And the next Call of Duty will be...

...Call of Duty: Ghosts.

...Call of Duty: Ghosts. That's according to a mistakenly published (and now removed) listing posted by megaconglomoshop Tesco. The posting, showing the PS3 version of the game, stated a December release, and lists Infinity Ward as the developer. That's as expected, given the annual franchise swapsies between them and Treyarch.

With no official announcement from Activision, further details are light. According to rumours that surfacedlast month, Ghosts is a Modern Warfare spin-off set in the future. It's suggested that a major plot event will force characters to use current-day weapons. Beyond that, if I were to wildly speculate:

Someone will be shot. At some point, you'll be informed that you're "Oscar Mike". The plot will be jingoistic and morally dubious bobbins, but no-one will care because hey, multiplayer.

I'd also like to nominate the Ghost Knifefishas the official mascot of CoD:Ghosts. Just look at that thing! If the final cutscene doesn't involve the protagonist being incapacitated by ultimate villain Gruffman McBadingtons, groping around in a just-in-reach puddle, pulling out a Knifefish and throwing it skull-first into your opponent, then it'll be a criminally missed opportunity.

While the PS3 listing suggests current-gen consoles, it's more than likely that Activision will be keen to release the game on every conceivable format, including next-gen consoles - hopefully meaning the PC version will get a long overdue graphical bump.

Here's that box art in full. Just pretend the PS3 logo isn't there. And that we still use boxes.

Thanks, OPM.

Company of Heroes Online is the best deal in PC gaming

I've just been tinkering with Company of Heroes Online, the awesome World War 2 strategy game from Relic.

I've just been tinkering with Company of Heroes Online, the awesome World War 2 strategy game from Relic. And it's unbelievable. Absolutely, mind blowing. I know we've been banging on about this for months now, but you really, honestly, absolutely have to try it out. If you sign up at the Company of Heroes site, you can download the full, original, Company of Heroes campaign, for free. There's absolutely zero catch. It's worth it just to play the Carentan mission - which I still think is the best RTS level ever created. We'll have much more shortly, but just go and have a play, and report back what you think.

Grow Up in the Watercolor World of Beeswing

Jack King-Spooner works on some unique stuff, always playing around with visuals, storyline, and themes.

Jack King-Spooner works on some unique stuff, always playing around with visuals, storyline, and themes. Just play Will You Ever Return if you don’t believe me: It’s a claymation exploration of returning from hell to see someone you love again, it’s a constant barrage of surprises and strangeness that is somehow deeply human and touching at the same time. So, it’s no surprise that his newest title, Beeswing , is just as delirious and visually striking as his previous work, telling a story of life growing up in rural Scotland through watercolor, clay, and ink.

Beeswing is an exploration game, one where you are left to roam the world interacting with the people who live there. There are hundreds of characters to interact with, each having their own story you can uncover. While doing so, you can also enjoy the varied styles of shifting artwork that make up the characters and backgrounds of the game’s world. The art style seems to change on a whim as you play, going from watercolor paintings to ink drawings as you discover tales of the game’s inhabitants. Filled with relaxing acoustic music, it’s built as a sort of walk through the developer’s childhood, one that seeks to remind the player of their own youth and home town. King-Spooner is a bit of a strange fellow in his work, though, so expect a touch of madness somewhere within this nostalgic look back at his life.

Beeswing is available now for anyone looking to be reminded of home through the memories of another. With multiple endings based on who you see and help, and an abundance of characters, art styles, and small, personal discoveries to be made, it will be an intriguing walk through King-Spooner’s childhood.

Beeswing is available for $9.50 on tumblrand is also looking for votes on Steam Greenlight. For more information on Jack King-Spooner and his games, you can head to his GameJolt profileor follow him on Twitter.

Analysts react to Activision-Blizzard's $5.9B purchase of King

The news that Activision-Blizzard (ATVI) was acquiring Candy Crush creator King caught many off guard ... including professional game industry analysts.

caught many off guard ... including professional game industry analysts. “To say we are surprised by this news is an understatement, writes Ben Schachter of Macquarie Research.

Tim Merel of Digi-Capital notes that this deal comes amidst what had been a relatively calm time for games deal makers. "In the first 9 months of the year, game mergers and acquisition deals dropped 74% and the games IPO market evaporated," he notes. This acquisition turns things around in a stroke.

Like many, Merel wonders whether the ATVI-KING deal will be a catalyst for more large-scale consolidation in the games industry. " The critical question now will be whether other major industry players see this deal as fundamentally altering the competitive landscape, or whether it is simply the bringing together of two market leaders with complimentary businesses," he says.

We are rounding up analyst reactions to the deal. What does it mean for the future of these two companies? What does it tell us about gaps and weaknesses that Activision-Blizzard perceived in its lineup? Will we all be playing Call of Candycraft Modern Skylander Crush Warfare soon?

Was this a wise purchase? Is King worth $5.9 billion?

"For the first half of 2015 revenue and income were down and King’s monthly paying users at the end of Q2 2015 was down 27% versus the end of Q2 2014.  Revenue per paying user was up Q2 2015 versus Q2 2014 but it was flat to slightly down Q2 2015 versus Q2 2014. In other words there is some concern that ATVI has made an expensive purchase of a company at its peak." -- David Cole, DFC Intelligence

"ATVI buying KING is not something that we considered possible given ATVI’s historical view of mobile and the types of deals that have been done in the space, as well as KING’s declining growth profile. We think that the King acquisition was clearly at a premium and goes against the trend of buying a company at their peak to buy market share.  The track record for these type of acquisitions is not strong so it strikes us as expensive and risky."

"While we are far from convinced that this is a great deal, we have consistently said over the years that there is only one management team to whom we give the benefit of the doubt, and that is ATVI. While we have many reservations about KING, we have to be somewhat deferential to ATVI’s track record." -- Ben Schachter, Macquarie Research

"People who think the $5.9 billion valuation is too high are wrong. With game publishers becoming true cross-screen and transmedia companies, this is a huge move that will give Activision Blizzard a unique reach across all screens on a global scale. Having King’s experience in running and monetizing mobile games as a service will be a priceless asset to a company that is still on the learning curve when it comes to mobile." -- Peter Warman, Newzoo CEO

"While Activision has a strong track record of building games properties that generate revenues over $1bn, it has failed to build any such scale games for mobile. The company is also facing increased competition to the Skylanders franchise from Disney, Nintendo and Lego, and is experiencing declining sales of its annual release of Call of Duty . Declines in existing franchises mean Activision needs to add mobile revenues to mitigate any shareholder anxieties."

"Activision will seek to address both short term revenue growth and longer term profitability targets. But King is past its peak success. The company has seen its revenue decline for both the last two quarters. However, King remains highly profitable which will significantly boost Activision’s overall margins and will give Activision immediate access to a new $1bn+ franchise, which is anchored in the mobile market where to date it has modest exposure." -- Piers Harding-Rolls, Head of Games at IHS Technologies

"Activision bought King to appease a Wall Street that expects every game publisher to be heavily into mobile -- see the Nintendo stock jump on the original DeNA announcement. In that sense, it was a wise purchase -- but it would have been wiser to spend $500 million trying to make mobile work over the last 8 years rather than $6 billion in 2015."

"ATVI were very actively (arrogantly?) dismissive of mobile and social games back in 2010. I spoke about the danger of this position in my talk at GDC that year, and it turned out to cost them dearly in a large amount of new debt and a significant chunk of cash playing catchup today. The premium over the normal stock price wasn’t that great, so assuming the valuation was rational before, the price seems reasonable." -- Ben Cousins, CEO of The Outsiders and former DeNA, DICE exec

How does King complement Activision-Blizzard? What sort of synergies might we see between their various products and expertise?

"King basically gets Activision-Blizzard a major position in the mobile space.  However we see very few synergies between the two companies in terms of products.  Really it just addresses ATVI’s weakness in mobile and reaching a broader demographic.  King has a much larger audience than Activision, but they have been struggling to monetize that audience." -- David Cole

" O ur understanding is that KING has a particularly sophisticated analytics system in place to analyze player data, customer acquisition, monetization, etc… And reading between the lines on the call, ATVI discussed its collection of older IP. We believe that some of these older franchises could be used as the foundation for ATVI games cross-promoted to KING’s audiences. While we don’t expect Candy Crush players to all of a sudden become diehard Call of Duty players, there are many transferable skills that can benefit both ATVI and KING."

"We think that the days of a small company or individual hitting it big with a clever mobile game are basically over. Higher quality mobile devices, marketing needs, and global distribution all play to the strengths of larger companies. The success of Blizzard’s Hearthstone clearly had an impact on ATVI’s view of mobile and proved that mobile could drive meaningful revenue and profits." -- Ben Schachter

"Activision’s strategic move to acquire King, enables Activision to tap enormous scale of the mobile games market and overnight seize a significant double digit share of mobile games. This approach mirrors Activision’s last major strategic deal when it merged with Blizzard, which gave it access to new audiences (online gamers, gamers from Asia), platform expertise (PC) and new market segments (subscription massively multiplayer online games) but at a significant price having entered the segment at a more financially stable stage.

"Activision also plans to run King in a similar fashion to Blizzard – as a separate division and at arm’s length. While this autonomy has allowed Blizzard to flourish, the ability for Activision to leverage King’s mobile expertise and audience will be hampered by this light integration." -- Piers Harding-Rolls

"One key value element is a complementary pipeline in terms of games in development. In addition to its Saga series, King has been rumored to be working on several mid-core games that will soon see daylight. I am certain Activision Blizzard has taken this into account in the valuation." -- Peter Warman

" It compliments Activision-Blizzard in the sense that it gives them a big presence in a market that they had no prior position in. In terms of connections with other aspects of Activision’s business - its going to take titanic effort to get these two very different companies to integrate, I think."

