 40 hours a week that I couldn’t talk about. If I were asked how my day was by someone outside of the company, I could bark back a simple “Good.” or “Bad” or “Ok”. At […]


May 3rd, 2021

We’re Totally Judging You

A lot of games allow you to play evil characters. In fact, some insist upon it. I remember years back when playing Grand Theft Auto, I was cursing loudly at the PC. My wife asked me what was up. I told her I was failing repeatedly at this mission. She asked what the mission was. […]


April 27th, 2021

Games Will Kill You

For the record: successful game companies try to avoid killing their players. For one thing, it cuts down on the customer base for sequels, and that’s where the big dough is. For another, it makes hiring QA employees difficult. But you wouldn’t know that from watching TV.  During the 90s there were a series of […]


April 20th, 2021

Born to Lose

I don’t like to lose. It’s not so bad in multiplayer games like Sid Meier’s Civilization, Super Mario Karts, Fortnite, or Covid-19 injection scheduling web sites (too soon?). If I’m beaten by superior gameplay or better luck or whatever, that’s okay. Somebody won. What I really hate is losing a single-player game. Say I’m playing […]


April 16th, 2021

Welcome to the Crab Triangle

We’ve been hiring up here at Oxide, I’m sworn to secrecy as to why (hint, we’re a computer game company). At the end of job interviews, I like to tell prospective employees why they should want to live in the Baltimore-Hunt Valley area. There are the obvious reasons – the Baltimore Ravens, crabcakes, brewpubs and […]


April 9th, 2021

Games People Play

Like most everybody else, we’ve been stranded at home for the past year. While some of us have taken the opportunity to learn cool new skills – baking, carpentry, interpretive dance, and the like – we’ve been doing a ton of gaming as well. I recently demanded to know what everybody at the company was […]


June 13th, 2016

60 is the new 30 (but not for long)

Being a game developer, I often think about how we evaluate the quality of the games we make, as well as those we play. I know everyone has their own subjective list of what is important, but there have been some metrics that as an industry we have embraced. The one that comes to mind […]