Jump to Section: Best Price Comments Pros Cop chases prove addictively fun Tweaking your car finally has a context Police chatter ratchets up the tension Cons Single-player progress gets repetitive No cop-chase mode in multiplayer? Difficulty gets brutal You know that saying about pleasing all of the people all of the time, right? Impossible. That's kind of what Need for Speed has faced as it went
Revisiting Blood Gulch - Halo's greatest ever map?
Over a decade ago, a relatively unknown machinima outfit produced a short video made in Halo: Combat Evolved . In it, two Spartans had something of an existential dilemma. “Why are we out here?” asked one. “It’s just a boxed canyon in the middle of nowhere, with no way in or out.” Those Spartans were the nascent stars of what would go on to be the phenomenally successful Red vs Blue. The canyon was
Play Super Meat Boy, the award-winning meat-based adventure
Super Meat Boy is a critically acclaimed puzzle-filled platforming adventure that casts players as a living cube of meat named Meat Boy.
is a critically acclaimed puzzle-filled platforming adventure that casts players as a living cube of meat named Meat Boy. Now available to download on NVIDIA’s next-generation entertainment platform, SHIELD Android TV, Super Meat Boy tasks players with completing a series of increasingly challenging levels in order to rescue Meat Boy’s girlfriend Bandage Girl who’s been kidnapped by an evil scientist.
Super Meat Boy boasts charming retro-style visuals and gameplay that are an homage to video game classics from the past. Not only does the game feature pixelated graphics inspired by beloved franchises like Super Mario Bros. and Mega Man, but its increasingly challenging and often unforgiving levels are also influenced by punishingly difficult games of that era.
Meat Boy can run left and right, jump, and bounce off walls to achieve multiple leaps up vertical surfaces. This would be a straightforward task were it not for the fact that the maze-like levels are claustrophobically designed, the platforms are often small and the drops precipitous.
Only a combination of split-second reactions and pixel perfect precision will get you where you need to be. The addition of hazards such as deadly saws, crumbling platforms and cannonballs are the poisonous icing on an already deadly cake. But once you overcome Super Meat Boy’s toughest challenges, success is that much sweeter.
With over 300 levels to play through, Super Meat Boy is an extremely rewarding platforming adventure that’s a great addition to SHIELD Android TV's growing library of must-play games.
Download Super Meat Boy now on NVIDIA SHIELD Android TVvia Google Play for $14.99.
By Andy Dyer
Sponsored by Nvidia
Planetside 2 preview - Paving the future of the FPS
We walked out of the spawn point and looked towards the objective. A few hundred yards away, dozens of soldiers were doing battle over a few scattered checkpoints inside of a large command base, blasting each other with heavy weapons and powerful vehicles. We decided to join them, taking to the sky in a light aircraft and swaying towards the battle. In only a few minutes, we’d become more comfortable
Halo: Spartan Assault coming to Xbox 360 and Xbox One in December
That didn't take long: twin-stick shooter Halo: Spartan Assault is coming to Xbox 360 and Xbox One, Microsoft announced on Halo Waypoint today. The Windows 8 and Windows Phone exclusive which launched in July will release as a digital download on Xbox Live this December. The console versions add an online co-op mode and missions, more weapons and abilities, and the Operation Hydra single-player campaign
Five reasons you’ll want to be ready for virtual reality
It's been a long time coming, but next-generation virtual reality has finally arrived in the form of two immensely promising head-mounted VR devices: Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive.
It's been a long time coming, but next-generation virtual reality has finally arrived in the form of two immensely promising head-mounted VR devices: Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. But before you lose yourself in the breathtakingly immersive VR worlds offered with VR devices, you’ll want to make sure your PC meets the minimum requirementsto deliver the performance and experience VR gaming demands.
Often times, ensuring your PC is truly ready for VR on the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive simply requires upgrading to a higher-end GPUsuch as the GTX 970 or above. NVIDIA GeForce’s joint programs with both the Oculus Riftand HTC Vivewill also conveniently tell you if you’re ready for VR.