"The Saga framework - King’s billion-dollar invention - can be applied to any single-player game genre, in my opinion. If there was a (literally) incredible collaboration it could result in ATVI properties working well on mobile, but honestly I don’t think it’s practical for the integration of the new company to be deep enough to make that possible in any meaningful way. People joke about Call of Duty Saga , but single-player CoD is already halfway to being a Saga - a linear sequence of missions that get progressively harder." -- Ben Cousins

This new Star Wars 1313 trailer doesn't feel very... Star Wars-y (but that's no bad thing)

As this year's Gamescom begins to get its German sausage on (don't know what that even means), so the first new trailers steadily begin to appear. The latest video delight being for LucasArts' bounty-hunting adventure Star Wars 1313 . Digest it immediately through your eyeballs: The footage is mostly from the various E3 2012 trailers, but I'm pretty sure *some* of it is new. If not, please accept my

Company of Heroes Online Gamescom impressions

I'm in the the trenches at the Company of Heroes Online demonstration here at Gamescom.

I'm in the the trenches at the Company of Heroes Online demonstration here at Gamescom. It's on course for a spring release next year, and I'm finding out lots about the business model and how the free elements will stack against the paid bits, as well as getting a good impression of the game itself.

From the top, then: You can create your own character - customise his appearance and give him a nice smart haircut, then name him. Matches jump off from a lobby system where you chat with other generals, put them on your friends list, and ask if they fancy a fight - a bit like real war.

You can play against your friends, skirmish with the computer, or join a ranked match against an appropriately skilled and levelled opponent. You can have as many as four players on each team.

As you battle, as well as XP, you'll earn upgrade points for your Commander. You can spend those on improving your abilities - more planes, higher payload, better damage, etc.

You unlock a new ability every six levels. For example, you can unlock the ability to fly in smoke grenades that confer an increased resistance against suppression and let you take less damage. It acts like instant cover, or a welcome escape route for pinned down troops.

These abilities are lined up like an RPG action bar across the bottom of the screen. You can summon bombing runs, drop in troops, strafe infantry with your aircraft.

You can also customise your army's loadout by adding army items: jeeps, tanks, better infantry armour, rifles for engineers, etc. Because you're limited to eight of them, these items will reflect your play style rather than progress you towards the same ideal as everyone else.

In addition, you can build hero units. They're built out of standard buildings and have more unlocks than your regular army. Hero units level up until they have everything unlocked, and if you keep them alive, you can use them in the next game. From infantry with flamethrowers, a fast jeep that can call in artillery strikes, to the Sherman Ace tank (faster, stronger, better tank), hero units stand out from the crowd.

Not that your soldiers are useless idiots. They behave intelligently - as they come under fire, they dive for cover. Squads of soldiers work well together, leapfrogging to gain ground and providing covering fire.

The battlefield is also dynamic. You can destroy or hide behind anything - walls, hedges, buildings, telephone polls, trees, the works. You can even hide in craters left by artillery (which is a small commiseration for having your bunkers bashed in).

Money will make things convenient, not more powerful. You're not going to get the "I Win" tank. When it ships, you'll be able to buy upgrades with cash or just play - whether you win or lose, you'll level up and you'll get in-game cash (or "supply") to spend on items. Some items are drop only - they can't be bought. Your premium money will get you more character slots and upgrades that you'd get by grinding anyway.

Best Of GamerBytes: From Shank To Waldo

Gamescom 2011: Sony slashes price of PS3, announces budget model PSP

Gamescom 2011: Sony slashes price of PS3, announces budget model PSP Though nothing wildly surprising came out of Sony’s presentation at Gamescom in Cologne last night, it was a sensible set of announcements that quietly fuelled a clear build-up to the company’s future plans. As reported on NowGamer , the prices of both the PS3 and a newer, even more streamlined PSP model have tumbled, with an expansive

Star Wars 1313 preview - Descending into a new wretched hive

If nothing else, the technology driving Star Wars 1313 is exceptionally impressive. LucasArts’ upcoming mature-themed Star Wars game displayed some genuinely awe-inspiring glimpses into the look of the game. We only saw a brief two-minute tech demo of how it could look, but we’re hoping that it’ll have more impact than The Force Unleashed. Level 1313 is one of the worst areas in the sublevels of Coruscant

Company of Heroes Online: maps revealed

There are 17 maps available in the current build of Company of Heroes Online, the free-to-play version of one of our favourite strategy games.

There are 17 maps available in the current build of Company of Heroes Online, the free-to-play version of one of our favourite strategy games. They range from brisk 2 player skirmishes to brain melting 8 player battles. These maps are mostly taken from the original game, and have played host to many memorable war stories. I've taken an in depth look at a few of my favourites, so you'll know what to expect when you boot up Company of Heroes Online for the first time.

Angoville, 1v1

The tranquil farmlands of Angoville are a good place for a short brutal fight. This map forces you to wage two different types of warfare in a fairly small space.

To the east a cluster of buildings surround two nearby victory points that play host to some close, bloody scraps. This is a style of warfare modern British armed forces call FISH and CHIPS. Fighting In Someone's House and Causing Havoc In People's Streets. It's tight, fast and, if you're not in a building holding a heavy machine gun, very bad for your health. The lack of dominant structures means that expensive snipers probably aren't worth the cost on Angoville, it's much more effective to get a heavy machine gunner squad into an advanced building early on to suppress enemy infantry as the try to get into position.

Then there's the western half of the map. Here lie the open rolling green fields of death, featureless but for a solitary victory point surrounded by nothing but bushes. In Company of Heroes, as indeed in real war, bushes don't stop bullets, so building cover is essential if you want your infantry to survive long enough to get run over by a tank. The Americans have the advantage in the wide open areas, their greater numbers in the early game allow them to flank encroaching Axis forces. Once the victory point is secured, sandbag walls can be set up in the surrounding area to create devastating crossfires across the fields.

There's one more thing to consider: fuel. It's the most rare and most essential resource in Company of Heroes Online, and it's worth dying for. Small amounts of Fuel will be provided by low yield points close to your base on most maps, the important points are the high yield ones, often located in very dangerous positions. On Angoville the player holding the wide open western side has an easier time defending the point itself, but the territory linking the point to base is more exposed. Cutting off the enemy's supply of fuel can be the key to victory, because without fuel you can't build tanks. If you have tanks and your opponent doesn't, you're at a huge advantage.

Achelous River, 2v2

This is one of my favourite maps, it's just so brilliantly contrived. Axis and Allies take up positions opposite each other on the wide northern and southern sections. Between them there lie three square islands connected by bridges, and all the bridges are broken. The question is, which bridge should be repaired first?

There are three victory points on this map, but there might as well only be one. The northern and southern points will likely stay capped for the duration of the fight, the real battle is for the control point that stands in the middle of the central island.

The temptation is to go straight for the central point, but this can backfire, as it opens up a corridor straight into your base. The eastern and western islands are key, because they present excellent flanking opportunities once the linking bridges are repaired. They also have gallons of sweet, tank sustaining fuel. The low yield fuel points on the central islands will change hands too often to make them reliable, but the flanking islands are easier to hold. Converting a building on one of these islands into a forward base will let you get troops into the central melee much faster.

The large buildings that dominate the central island mean it's FISH and CHIPS again in the middle. A couple of Engineer or Pioneer squads with flame-throwers can get into the central buildings and ruin everyone's day. There's also a large church nearby that's just begging to play home to a sniper. It's also worth noting that mortars can easily fire across the gaps between islands. If you don't hold the an area it's possible to sneak a spotter in and devastate infantry build-ups with a well placed barrage.

Guide a Rag-Tag Group of Nobodies to Victory in Disposable Heroes

Once upon a time, in a peaceful land, a queen birthed the future prince of the kingdom.

Once upon a time, in a peaceful land, a queen birthed the future prince of the kingdom. The happiness turned quickly into horror when the child saw the sun for the first time; due to some inexplicable magic, he made the sun disappear. The child decides to make a run for it before the king has to make the tough decision to sacrifice his own son.

That’s the intro to Disposable Heroes, an action-variety title that just hit Steam. Players take on the role of hapless villagers tasked with disposing of the supposedly-evil son, now lurking deep in an evil forest. The winding path of over 60 game levels carries increasingly wild challenges. From witches and warlocks to zombies and orcs, Disposable Heroes presents a variety of monsters ready to tear the heroes to pieces. The action is primarily top-down hack n’ slash, but there are also cart-riding and catapult battles. As for the characters, one or two people can team up and fight by controlling the Wizard, Princess, Gladiator, or Orc.

The Dutch studio Evilized Productions has been developing Disposable Heroes for about seven months, steadily evolving the concept from a wandering villager on a horse to more and more absurd four-character adventures. There is a lot of work left, and the team continuously comes up with new secrets, levels, and ideas. Evilized decided to go with Early Access for about six or seven more months to polish the game.

Disposable Heroes just launched on Steamfor Windows machines. For more information on the game, check out its websiteand stay updated via Twitterand Facebook.

Genius or trash? Silver Dollar Games speaks

Genius or trash? Silver Dollar Games speaks To start out, could you give us a brief outline of how you see Silver Dollar – your history, overarching goals, long-term ambitions, mission statement, and so on. Silver Dollar Games was incorporated in September 2009, but the beginnings go back to 2006 when my brother David first discovered XNA, the programming language behind all Xbox Live Indie Games.