What's the deal with VR's exotic hardware demands, though? Here are five key reasons why your PC needs to be VR ready.
1. Latency
Your brain is a very sensitive piece of equipment, and it can pick up on the tiniest mismatch between what it expects to experience and what it's actually sensing, resulting in discomfort.
What this means is that if there's too much latency the delay between input in a VR system, everything's going to feel laggy and swimmy and you won't be able to bear it for long.
The latest VR headsets keep latency below a manageable 20ms, but that's only half the story. They also need a fast GPU to render their VR worlds at lightning speed, coupled with a good CPU and plenty of memory to ensure there aren't any bottlenecks in the process.
2. Frame rate
60fps might be the ideal frame rate for playing games on your big screen, but trial and error over the last few years has discovered that it's just not good enough for VR.
Early VR hardware prototypes suffered from motion blur due to their persistent mobile displays that didn't clear the screen between frames. This problem was solved using low-persistence OLED displays, but uncovered a new issue in the form of flickering, which in turn can give you eye-strain and a headache after prolonged use.
Both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive run at 90fps, which eliminates flickering but also puts added demands on your GPU.
3. Two screens
On top of managing latency and running at 90fps, VR devices generate two screens at the same time, one for each eye. They are rendered from slightly different viewpoints in order to create a stereoscopic image.
Both the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift use a single 2160x1200 display, split down the middle so that each eye has its own 1080x1200 screen. If you add up the numbers, this means that the basic demands of a VR system are roughly seven times that of a PC that can comfortably run games at 1080P and 60fps.
Of course, if you want blazing fast performance then you can opt for extra power. For example, NVIDIA's VR SLI part of its VRWorks Technologiesenables you to accelerate stereo rendering by using a separate GPU for each eye.
4. Maximum detail
Many VR users have described the experience of being in a VR world as less like playing a game and more like being in an actual place. They remember VR adventures as places they've been to rather than things they've seen.
Creating this feeling of presence, however, comes with its own demands. Developers need to ensure that they don't skimp on the details. If you pick up an item in the VR world to take a close look at it, and discover that it's just a low-poly model with low-resolution textures, then the experience suffers.
Instead, everything in VR needs to be rendered at maximum detail, without any corners cut along the way. If you look through the advanced video settings on your average game and see how many of them are dialed down from maximum in order to keep the frame rate up, you'll understand just how much GPU power this is going to take.
5. Consistency
So, we have the need for low latency, high frame rates and maximum detail, and all being rendered on two screens simultaneously. But there's one final detail that's absolutely crucial for a comfortable and immersive VR experience: your PC has to do all of this with absolute consistency.
We're all used to hitting points in games when there's a lot going on at once and the frame rate briefly falls through the floor. It's annoying but we take it for granted, but VR simply can't afford to drop its game like that. The experience needs to start smooth and remain smooth.
The Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are now available to purchase. Find out if you’re ready to experience the most exciting new frontier in gaming by checking to see if your PC meets the minimum requirements to be VR ready.
By Jim McCauley
Sponsored by Nvidia
IGM and hitbox Partner Up to Promote Indie Game Streaming
Today I get to make a really exciting announcement that I’ve been wanting to blurt out for a while: IGM and hitbox (stylized with a lowercase “h”) have come to a partnership arrangement to help springboard indie streaming into the spotlight.
A wild IGM appeared!
Today I get to make a really exciting announcement that I’ve been wanting to blurt out for a while: IGM and hitbox (stylized with a lowercase “h”) have come to a partnership arrangement to help springboard indie streaming into the spotlight. We love the success that indies are finding thanks to the Lets Play community, and IGM has long planned to break out into more multimedia programming/content, so this partnership comes at exactly the right time for us.
On the hitbox side of things, we’re very impressed by the support they’ve shown the streamer community in general, and of their plans for the very-near future. What’s even more exciting is their commitment to the indie game scene – having realized just how important indies are to the gaming industry as a whole – and the amount of promotional support they’re willing to put behind us. In exchange, hitbox will be the exclusive stream partner of IGM, so you’ll find all of our live content and event coverage on the official Indie Game Magazine channel: http://www.hitbox.tv/IndieGameMagazine
“The indie games scene is one of the most creative forces in today’s gaming landscape. Oftentimes backed with the help of crowdfunding sites, developed with passion, and more often than not in the sparetime and driven by a very strong community focus,” said Martin Klimscha, CEO of hitbox. “Both IGM and hitbox work as a central hub for the community, making this partnership a perfect fit.”
In terms of content, IGM recently joined forces with Average Gamerand MightBeGiantto present the Average Giants webcast. Every Monday night at 9:00pm EDT, we’ll play indie games live on stream while speaking with the game’s development team and taking a few questions from the audience. The show will also exclusively host the hitbox “Indie Game Challenge”, a weekly challenge that encourages the hitbox stream community to participate in a variety of stream-related activities, such as creating highlight clips from the featured game of the week. In addition to this weekly webcast, IGM plans to introduce a weekly IGM Plays series, a news-focused podcast, and a more casual weekly series where members of our staff enjoy a multiplayer game for a night of laid-back fun.
This partnership comes just as IGM prepares to kick our multimedia division into high gear, beginning with our April 1 Magazine Relaunchevent; a 24-hour Marathon stream playing sponsored games that early adopter Magazine subscribers will then receive as a “Thank You!” for their support. (While supplies last.) We hope to see everyone there!
Lastly, IGM will be hosting a hitbox Team page for indie game streamers serious about promoting the scene. Our Indie Armada StreamTeamwill be dedicated to providing quality stream content in support of the game dev and indie game communities. Streamers selected to be a part of the team will have IGM’s promotional support moving forward. There are exciting times ahead for the stream community, and IGM is happy to be a part of it!
Activision buys Candy Crush creator King for $6B
In a massive acquisition, Activision Blizzard has bought Candy Crush creator King for $6 billion, Activision announced Monday night.
The purchase puts one of the most successful mobile game makers under the same umbrella as billions-dollar Activision Blizzard franchises Call of Duty and World of Warcraft .
The company’s King purchase instantly makes Activision Blizzard a top contender in the lucrative mobile game market.
Until now, Activision Blizzard has been taking a measured approach to entering the mobile game business, mainly investing internally, namely with Blizzard’s popular Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft digital card game. King says its network has 330 million unique users.
Activision Blizzard will acquire all of King’s shares at $18 a piece for the total of $5.9 billion. The price per share is a 27 percent premium over King’s average share price over the last three months.
The combination creates an even more substantial game industry powerhouse. Activision Blizzard says it had GAAP revenues of $4.9 billion for the 12 months ended September 30 this year; King had revenues of $2.1 billion for the same period. As for profits during that period, Activision made $1.1 billion, while King made $600 million.
The companies hinted that mobile business models and practices will be applied to various franchises across Activision Blizzard and King's combined portfolio, "from micro-transactions, game analytics and mobile marketing to increase digital revenues."
King's executive management will remain intact under "long-term" employment contracts. Activision said King and its 1600 employees and 12 studios will operate independently from the rest of Activision Blizzard.
The deal, slated to finalize in spring 2016, is subject to approval by King shareholders, Irish High Court, antitrust authorities and other customary closing conditions.
In a prepared statement, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick said:
"The combined revenues and profits solidify our position as the largest, most profitable standalone company in interactive entertainment. With a combined global network of more than half a billion monthly active users, our potential to reach audiences around the world on the device of their choosing enables us to deliver great games to even bigger audiences than ever before."
"We believe that the Acquisition will position us very well for the next phase of our company's evolution and will bring clear benefits to our players and employees. We will combine our expertise in mobile and free-to-play with Activision Blizzard's world-class brands and proven track record of building and sustaining the most successful franchises, to bring the best games in the world to millions of players worldwide. We are very much looking forward to working with Activision Blizzard. We have two teams that, together, will have an amazing footprint, innovative technology, and leadership across platforms, and unique, established IPs to delight one of the largest networks of players in the world."