Two Bioshock vets go indie to build a darkly comic game about development

Game industry veteran Jordan Thomas seems to be a big fan of the 1976 film Network, citing it as a major source of inspiration for his first indie game no less than three times during our recent interview.

Game industry veteran Jordan Thomas seems to be a big fan of the 1976 film Network, citing it as a major source of inspiration for his first indie game no less than three times during our recent interview. Trouble is, I've never seen it.

If you haven't either, know that it's a satire of what goes on behind the scenes of network television, where the budgets are big and the audience is fickle.

Thomas has some experience working on big-budget productions. He was the lead designer of Thief: Deadly Shadows (where he helped design the notoriously terrifying "Into the Cradle" level) who went on to work on the various Bioshock games before bailing on the AAA game businessin 2013 to pursue new projects.

Now he's ready to talk about what he's been working on:, a first-person Unity game designed to playfully lampoon the art of game development.

“You don’t have to be a developer to enjoy this game,” says Thomas. “A bit of knowledge helps you appreciate the humor, but our goal is to be more like 30 Rock, or that '70s movie Network."

Well, shucks.
The well-worn path from AAA to indie The Magic Circle marks the debut of Question, the indie studio co-founded by Thomas and his fellow Irrational Games expat Stephen Alexander after Thomas’ departure from 2K Marin last year.

Thomas and Alexander both have extensive experience designing first-person ‘immersive sim’ games -- Alexander worked on both Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite alongside Thomas at 2K Games.

They also share an affinity for talking about games as conversations between designers and players. The pair describe The Magic Circle as an attempt to explore that concept: it's a puzzle game with open-ended challenges meant to afford players some choice in how they go about using non-violent abilities to subvert the development of a (fictional) vaporware game from the inside.

The conceit is that players guide an avatar of mysterious origins through the virtual landscapes of a long-delayed game as it’s still being developed, sucking up life-sustaining memory that leaks from objects in the world and expending it to make changes to the code -- rebuilding deleted structures, for example, or editing the form and functions of creatures by swapping simplistic behavioral descriptors like "my enemies are THE HERO" to "my enemies are NOTHING" or sliding meters like "Health" up and down.


It's an ambitious initial offering from a two-man self-funded studio. Thomas affirms that he and Alexander "were probably screwed" by the scope of their game, at least at the outset. They've since brought on Kain Shin -- an experienced gameplay programmer who

"We intend for people to break this game, to a certain extent." previously worked on first-person immersive sims like Dishonored and Thief: Deadly Shadows -- to help out as a contractor, fortifying their code so that it bends to accommodate a player's tweaks without breaking too badly.

"We intend for people to break this game, to a certain extent," says Alexander. "Your solution to a puzzle might not seem pretty, it might not be perfect, but...fuck that, as long as it works."

The project bears more than a passing resemblance to Double Fine's Early Access game, which challenges players to solve puzzles using cheats, exploits and reverse-engineering tools to edit the game as it's running. Alexander and Thomas say they haven't played it, but are eager to do so now after hearing the comparison from multiple sources.

The Magic Circle seems a bit more narrow in scope than what Double Fine is building, and a bit more cathartic for its creators. The pair are trying to build a puzzle game that directly communicates some of their feelings about AAA game development, yet affords players more freedom in how they go about solving problems than a more traditional narrative-driven game like Kentucky Route Zero .

They also seem unwilling or unable to build a game that's as broad in scope as the big-budget immersive sim games they've spent years of their lives making -- the fact that the hero of The Magic Circle seems incapable of wielding a weapon precludes you from taking a "guns blazing" approach, for example, though you could theoretically convince a gun-toting enemy to blaze away on your behalf.
Building a game around the bankshot“We found while working on immersive sims that there was this really interesting indirect playstyle that was all about 'the bankshot' -- it was all about working through proxies,” says Thomas, referencing the way Bioshock players could overcome tough enemies like the series' iconic Big Daddies by using non-violent abilities to charm them or turn a level’s defenses against them. “We had to focus our efforts, so The Magic Circle is kind of all about that playstyle -- you’re always working through something you’ve pulled from the world.”

Alexander demonstrated by using the eponymous " magic circle" mechanic -- whereby players expend energy to edit game objects within a specific area of effect -- to do things like restore deleted level geometry and edit an enemy hound's behavior to make it serve the player. Question hopes players will use these tools to create their own unique "bankshot" strategies in order to circumvent seemingly insurmountable challenges and opponents, including what in-game characters call "The Sky Bastard," a free-floating blob that represents the editing cursor of the developers who are trying to finish the metafictional game within a game.

The Magic Circle seems to be rife with that kind of humor, but what if those jokes fall flat? Making a genuinely funny gameis a nigh-legendary challenge; many have tried, and very few have succeeded.


Games that lampoon game design cliches tend to be especially unfunny -- jokes about mandatory tutorials or “fetch quests” ring hollow when you hear them during an unskippable tutorial or fetch quest. When I mention this to Thomas, he agrees and evinces some trepidation about whether or not The Magic Circle practices what it pokes fun at.

“We have to make damn sure that the elements that are being parodied, those crutches

"I’ve been forced to reconfront all my own biases; there’s not a single development sin that’s being lampooned here that I’m not guilty of." of game development, are not in our game either,” says Thomas. “I’ve been forced to reconfront all my own biases; there’s not a single development sin that’s being lampooned here that I’m not guilty of.”

Thomas and Alexander both talk about The Magic Circle as a project that lets them work through some of their feelings about game development. When I suggest that they're mythologizing their work by making a game that portrays developers as gods, Thomas agrees -- up to a point.

“There’s this other side of me that has lived through development hell, and that’s more reflected [by a character] for whom none of this has any appeal,” says Thomas. “He kind of sees this all as hokum.”

Hokum or not, it's a hell of a unique perspective on the nature of game development, one that I think could only come from developers who have spent the lion's share of their professional lives making the same kind of game over and over.

Alexander suggests that he and Thomas are bound by their fascination with first-person immersive sims to continue making them, testing the bounds of what experiences and conversations these games can support.

"It’s kind of an ouroboros," says Alexander. "This is the toolset we’ve most often worked with, but at the same time it’s the type of games that have drawn us. It’s both the experiences that we desire, and the experiences that we keep making."

Space Marine is out in the UK, but not on Steam

UK fans of everlasting war in the 41st millennium will have been looking forward to the release of Space Marine today, but if you're looking to pick it up on Steam, then there's bad news.

UK fans of everlasting war in the 41st millennium will have been looking forward to the release of Space Marine today, but if you're looking to pick it up on Steam, then there's bad news. Space Marine isn't available on Steam. The old Space Marine Steam page has been replaced by a message saying "this item is currently unavailable in your region."

It seemed likely that this would happen when the Space Marine demopulled the same vanishing act a couple of weeks ago. Previously, Dragon Age 2and Brinkhave vanished from Steam in the UK with no explanation. Brink eventually reappeared several weeks after launch. Hopefully Space Marine will return in good time. Until then, this means yet more frustration for UK customers.

Guide a Rag-Tag Group of Nobodies to Victory in Disposable Heroes

Once upon a time, in a peaceful land, a queen birthed the future prince of the kingdom.

Once upon a time, in a peaceful land, a queen birthed the future prince of the kingdom. The happiness turned quickly into horror when the child saw the sun for the first time; due to some inexplicable magic, he made the sun disappear. The child decides to make a run for it before the king has to make the tough decision to sacrifice his own son.

That’s the intro to Disposable Heroes, an action-variety title that just hit Steam. Players take on the role of hapless villagers tasked with disposing of the supposedly-evil son, now lurking deep in an evil forest. The winding path of over 60 game levels carries increasingly wild challenges. From witches and warlocks to zombies and orcs, Disposable Heroes presents a variety of monsters ready to tear the heroes to pieces. The action is primarily top-down hack n’ slash, but there are also cart-riding and catapult battles. As for the characters, one or two people can team up and fight by controlling the Wizard, Princess, Gladiator, or Orc.

The Dutch studio Evilized Productions has been developing Disposable Heroes for about seven months, steadily evolving the concept from a wandering villager on a horse to more and more absurd four-character adventures. There is a lot of work left, and the team continuously comes up with new secrets, levels, and ideas. Evilized decided to go with Early Access for about six or seven more months to polish the game.

Disposable Heroes just launched on Steamfor Windows machines. For more information on the game, check out its websiteand stay updated via Twitterand Facebook.

King's fortunes falter as Candy Crush Saga grows older

The sun rises, tides fall, babies cry, another Call of Duty game confirmed

Activision's efforts to forcibly insert Call of Duty releases into the yearly rhythm planet Earth continue today.

Activision's efforts to forcibly insert Call of Duty releases into the yearly rhythm planet Earth continue today. There's some pretty dry biz news floating around this morning so let's enshrine key details in haiku form to keep things lively.

More CoD is mentioned,

In ActiBlizz earnings call,

Bear shits in the woods.

Shocking, I know. Gamespotreport that Activision CFO Dennis Durkin's future-sense has become clouded by the onrushing next-gen apocalypse. "There is increased volatility this year due to the ongoing console transition, which makes predicting the future more challenging than during normal years in the cycle," he opined, clawed hand hovering over a glowing ball of demonic energy.

"For Call of Duty, consistent with our past practices," he managed, gasping, "we are planning for the mainline release in Q4 to be down versus 2012." And with that he tore his hand away, and was spared the wrath of the artifact.

It's Modern Warfare's turn this year, according to the bi-annual Modern Warfare/Black Ops one-two punch that Activision has favoured in recent times. I'm sure it will be a perfectly adequate arcade manshooter. What would you like to see them change about the series?