Video: 'Where the Whales Live: The Pyramid Model of F2P Design'
"[N]one of my clients will admit that they have a retention problem, because that means admitting they’re not very good at making games that people want to play." In this free GDC Vault video from GDC Next 2013, Gamesbrief founder and author of "The Curve" Nicholas Lovell explores how to achieve what he feels is the goal of free-to-play game design -- let anybody access your game, and allow people who love what you do to spend money on things they truly value -- in his talk, " Where the Whales Live: The Pyramid Model of F2P Design.
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The content of this talk expands on what Lovell posted earlier on the Gamasutra member blogs, where you can find brief discussions of the core loop, the retention game, the superfan, and more.
About the GDC VaultIn addition to this presentation, the GDC Vaultoffers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.
Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC, GDC Europe, and GDC Next already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.
Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Tech
Fight the Darkness With Light in Bulb Boy
Bulb Boy is a point-and-click adventure horror game from Polish developer Bulbware.
is a point-and-click adventure horror game from Polish developer Bulbware. Players take control of poor little Bulb Boy on a dark and gloomy night. The little protagonist awakens suddenly from a nightmare to discover that evil itself has overshadowed the Bulbhouse.
Bulb Boy’s family has vanished, leaving terrifying monsters that lurk in the shadows. Players must help Bulb Boy gather his courage and use his illuminated glass head to save everything he loves while uncovering the secrets of the house. Players will solve puzzles, defeat wicked monsters, and reveal abilities to help unfold this twisted tale. Bulb Boy has a variety of talents to pull from, including the ability to survive electrical shocks, unscrew Bulb Boy’s head and use it to illuminate odd crevices, and more. Players don’t just control Bulb Boy; through the use of flashbacks, players will be able to control other members of Bulb Boy’s family. There is no actual dialogue in the game – the story unfolds in animated speech clouds.
Bulb Boy is slated for a Halloween release (October 31st) on Steam for Windows PC and Mac. There are no pricing details as of yet. To learn more about the game and developer Bulbware visit the official website, like on Facebook, or follow on Twitter. Players interested can play a demo of the game via the Steam page.
The game dev letters: A series on The Beginner's Guide
To: Samantha Kalman
From: Liz England
Subject: The Beginner's Guide
Hey Samantha,
I'm dying to talk about The Beginner's Guide but honestly I have no clue where to even start.
Sentris developer Samantha Kalmanand Insomniac Gamesdesigner Liz Englandexchange fascinating insights on Davey Wreden and Everything Unlimited's thought-provoking game The Beginner's Guide , and what it means to be a creator who happens to makes games.
I'm dying to talk about The Beginner's Guide but honestly I have no clue where to even start. I have nothing to compare it to.
Like, I'm tempted to compare it (obviously) to The Stanley Parablebut it has none of that humorous wink-wink nudge-nudge affectation. I've been scraping my brain but I can't think of a game that breaks the fourth wall so consistently without also being dredged in humor. The Beginner's Guide doesn't play it as a gag. It’s so sincere. Even as a work of fiction I feel like the message is terribly honest.
I think the reason I have trouble figuring out how to even start discussing The Beginner’s Guide is that the game is just a bottomless well of stuff to talk about. You can approach it as a series of art games, as a master class in level design, as a metaphor for the creative process, as a work blurring the line between fiction and reality, as a discussion of the relationship between a creator and its audience and who really owns creative work once you released it in the wild - all wrapped up into one short, two hour game. I could easily spend ten times that length just talking about it.
"It's weird to watch creative control over a work get lost once it's in the player's hands."