Space Marine co-op mode coming early October, new trailer shows Thunder Hammer

A few weeks ago a hastily withdrawn official post on the Space Marine forums confirmed that Space Marine will have co-op , but suggested that it could arrive a month after release.

Kotakunow report that the forum post was entirely accurate. The co-op option will be a four player survival mode called Exterminatus, and will arenas will throw increasingly tough waves of enemies at players. It will be free, and out in early October.

Hopefully Exterminatus will let all four players wield Thunder Hammers at the same time. RPShave spotted a new Space Marine trailer showing off the magnificent weapon. A regular war hammer isn't dramatic enough for the armies of Warhammer 40,000, so the Imperium invented a hammer with a portable force field that explodes with every impact, creating a weapon better known colloquially as "The Swingy Boom-Splat." Check out the video above to find out why.

Space Marine is out next Tuesday in the US, and on Friday in Europe. Get an early taste with the Space Marine demo.

Skyrim receiving Kinect voice command support on Xbox 360

Foldit Players Outperform Computer Models On Viral Protein Modeling

Star Wars 1313 gameplay and trailer shown off at E3

They're calling Star Wars 1313 a "darker" and "more mature" Star Wars experience, and from the trailer thus far it's hard to disagree. Not bad, right? The climbing segments are action-packed and gorgeous, though the shooting segments do look a tad typical. That said, if we get a "typical" action game wrapped in a Star Wars aesthetic that's based miles beneath the surface of Coruscant we'll be happy as clams. Topics E3 E3 2012 Star Wars 1313 We recommend By Zergnet Load Comments

Space Marine disappears from UK Steam store, demo out now

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Space Marine has vanished from the Steam store in the UK, which is going to make it harder for Brits to get hold of the new demo that's just been released.

RPShelpfully provide a workaround linkfor UK Steam users eager to brain some Orks.

It's unclear why Space Marine has vanished, but it reminds us of Brink's recent disappearance. That game didn't turn up until weeks after launch. Hopefully Space Marine won't suffer the same fate.

If the demo isn't enough to tide you over until Space Marine's release on September 6 in the US (September 9 in Europe), then check out the video interview with Space Marine's lead voice actor above. He offers various arguments supporting his decision to voice a Space Marine, though we all know the real reason. His name is MARK STRONG.

Indie Intermission – ‘Sharks Vs Pirates’ A Very Fishy Tale

After looking over the remainder of the Gameboy jam I couldn’t turn down the chance to cover a game with both sharks and pirates in it.

I couldn’t turn down the chance to cover a game with both sharks and pirates in it. Although the pirates play a minor role in the game overall, Sharks Vs Pirates is a very interesting concept.

Created by FelipeBudinich Sharks Vs Pirates is a novel concept about a sharks journey to avoid the ever pesky pirates and swim to its freedom.

The game is very simplistic and only uses the WASD controls to move around where D will increase the speed of the shark and A slows it. It’s a nice idea although in the current form it does feel a little void and lacking of content.

Of course being a jam game this is entirely understandable as you have such a short time to get these games done, which means you will always end up leaving something out.

Although the level design does leave a lot to be desired the music is clearly a stand-out part of the game, it adds a great deal to the atmosphere of the game and helps make Sharks Vs Pirates a very interesting game.

Average play time – 5 minutes

Although Sharks Vs Pirates lacks a lot in the level design aspect overall the game has been created with a fantastic retro aesthetic with some great music that all feed into the fun that is Sharks Vs Pirates .

You can play Sharks Vs Pirates onlinefor free. If you would like to read up more on the game or others in the jam check out the official website.

If you are a developer with A fun indie game that can be played over a coffee break, we want to hear from you! Private message us on twitter @IndieGameMag or shoot us an email at editors@indiegamemag.com with the subject “Indie Intermission” and you could be our indie intermission pick of the day!

Brian Fargo: Demon's Advocate

Brian Fargo: Demon's Advocate So, you’ve just announced Hunted: The Demon’s Forge and compared it to old-school games like Wizardry and Dungeon Master even though it’s not really an RPG. Were you referring more to the genre’s atmosphere than its gameplay? Exactly. Those games were a romantic notion about going into a quiet, scary dungeon. Those were the parts that I wanted to strip out because today

Star Wars 1313 revealed, will put us in the boots of a Star Wars bounty hunter

Looks like that mysterious Star Wars 1313 trademark from a few months back was, indeed, pointing towards a game announcement, and it's similar to one of the rumors we mentioned when we speculated as to what the next Star Wars game might be . Tonight, LucasArts officially unveiled Star Wars 1313 on GameTrailers TV , lifting the curtain ever so slightly on the next big Star Wars game. Though few details

Space Marine demo incoming

A post on the Space Marine site , spotted by Evil Avatar announces that a demo for Space Marine will be arriving next Tuesday August 23.

announces that a demo for Space Marine will be arriving next Tuesday August 23. It'll let us take control of Captain Titus for two levels. The first will let us murder a horde of Orks at the gates of a munitions factory using a selection of six weapons, including a chainsword and a bolter. The second section will let us try out Space Marine's assault pack.

Assault packs are essentially jetpacks, but because this is Warhammer 40,000 they're twice the size you'd expect and can be used to kill. In Space Marine you can blast yourself over a horde of enemies and then use your jets to fire yourself at the ground. Anything you hit explodes with the impact. Whoosh-BANG. Check out the latest Space Marine trailerfor more.

Ride, Train, and Evolve Pet Dragons in Dragon Masters

I love raising and evolving my monsters in Pokemon , but there’s always this feeling of distance in its RPG action.

, but there’s always this feeling of distance in its RPG action. It feels weird to issue commands instead of riding into the fight with them, sharing in the danger and triumph. Dragon Masters from Radiate Gamestudio is looking to fix that feeling of separation by putting players right in the fray with their pet dragon, battling side by side with the pet you helped raise.

Dragon Masters promises over one hundred cute dragon styles for players to find and grow. From the looks of screenshots and the trailer, players can keep up to six dragons at any point, switching to different ones on the fly to use their varied abilities and powers in combat or exploration. With an open world style, players must also find keys and secrets using their dragons to steadily open up new areas. The game features an array of different powers and dragons to experiment with, finding different routes depending on which dragons and powers are chosen. Dragons can also grow stronger and evolve in unique ways based on how much they are used and how many fights they’ve been in.

Those looking to raise some adorable dragons will have to wait a little while, as the game is not quite ready for a Steam Greenlight campaign yet, contrary to what the trailer says. Developer Radiate Gamestudio claims that one is coming soon, but for now, players will just have to imagine the adventures and fun they’ll have raising their dragons in Dragon Masters .

For more information on Dragon Masters and Radiate Gamestudio, you can check out the game’s websiteand follow its developer on Twitterand Google +.

Next Games nets $10 million from existing investors

Newsbrief: Mobile developer Next Games has secured $10 million in funding from existing investors, meaning the studio has now raked in $18 million in external funding since it was founded in 2013.

The latest funding round was led by regulars IDG Ventures and Jari Ovaskainen, and was also backed by AMC Networks, Lionsgate, Lowercase and IDG Capital,

The cash will be used to fuel the growth of the developer's existing mobile titles, such as Compass Point: West and The Walking Dead: No Man's Land , and will also aid the development of a third unannounced project.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 patch fixes sinking horses, allows 90 degree FOV

Martin's steed got stuck in quicksand and couldn't extract itself during our review of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 .

. According to the latest patch notes posted on the CoD forums, spotted by Strategy Informer, the problem has been fixed. The update also boosts CoD's field of view allowance to 90 degrees, good news for anyone experiencing the strange tunnel vision queasiness that those tight FOV settings can cause.

Performance has also been smoothed out for those with four or more CPU cores, server matchmaking has been improved and "connection interrupted" multiplayer errors fixed. Patch notes below.

November 21, 2012 Update for Singleplayer, Multiplayer, and Zombies

Max FOV increased to 90 Fix: Horse falling through the world in Afghanistan when playing on some CPUs with 4 or more cores Fix: RC-XD and the AGR sinking into the map in MP when playing on some CPUs with 4 or more cores General performance improvements in SP, MP, and ZM for CPUs with 4 or more cores Fix: crash when a 7th player tries to join a 6 player league lobby Improved dedicated server matchmaking Fix: some cases of "Connection Interrupted" in MP while loading into a match

At the start of 2012, myself and a couple of friends finally decided to have a crack at something we

'd been talking about for many months prior -- making a mobile game. Earlier into development, one topic came up over and over again: Would we make it a paid game, free-to-play, or some sort of mish-mash of the two models?

Paid vs. free-to-play: Advice from notable mobile studios

We argued over the finer points of each model for hours at a time, and eventually I decided that there was an easier way to solve it. I emailed various mobile developers who had dipped their toes in both the free-to-play and paid market, gave them a taster of our game idea, and asked them whether they'd be willing to donate advice regarding the direction we should take.

A few notable names gladly got back to me, and along with my team, we made a decision based on these answers. Alas, we shelved the game later into the year, as we each became far busier at our respective day jobs, and simply couldn't get together as often to work on the game.

Now, 16 months later I've decided to put my original question to the same developers, to see how their advice has changed given how the mobile market has progressed over the last year.
The original emailWhat follows is my original email, proceeded by the answers I received from each developer, first from the start of 2012, and then from this week:

This is Mike Rose from IndieGames.com and other assorted places of the writing. Hope you're well! I was hoping to ask you a quick bit of advice if that's OK.

I'm currently starting up development of a smartphone game with a couple of friends, and we're putting together a puzzle game that we're hoping will prove popular. Obviously I'm very much aware of the paid vs F2P aspect of App Store pricing, and we're currently weighing up which direction we should go in. Since you've had great success with F2P, I was wondering if you'd be so kind as to give your opinion on which I would be best going for!

I'll give a little background on what the game is about - it's essentially a puzzler that throws up conundrums on the screen, ranging from maths problems to logic puzzles to real head-scratchers, with a story that links all the puzzles together. There's a little more to it than that, but that's the core idea.

Our initial idea was to make it a 99c app, but having researched F2P a bit, we're now wondering whether making it free with IAP would be a better idea. When it came to which IAP we'd implement for this idea, we were thinking that players would be able to purchase hints for the puzzles, so that if they get stuck, they can buy hints on how to solve it. We were also considering having additional puzzle packs, so the main story of puzzles would be completely F2P, but then players can buy additional blocks of puzzles that don't affect the story if they so choose.

Does any of this sound logical? I have no idea whether any of what I've just said would work commercially... we just have an inclining that if we put it out as a 99c app, it will barely sell and then be confined to the depths of the App Store. If you have any thoughts, big or small, I would really love to hear what you think.

Cheers
Mike
NimblebitNimblebit's David Marsh was kind enough to get back to me with advice. At the time, his studio had just released Pocket Frogs , and was gearing up towards the release of its hugely popular Tiny Tower -- both free-to-play titles.

Most recently, Nimblebit released Nimble Quest for iOS and Android, a sort of Snake meets RPG meets tower defence style game. Below is March's original response to me, followed by an updated response from this week.

01/24/2012

Hey Mike,

we have had such success with F2P stuff that I fear anything I have to say is going to be pretty biased. I think it is safe to say though that the main hurdle on iOS is getting people to install your game, and that becomes a lot easier to do when it is free.

How you can structure F2P with your game can vary wildly depending on what type of game it is. Some people put in IAP and still make it 99 cents or higher, and then depend on dropping it to free later as a promotion. Some make it free from the get-go with IAPs built in. Unfortunately we have never done a F2P trivia / puzzle type game, so I don't have a lot of sage advice for good ways to structure IAP in that setting.

I know of many similar types of games that do have non-consumable extra level packs as IAP like you mention, and I think that can work well and it makes sense with the structure of the game. Consumable IAP definitely can be more successful financially over the long run, but I think it is a real challenge to figure out a way that consumables make sense in a puzzle / trivia type setting. Some people sell skips or hints like you mention. I wouldn't be afraid of experimenting with both.

None of what you mention sounds crazy, and is probably the first things I would experiment with too. Good luck!

04/22/13

Hey Mike,

it's been 16 months - would my answer be the same? I think in two words my new answer would be "it depends."

Even over the last 16 months the App Store has seen pretty incredible growth, which means a couple of things. One is that the people at the top are getting massive amounts of downloads, and subsequently earning mountains of cash. The flip side is that now it's even harder to get visibility climbing the charts, since the download numbers you have to compete with are insane.

It's harder now than it's ever been to get the huge download numbers that make F2P work. In light of that, I still think it makes sense to go free if you have a game with broad appeal that you could imagine sitting on top of the charts.

When almost everyone is a potential fan of your game, your mobility on the charts is more lubricated. If you don't think you have a shot at the top of the charts, if you have a more niche game - I think you can do well by making your game paid, or paid with IAP.

I think if we could launch Nimble Quest again, we might try going that route. There is a tipping point where the power of free really takes off, but if you are not going to hit that point - it can make more sense to start paid.

Unless you think you are going to have a really crazy launch with millions of downloads, there is little risk in starting off paid, you can always experiment with going free at a later point.
KilooJeppe Bisbjerg from Subways Surfers dev Kiloo also fired advice off in my direction. Here were his responses, both 16 months ago, and now.

01/25/12

There really isn't any magic formula as to what you need to do. Some games flourish by being freemium, others by being $0.99.

If you're afraid your game will get overshadowed by the hundreds of titles that launch every week, then perhaps free is the best way to go to make sure that people at least notice your game.

I get the feeling that you're a smaller, new company so my guess is that you don't have the funds to create large marketing campaigns. In this regard, remember that the iOS market is extremely crowded and competitive.

Generally, we always try to create the best possible game, no matter the price, I encourage you to do the same thing. If your product is polished and fun enough, people will notice it. Word of mouth can be a very powerful thing, especially in this day and age.

04/23/13

Everything depends on the game in question. Not all premium games make good free-to-play games, not all free-2-play games make good premium games.

One thing you can never discard is quality, execution of style and player experience. Discovery and market position will flourish from a polished product.

Business models can help you in a crowded market, but basically it all boils down to direction, vision and attention to detail.
Godzi Lab GamesThese third and final pairings of advice were sent to me by Jerome Lanquetot, co-founder of Godzi Lab Games -- best known for mobile titles like iBlast Moki and Happy Street .

01/24/12

Hi Mike,

I'd be happy to help you with what we have seen on our side.

Unfortunately F2P puzzle is not the best match for F2P games. We have been thinking about it for quite a while with iBlast Moki 2 , and we decided to release it as a paid game. The best for F2P is when you have a currency which unlock new content, and best is if the content is unlimited such as time. In a puzzle game, apart from unlocking new levels or hints, it's limited.

We actually submitted a F2P version of iBlast Moki including those 2 unlockables (hints and levels) which was rejected due to the usage of virtual currency - they didn't want us to use virtual currency. We might fall back to a simpler version with IAP.

It's not a trivial answer for your type of game. If you can find more than those 2 IAPs, it might worth it (such as bonuses or powerups) - otherwise, I'd release a paid version first, and an F2P version later.

04/24/13

Hi Mike,

today I still think a F2P puzzle is a lot harder to monetize than other F2P genres, mostly because the content is limited and requires a lot of level design.

Candy Crush is the best example of highly successful F2P puzzle. They have more than 250 levels and are still producing a lot of content and find new gameplay mechanics with every update to keep their current userbase. That's a lot of content, 2x more than what Angry Birds has.

The other thing that's hard in general with an F2P game is balance - to monetize you have to create gameplay mechanics which involve timers, and some developers will also play with frustration to push the player to buy bonuses or boosts.

In Candy Crush they chose to monetize both time and frustration: you can fail a maximum of 6 times before waiting for an hour for your lives to regenerate or buy a pack of lives. And frustration is solved with the bonuses you can buy. Some high levels are purely based on luck, and if you don't get the right combination at the right time there's no way you can make it.

They push the difficulty quite high once you are already addicted to the game, and when you start failing more than 20x at the same level over and over, either you quit the game or you buy the special bonuses. Especially when you see you only had one jelly left to clear and you saw the exact move to get it. Candy Crush leaves you the option to buy those 5 extra moves for one dollar and your frustration will be relieved. That happened to me more than once.

As a developer, your role is to create a product that entertains the player. With those monetization techniques you are balanced between entertaining the player, or seeing how far you can push the player's patience and frustration. Candy Crush manages to play with the pacing quite well - they have created a few of those extra hard levels that monetize a lot than the rest of the levels. And in between, they have some much easier levels which increase the player's satisfaction until he reaches the next hard level.

Regarding the F2P model in general, some genres are definitely more adaptable than others. We integrated some F2P mechanics into iBlast Moki 2 , but we decided not to release it as it was not designed for it even if it was done from the ground up.

In term of monetization, I definitely think F2P games are the future. You can look at the charts, and a game like Cut The Rope: Time Travel which is #1 in paid games is only #37 in top grossing games. All the titles above are free games.

Our last title Happy Street is an F2P game designed from the ground up with F2P game mechanics. Developing an F2P game is not easy, as it's not easy to fall into the trap of monetization and forget about the player enjoyment. For us we are avoiding gameplay aimed at monetizing frustration - we mostly use timers and we are quite generous with the hard currency.

In the simulation/building genre, you can also sell premium content, but we have to be careful not to create supremacy goods. The key is to find the right balance between all those gameplay mechanics, and don't forget that we are making games for players to enjoy first.

Designer Merritt Kopas has a problem with violent games, but not in the way you expect. It's not as if

they're too violent or "too edgy," she says, but rather the opposite: weightless and gimmicky, most of these portrayals exclude the player. The purpose and impact of the violence on its perpetrator is never addressed. Since the release of Lim , her visually-abstract game about negotiating the consequences of nonconformity, Kopas has created an innovative series of games about bodies, boundaries and feelings.

Consensual Torture Simulator : Is game violence meaningful enough?

, her visually-abstract game about negotiating the consequences of nonconformity, Kopas has created an innovative series of games about bodies, boundaries and feelings. Her work has a gentleness and candor that makes complicated things -- like how to talk to your mother about your identity, or non-heteronormative ways to have sex-- feel accessible.

Her work is personal, but to call them "personal games" is slightly misleading: Kopas, who has a sociology background, is on the forefront of a community of independent creators using games not only to express themselves, but to use their personal experiences to ask bigger questions about how we experience the world -- and, crucially, the role game design can play in that goal.

One of her most recent games, Consensual Torture Simulator , has proved an interesting challenge for the game community, and for commentators outside of it. "It was deliberately made as a comment on violence in games, and a comment on the ways that violence is portrayed as 'edgy,'" she says.

In Consensual Torture Simulator , a text-only game, the player takes the role of a person physically "topping" her romantic partner in a kink relationship scene. Both partners have decided the goal of the interaction is to make the submissive partner -- the recipient of the violence -- cry. There's scratching, flogging and caning; periodically the player needs to rest, as much to comfort her partner as to recover herself.

The essential element of this game is that it's clearly established both partners have wholly consented to the interaction; these are characters who express affection and provide release for one another through physical violence, within previously-discussed limits and with a "safe word" the recipient can use to end the scene at any time.

For Kopas, there are several things that make Consensual Torture Simulator 's violence unique: Of primary importance among these is the element of consent.
"It's kind of hard to be 'edgy' when you've been doing it for so long."Dozens of video games have attempted to mature or redress their traditionally-violent themes by setting themselves up to "force" players to analyze the import of their actions: The now almost-universal scene where the game gives you a gun, a morally-ambiguous target, and a "choice" that is rarely much of a choice. Commit this "terrible" act in order to continue with this game! Or don't, bypassing it entirely and making it even more irrelevant.

"These games are making you do things to progress, by definition -- you haven't 'agreed' to do them," Kopas points out. "This is something a lot of people were talking about when Spec Ops: The Line came out, or similar games where you have to shoot someone, you have to do this thing, and you haven't made a meaningful choice."

Grand Theft Auto V 's torture scene requires the player -- at the behest of the "FIB" -- to apply pliers, hammers, waterboarding and other gruesome instruments against a person allegedly keeping information about insurgents. The purpose of demanding the player complete the upsetting scene seems intended to comprise a meaningful critique about torture, and more widely, about American tactics at war.

But can one intentionally "edgy" scene in a game that trades in decades-old physical cynicism really do that, anyway? The character of Trevor, who performs the torture, is defined throughout the game as a moral black hole that lets the player do anything they want in the game world without consequences, so does his willingness to perform torture have any real emotional weight?

"Games like GTA are really, still in 2013, selling themselves on the basis of their appeal to a certain kind of person," Kopas suggets. "It's kind of hard to be 'edgy' when you've been doing it for so long."

Upon hearing of the scene, she had an idea: "I was thinking, well, something really edgy would be hitting someone who wants you to hit them, in a context where you want to do that."

Kopas also wanted to challenge a narrative she's sometimes seen in portrayals of kink in culture: One where the person who's topping is "there as a dispenser of something, or is a machine," just the catalyst for the submissive partner's great revelation at their hands.

It was important to her, with the game, to challenge players to manage their own stamina, physical and emotional response as they interact with their partner. Both characters need breaks from what is often an intense, complicated, adrenaline-fueled experience that requires a great deal of trust, communication and patience.
"Violence in games is weightless,"This feels revelatory as a concept, alongside other violent power fantasies, where players rarely needs to manage the personal consequences, physically or emotionally, of their choices. "Violence in games is weightless," says Kopas. "It's described as 'hyper-realistic,' but it's really very light -- bodies are puppets that jerk around on ragdoll strings, and the weight of actually inflicting harm on someone isn't realized."

"Some people might say that's a good thing," she continues, "but I'm not totally sure that it is. I think the false realism [creates] an aesthetic of violence that doesn't really deal with the intensity of committing or experiencing it. You could argue that people don't want to experience trauma, or don't want to experience bodies as having needs or demands in games because they're playing for escape."

But not all games are about escape: "I think there's a lot we can explore in terms of that," she says, "things most games, even the ones that would describe themselves as hyper-realistic, aren't doing."

A surprising thing about the game's reception, for Kopas, has been that video game websites have been more willing to understand and be open to both the rhetoric and the reality of what she's wanted to express with the intimate game. Consensual Torture Simulator also received prominent coverage on feminist-identified news site Jezebel, where commenters were horrified at the idea of a game based on "beating up a woman" -- despite the fact one would generally expect a deeper understanding and higher sense of value placed on kink and consent in feminist spaces.

One useful way Kopas has heard consent described is that one can inflict pain on their partner in a consensual setting, and with communication and care, the recipient will be fine the next day; that's not the case with abuse. "The context in which actions are taken is really important to me," she says.

After releasing most of her work for free, Kopas decided to place Consensual Torture Simulator for sale on Gumroad for $2, just as her colleague (and partner) Anna Anthropy recently did with a choose-your-own adventure story. Kopas says she was inspired to make games upon discovering Anthropy's manifesto-of-sorts, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, which calls for people from all walks of life to take advantage of free or low-cost, simple tools to start expressing themselves through games.

Kopas, Anthropy and other individual game makers have widely begun experimenting with monetizing their creations; their work is often cited as necessary or influential, but free games haven't earned them a living. Consensual Torture Simulator "did pretty well" on sale, leading Kopas to think about continuing to work sustainably in games.

She aims to continue trying to sell small projects. She has little in common with the "Indie Game: The Movie" vision of the independent scene, and is excluded from many conversations by the fact she doesn't have a programming background. And her work generally eschews notions of skill and mastery, which to her seem important to most game makers, even other indies.

I ask Kopas whether maybe people who are deeply interested in games may be more able to relate to kink relationships, which are about scene-setting, communication, mutual negotiations, and rules, often in ways that seem similar to video games.

"I'm not someone who in personal relationships is approaching things in that way, but I think for me, the broader parallels between games and kink is that both of them, at their best, can allow for exploration and re-definition of symbols and meanings; they can be useful and transformative," she says.

"So when I am making a game, I guess I'm trying to allow for some of that -- to allow for exploration of something the player hasn't thought about before, and some kind of subsequent perspective."

28 million DreamHack eSports deal finalizes

$28 million DreamHack eSports deal finalizes
DreamHack is one of the region's biggest players when it comes to eSports, with the company producing and hosting a huge array of events across Europe, including the DreamHack Open European eSports championship; the DreamLeague international eSports league for Dota 2 players; and the Esport SM Swedish national eSports championship.

Swedish entertainment outfit MTG has completed the acquisitionof eSports organizer DreamHack for 244 million SEK ($28 million).

DreamHack, which will host events in the U.S. and Germany for the first time next year, generated 69 million SEK ($7.9 million) in sales across 2014, and now expects to see double digit sales growth in 2015.

MTG is no stranger to the world of competitive gaming, with the company having previously purchased a 74 percent stakein ESL - one of the biggest eSports companies in the world - for $83.7 million back in July.

"[The DreamHack deal] complements our recent investment in ESL, and reinforces our commitment to video gaming as one of the most watched and fastest growing online video categories," said Jørgen Madsen Lindemann, MTG president and CEO.

"Our strategy is to invest in relevant, complementary and scalable digital brands, content and communities. We are creating a digital video entertainment ecosystem and eSports is at the very center of this given its global appeal and huge following."

Black Ops 2 grosses $1 billion in just 15 days

As is now the tradition, Activision announced today that the latest game in the Call of Duty franchise made... kind of a lot of money.

As is now the tradition, Activision announced today that the latest game in the Call of Duty franchise made... kind of a lot of money. Black Ops 2 grossed (places pinky at corner of mouth) one billion dollars in 15 days, hitting the mark a day faster than its predecessor, Modern Warfare 3.

While regional prices vary, dividing that by the U.S. sticker price of $59.99 gives us about 16.7 million units sold, which is roughly equal to the population of the Netherlands. You can read Activision's full press release here, and check out our video critique of Black Ops 2and the official reviewto help you decide whether you want to be #16,700,001.

Space Marine will have co-op, may be added after launch

A post on the Space Marine forums, spotted by Shacknews , briefly appeared to confirm that Space Marine will have co-op.The same post also suggested that it will be arriving some time after launch, "thirty days "give or take" after launch," in fact.

, briefly appeared to confirm that Space Marine will have co-op.The same post also suggested that it will be arriving some time after launch, "thirty days "give or take" after launch," in fact. You can read a cached version of the post here.

THQ have since contacted Shacknews to officially confirm that "Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine will have co-op," adding "we look forward to announcing more details later this month." Read our hands on Space Marine previewfor an idea of how Relic's Ork-mangling sim is shaping up. It's out on September 6 in the US, and September 9 in Europe.

Attend GDC to hear how Everybody's Gone To The Rapture was scored

Konami profits on the up as Metal Gear Solid V ships 6 million

Call of Duty "stamped out memories" of what made FPS games great, says THQ

THQ's global communications boss Huw Beynon recently spoke to OXM about Metro: Last Light's and handsome Russian mutants.

and handsome Russian mutants. Benyon's thoughts eventually expanded to a criticism of the rut he believes the FPS genre has wallowed in for years. Specifically, he calls out Call of Duty's rinse-repeat military formula for "stamping out" other creative shooter ideas.

"I think it's probably very true to say that there's reaction to what used to be a small subset of the genre of a military shooter," he said. "It's ballooned and mushroom-clouded to almost define the genre and kind of stamp out memories of what I remember being great about first person shooters, whether that was Half-Life, System Shock, or GoldenEye—where a FPS didn't necessarily have to involve military material, it just meant an invitation to a fantastic other world, which to me was always the point of video games in the first place."

Beynon also suggested gamers are slowly detaching themselves from the idea of always playing as a military superman, and that gamers are hungry for different experiences—like Metro. He also points to Dishonored as a successful experiment. "I've hugely enjoyed [Dishonored] and I'm thrilled that they've had success with that—it's probably the game that's interested me most this year and am glad to see it get the critical and hopefully commercial success that it deserves."

THQ filed for bankruptcyearlier this week but continues to keep its publishing duties and upcoming releases active. Elsewhere and earlier on, Black Ops 2 raked in gobs of profit, but not quite as manyas its big brother, Modern Warfare.

Space Marine trailer and screenshots have so much blood, Squigs confirmed

Destructoid have raided the Eye of Terror and brought back a new Space Marine dev diary showcasing some spectacular combat footage.

have raided the Eye of Terror and brought back a new Space Marine dev diary showcasing some spectacular combat footage. If you thought Orks bled green, be prepared to be proved wrong in the most splattery manner possible. Relic have released another five screenshots from the game. You'll find them embedded below. Space Marine is shaping up very nicely, don't you think? We look forward to seeing more of it soon at E3.

How a simple Madden-like name change overcame Marvel Heroes ' Metacritic woes

Free-to-play online games are perpetually reinventing themselves with patches and new content, but they don’t often get a second chance to make a first impression.

Free-to-play online games are perpetually reinventing themselves with patches and new content, but they don’t often get a second chance to make a first impression. But Gazillion Entertainment managed to pull that off with the relaunch of their free-to-play MMORPG last year. The secret: a very slight tweak to the name.

When Marvel Heroes launched in the summer of 2013, it was generally considered to be...well, a mess . Critics grumbled about a lack of content, originality and difficulty. Gazillion CEO David Brevik freely concedes that the game was put out before it was ready, and that it was frankly not very good.

In the crowded free-to-play space, a lukewarm launch can be a death knell. (Even when there's a high profile comic book license attached.) “Here we were stuck with this Metacritic 58 score,” Brevik tells me, "So our marketing dollars were going to waste. We would try to bring attention to the game, and they’d all just say, ‘Well it’s a 58, why bother?’

A year after its inauspicious debut, Gazillion relaunched Marvel Heroes . " We wanted to get a message out there we’re completely different from what we were," says Brevik. "That's incredibly important, so how do we do that?"

They trumpeted the messagethat this was literally a different game than it had been a year ago. Like Jean Grey becoming Phoenix, it was returning in a more powerful form with a new name. "We wanted to avoid a label that was tied to any particular piece content," says Brevik. "Since we add all this new content all the time, it felt weird to name it something like, say, 'Secret Wars,' and then content for the next six months has nothing to do with Secret Wars."

The game was ultimately reborn as... Marvel Heroes 2015 .

Marvel Heroes 2015 amalgamated a year’s worth of yeomans work on patching, rebalancing, and added content. “I think that a lot of people who had tried the game at launch and been disappointed came back when we relaunched as 2015 and were pleased,” says Brevik. Just as importantly, it also garnered its own new page on Metacritic, and it got onto the green this time. (Granted, the reviews that were now almost uniformly positive were from a somewhat smaller and more MMO-focused set of outlets.)

" Rebranding has been very effective for us," says Brevik. "Our audience is now bigger than it was a year and a half ago, and there are still people who only recently heard about it, so I think it's going to continue to help with retention .”

Now that Gazillion has avoided the fate of the Infinite Crisis MOBA, whose popular license couldn't save it from bad buzz , they have been able to fully capitalize on cross-promotional synergy with other Marvel properties. “For the last Avenger’s movie in May, we had more new players than we’ve ever had.” Brevik tells me. “We have tons and tons of metrics, and our retention coming out of the Avenger’s movie was higher than at any other time. ”

But over a year after the successful relaunch, Marvel Heroes 2015 is faced with a new problem: it's not going to be 2015 for much longer. The development team at Gazillion is preparing for another name change.

They will be ticking that number up a year.

“We’re kind of stuck with it,” Brevik says. “But it’s not a bad thing, because now we can plan for it. The naming convention is something we thought about long and hard, and came up with a long list of possibilities. There are a lot of products that do annualiz ed releases, from Windows products to sports games, all sorts of things. It communicates that  it’s the same game, but it has all these new features.”

Marvel Heroes 2016 will provide a fresh focal point for all of Gazillion's marketing dollars. “We’ll run promotions that tempt people in, and we’ll get a lot of attention not only from press but also some slotting on Steam, and other things that give a big marketing push around the event," says Brevik. "It’s our big launch for the year, basically. And I think as we get better with improving the game as well as watching our metrics and measuring things, our retention will improve as well."

There might be a lesson there for other free-to-play online publishers: a new name is a great way for the public and the media to get a handle on your latest batch of content and fixes. And if Madden NFL already came up with the perfect naming convention for an annualized franchise, don't reinvent the wheel.

Independent VR platform Transport nets $25 million

Transport is being billed as a device agnostic "curated content network" that gives creators the ability to target multiple VR platforms at once.

California-based virtual reality startup, Wevr, has received $25 millionfrom investors including HTC and Samsung to further develop its independent VR distribution platform, Transport.

According to Wevr, the service will be made available on both mobile and living room headsets such as the Samsung Gear VR and Oculus Rift, allowing devs who publish through Transport to tap into a variety of markets.

It's not clear yet what monetization options it will offer, although Wevr has explained that Transport "will allow creators to build an audience, and, as their popularity increases, monetize their content."

Those of you interested in Transport can add your name to the beta list right here.

"Star Wars 1313" patent filed by LucasFilm

Though we're not yet sure what this thing is, we're very curious about it. A website called Fusible first spotted the patent earlier today, and noted that it includes the use of video games as well as dozens of other categories. Including, but not limited to: sticker books, toy banks, and scooters (among dozens of others.) The filing fits with a recent sightings of dozens of domain names being registered

Space Marine system requirements are out, Steam required

Relic's 40K mash-'em-up, Space Marine will give us the chance to meet new and interesting aliens, and purge them of all of their blood.

Relic's 40K mash-'em-up, Space Marine will give us the chance to meet new and interesting aliens, and purge them of all of their blood. It's out in September, but will all that gore require an ox of a machine to run? Find out in the minimum and maximum system requirements, spotted by NewGameNetworkon the Space Marine forums.

Hopefully, the fact that the game requires Steam means it won't use Games for Windows Live, as was the case with Dawn of War 2. Relic and THQ then moved away from GfWL with this year's Dawn of War 2: Retribution, which required only Steam. Otherwise, the system specs seem quite reasonable.

Minimum specs:

OS - Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista SP1, Windows 7 Processor - 2.0Ghz Dual core CPU (any Core 2 Duo or AMD X2 or better) RAM - 1GB (XP), 2GB (Vista), 2GB (Windows 7) Hard Drive - 20 GB space free (10 GB free after install) Video Card - 256MB Video Card using Shader Model 3 (Performance equivalent to an AMD Radeon 3850 or NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT) Online Steam account

Recommended specs:

OS - Windows 7 Processor - Any Quad-core AMD or Intel Processor RAM - 1GB (XP), 2GB (Vista), 2GB (Windows 7) Hard Drive - 20 GB space free (10 GB free after install) Video Card - 512MB Video Card using Shader Model 3 (Performance equivalent to an AMD Radeon 5750 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260) Online Steam account

League of Legends ' new loot system isn't open to 'toxic' players

GDC 2016: See how the striking look of Mirror's Edge: Catalyst was achieved

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 makes bajillions

It's inevitable, I know.

It's inevitable, I know. Do bears tango in the woods? Is there a party like an S-Club party? Will Call of Duty make money this year? Yes, to all these things. A thousand times YES. $500 million is the day one worldwide sales figure Activision are bandying around today for Black Ops 2.

“With first day sales of over half a billion dollars worldwide, we believe Call of Duty is the biggest entertainment launch of the year for the fourth year in a row,” intoned Actiblizz robo-boss Bobby Kotick. “Life-to-date sales for the Call of Duty franchise have exceeded worldwide theatrical box office receipts for “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars,” the two most successful movie franchises of all time."

Not bad I'm sure, given that I can't fit $500 million into my head without most of it leaking out as a stream of awed vowels. This means that the Call of Duty series is showing no signs of slowing down. It'll be interesting to see how they fare across the next gen transition. By our reckoning, Black Ops 2 was a middling addition to the series with a few interesting sparks. Get the full verdict in our Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 review.

Space Marine trailer fights an Ork Warboss

[bcvideo id="1083301724001"]
A man in bright blue armour slitting a demon's throat with a chainsaw?

A man in bright blue armour slitting a demon's throat with a chainsaw? It must be Warhammer 40k. We're hurtling like a drop ship towards Space Marine's September 6 release date. Space Marines is available to pre-order now. Check out the various deals on the Space Marine site. There will be only war. And some talking. About war.

Diablo 3 account bans issued to "several thousand" players using bots

It's a bad month to be a bot.

It's a bad month to be a bot. First Guild Wars 2's struck a "decisive blow" in the name of humanity, banishing 34,000 bots from Tyria. Now Blizzard are sending the autonomous avatars straight to hell, and banning the players they worked for to boot.

Blue's Newsspottedto the Diablo 3 forum in which community manager Lylirra revealed, "We've recently issued account bans to several thousand Diablo III players who were found to be using botting programs while playing."

"As always, maintaining a stable, safe, and enjoyable online environment for legitimate players is very important to us, and we'll be continuing to keep watch on Battle.net and take action as needed."

She notes that the team are working on a patch that will allow players to report bots in-game, but that in the meantime, players can report bots here.

Clearly botting is a big issue for Blizzard, especially with Diablo 3's economy tied to the Real Money Auction House. With that in mind, it seems strange that they've taken so long to take such a big swing at it. While Lylirra mentions later in the post that "this isn't our first rodeo," admitting that the company just hadn't been very vocal about previous efforts, surely in-game reporting should be a standard feature by now?

Via VG247.

Steam Discovery: The curation tools we've been yearning for are finally here

Valve Software today announced a move for its Steam platform that the vast majority of PC game devs have been waiting a very long time for -- Steam Discovery, an update to the store that introduces new curation options.

The update comes at a time when game discoverability is becoming an increasing concern among developers as digital app stores are flooded with new games and content. This flood makes it more difficult for developers to reach their target customers, and it makes it more difficult for customers to find the games they'd buy.

Valve's Alden Kroll says that the move is in direct response to the fact that over 1,300 games have been released on Steam already this year -- a shift that Gamasutra has already delved into. In total, Steam hosts over 3,700 games and counting. A recent GDC Next surveyshowed that nearly 75 percent of developers polled think platform holders must do more to improve discoverability.

With Steam Discovery, Steam's 100 million active users can now become "Curators," and build their own lists of games that they believe their followers should pick up.

There's also other new functionality and features in place -- the Steam storefront will now show recommendations based on past purchases and what your friends are playing, while a new "Discovery Queue" will allow you to browse through new releases quickly, and "follow" any game that looks interesting, but you aren't ready to purchase just yet.

"This is really about improving discoverability for customers as the number of games available on Steam continues to grow at a very rapid rate," Kroll told Gamasutra today. "In the past nine months, over 1,300 games have been added to Steam, and we don't see that pace slowing. This is part of an ongoing effort to help customers find the titles they're most interested in playing and connecting them with communities and titles most relevant to their tastes."

The platform's search function is also upgraded with new filters to make finding games easier.

But what does this new storefront mean for developers? Valve is providing a new analytics toolset alongside this new functionality, and Kroll says devs should benefit from having their games shown off to the most relevant customers.


"This is really about improving discoverability for customers as the number of games available on Steam continues to grow at a very rapid rate." "In terms of the analytics, the goal is to provide developers with insight about just how many potential customers their game is being exposed to and where," he explains.

"In addition to showing developers the ways that customers are finding their product within Steam, the analytics also include information about external sources of traffic, which will help track external marketing efforts. We have done a lot of testing on this new system and the analytics to make sure it produces a higher number of impressions for games, and a more relevant service for showing those impressions. Like everything else we do, wider scale testing will teach us a lot and may inspire a few tweaks along the way."

Valve is also well aware that the current "New Releases" and "Top Sellers" tabs aren't as useful as they once were. As a result, the company is bumping these tabs down the front page, in favor of these new discoverability options.

"While those lists are still there, the new personalized home page can better serve customers by including titles of interest that may not be the most broadly popular titles," says Kroll. "Niche titles can now appear to appropriate customers in the largest banner on the home page. Steam Curators you follow may now recommend popular games from last year that you might have missed, or that awesome hardcore strategy game that just released."

So what sort of control do developers have over which Curators are linked to their game's page? For example, can devs link their own Curator list to their game's page?

"Developers can set up their own Steam Curator space if they wish," Kroll answers. "We expect some developers will do this to promote their full line of titles or even to promote the other games that they enjoy playing themselves."

"The list of Curators that appear on any given store page will depend on the user that is viewing the page," he adds. "So if you are following some Curators and you go to a store page, you will see the curators that you are following that recommend that particular product, along with other popular Curators that recommend that product."

Call of Duty Elite extended until March for MW3 early adopters

If you signed up for the 'Call of Duty Elite Premium' service on the launch day of Modern Warfare 3 last year - thus making you an 'early adopter' - you can look forward to an extra three-and-a-bit months of service.

If you signed up for the 'Call of Duty Elite Premium' service on the launch day of Modern Warfare 3 last year - thus making you an 'early adopter' - you can look forward to an extra three-and-a-bit months of service. This is Activision's way of apologising for the outages that affected Elite at launch. As Joystiqreport, when that extra time is up - on March 1st 2013 - Modern Warfare 3's Elite service is going to go completely free. Upon that date, your Premium service will continue as normal (with all the same features), but you won't have to pay a penny.

To make things extra confusing, when CoD Elite goes live for Black Ops II next week, it's also going to be free, as we mentioned a couple of weeks ago. However, Black Ops II players won't get Modern Warfare 3's Premium features by default - only MW3 Premium members will.

It's a frankly convoluted state of affairs, but at least it's one that isn't asking for any more of your money - whether you plan on migrating to Black Ops II, or carrying on with Modern Warfare 3, you won't have to shell out for CoD Elite.

Check out Epic's new Bullet Train Rift demo

This morning at Oculus Connect, Epic's Tim Sweeney took to the stage to showcase the company's newest demo -- playable at Oculus Connect -- which showcases the latest in Rift technology.

You can watch a 2D trailer for the demo above.

Notably, it offers support for the Oculus Touchmotion controller system. Maybe more interesting to game developers, however, is that the player moves through the world via teleportation -- point, click, and move. This is an increasingly popular workaround for traversal in current-generation VR games, and one that Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe lauded.

Traditional motion "wasn't quite as comfortable as we were hoping, especially for people like me," he said, joking about the fact that he's notoriously prone to motion sickness in VR. Conversely, the teleportation system is great for avoiding motion sickness in players, he said.

PC Gamer US Podcast #334 - Burger Commando

Join Evan, Omri, and T.J. for a descent into the frightening (and sometimes disappointingly not-so-frightening) world of horror games on this minimally-gimmicky, holiday-themed epsiode.

Join Evan, Omri, and T.J. for a descent into the frightening (and sometimes disappointingly not-so-frightening) world of horror games on this minimally-gimmicky, holiday-themed epsiode. Featuring SPOOKY news, SPOOKY discussion of upcoming DLC for some of our favorite games, and SPOOKY musing on whether Minecraft is still relevant. Listeners beware, you're in for... PC Gamer Podcast 334: Burger Commando

Have a SPOOKY question, comment, complaint, or observation? Leave a SPOOKY voicemail: 1-877-404-1337 ext 724 or email the mp3 to pcgamerpodcast@gmail.com.

Subscribe to the SPOOKY podcast RSS feed.

@ELahti(Evan Lahti)

@omripetitte(Omri Petitte)

@AsaTJ(T.J. Hafer)

@belsaas(Erik Belsaas, podcast producer)

Legend Of Zelda: Wind Waker Celebrated With Special gamesTM Cover

Legend Of Zelda: Wind Waker Celebrated With Special gamesTM Cover gamesTM celebrates the recent release of Wind Waker with a stunning gold foil cover. To coincide with the releases of The Legend Of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds and Wind Waker HD, games™ has created a special Zelda celebratory issue with a gold foil cover. Featuring an all-new interview with Zelda series overseer Eiji Aonuma, where the

Infinity Ward animator talks FPS design, animations in Reddit AMA

It all started with mirrors.

It all started with mirrors. Spurred on by its insatiable hunger for the unknown, Reddit's gaming community flitted between poring brainpower over why reflections don't commonly appear in FPS games, the inevitable meme-orized destructionof the topic, non-Euclidean mind trips, and kittens. Eventually, the Jeopardy-like attention span shifted to first-person animation design. Discussion threads sprouted, recipes were shared, an expert was called in: Infinity Ward animator Chance Glasco who, in a weekend AMA thread, shared knowledge on the intricacies of constructing and positioning some of the most frequently glimpsed weapon animations of the genre from the Call of Duty series.

As an animation veteran of numerous multiplayer shooter mainstays such as Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Modern Warfare, Glasco tweezed tiny finger motion joints and figured out creative magazine ejections of such weapons as Modern Warfare 2's FALand Allied Assault's Kar98K. We've pulled out a few of Glasco's more noteworthy responses below, but check out the rest of the threadfor more info.

On jumping: "When the player hits the jump button, he/she expects an immediate response. In reality, if you were to jump, there would probably be a good half to full second of anticipation. Because the server you are playing on isn't psychic, it's going to end up playing the animation from the instant you actually leave the ground. Anticipation is a basic rule of animation, so if you get rid of it it looks awkward.

"You also have the issue of looping. If you're jumping off of something, there's going to be a point where you might have to loop an animation until it is told to play the landing portion of the animation. The more you see this loop, the more gamey it feels. Gamey, like a BBQ Duck at Sam Woo BBQ."

On invisible torsos/legs: "It's one of those things we technically could have done, but have always found features more important to add. Often, the difference between a good game or a bad game is someone putting the hammer down on cute and fun little features that take as much time as important features that might be seen or used often. That was also a huge run-on sentence."

On the FAL animation: "I personally thought my FAL animation was one of my weaker animations in the game, but it was literally saved by the concept behind the animation. People like it because you knock out the empty magazine with your new magazine, not because it was my best animation. There are some things I wish I could have changed/cleaned up in it. It really goes to show you how a good reload idea can really propel a gun into popularity."

On Battlefield having the AK-47's ejectors on the wrong side: "It keeps me up at night."

On the animation process: "Before I start animating, the gun will be modeled and textured by an artist and then given to a rigger to add bones and skinning (attaching model to bones) so that I can animate it. My animation file will have that particular gun in it with the first-person arms and hands to animate. From there, I basically just start animating every animation you would see in the game. Tactical reload, empty reload, pull out, put away, aiming down the site, etc. Once you've created all of the necessary animations, you need to setup exports so you can get them in game.

"After exporting, there are a bunch of technical hoops you need to jump through like converting the animation to the game's animation format, making entries for every animation, and setting up the weapon in an asset manager. I would say about 75 percent or more of the time is spent on doing the reload animations."

On balancing realism with flashiness: "This is actually one of the most difficult aspects of my job, especially as time goes on and I've worked with so many weapons. Before I start, I usually research how the weapon is operated if necessary. I do try to keep it realistic to a point. I don't go full realism because it's often boring and flat. If you want to be tactical, for example, you should always keep your rifle pointing forward when reloading, but frankly, that doesn't make for a very interesting animation.

"So, often I will meet a weapons expert and they'll tell me that I made a mistake here or I should have done this. Usually that 'mistake' is a creative choice to show off the weapon or make it feel unique or special. I do keep it balanced though, as I don't really add super flashy actions to my animations like twirling a pistol or flipping a magazine before inserting it."