And even though I want to talk about it, I had to think pretty hard about whether I wanted to actually write about the game, you know? The game kind of resists interpretation - by digging for meaning, we’re perilously close to committing its cardinal sin. I don’t want to be a "Davey" (the character, not developer) confusing familiarity with a creative work with intimacy and friendship with its creator, a "Coda". I’ve seen that kind of troubled one-sided relationship in celebrity fandom, but (luckily) never experienced it myself. I definitely know what it’s like to have my work in the hands of players and critics as they assume all kinds of intent behind even the most innocuous choices. It’s weird to watch creative control over a work get lost once it’s in the player’s hands. I think this is the first time I’ve seen the topic actually addressed in a game - though obviously it's not the only topic in there.
Anyway, I totally intended on just talking about some of my initial thoughts but it’s so hard to keep to a surface level discussion of the game. I spent a good amount of time after I finished it reading what other people had to say about it - mostly gamers, critics, and journalists, but pretty much nothing from developers. I’m super curious what a fellow dev has to say about it (and not just because there’s some awesome craftsmanship going on behind the scenes).
-Liz
To: Liz England
From: Samantha Kalman
Subject: The Beginner's Guide
Hi Liz! I'm also so glad to for this chance to dig into Beginner's Guide with another developer. It's a work that contains many layers to sift through, and I kind of want to remark on all of them. You bring up some great points to start with~~
There are certainly similarities between BG and Stanley. Its mechanics, narrator, the weight of its detailed static environments all seem deliberately evocative of Stanley. It brings to mind the chapter where Coda was making many similar prison games in succession. That seems like a funny parallel to me. Like the game is in some incredibly recursive way, commenting on itself. Or, maybe I'm reading too much into it and that relationship wasn't intentional. Have you ever experienced any kind of pressure to follow up a project with something very similar?
"Is it difficult or delightful when you see players misinterpret your games?"
I suspect even by drawing this parallel I've already committed the game's cardinal sin; how could I possibly draw any real conclusions about what the creator intended? I can only interpret the work through the lens of my own experiences. "Davey" does this over and over again while talking about Coda's work. He appears as the voice of authority, forcing his own opinion about each piece onto the player. It's almost rude how he, in the game, doesn't allow the player to interpret Coda's pieces without biasing us with his own perspectives. He's influencing the way we experience the games before we can see each in their entirety. I wonder if this is commentary on the tendency for players to seek out authorial intent rather than find satisfaction with their own interpretations? I'd like to think it is, but that's because I'm actively committing this sin right now.
Liz, what's your opinion on the importance of authorial intent? Is it difficult or delightful when you see players misinterpret your games?
The other question on my mind at this point in the conversation relates to an early narration in the game. Davey said Coda never intended to release these games anywhere...that perhaps the act of making them was more important than the act of playing them. This sits tumultuously on my mind. What's the value of making a game that isn't intended to be played by anyone? What purpose does that serve? I'd offer my own opinion but I'm still not quite sure yet.
-s
To: Samantha Kalman
From: Liz England
Subject: The Beginner's Guide
Hey Samantha-
I haven't played anything else by Davey Wredenexcept for Stanley Parable and The Beginner's Guide so it's hard for me to judge how much is one imitating the other, and how much it is just his style. I tend to side with style, to be honest. I hadn't actually put together the idea that Stanley Parable is a big prison for the player. I feel a little sheepish admitting that now. It's so obvious in retrospect.
I loved that you asked about authorial intent. Once upon a time I was a literature student and all the authors I studied were long since dead, so no one was around to really care about "intent." I learned to study works for what they had to say about themselves, regardless of what the author might have intended. I still think that's totally fine, that a book - or a game - can be evaluated on its own merits and doesn't need a creator to tell you how to interpret it. But… once I became a developer myself I started to realize where the line stood, and how so many people would mix up "what the work means" and "what the creator means." I wouldn't say it's difficult so much as frustrating to read, especially since it's everywhere once you start to notice it. A lot of times it's players ascribing deep meaning to something that was, I don't know, a band-aid used to hide asset streaming. At that point the things players say about why a developer did 'X' just sound completely absurd, you know?
"I've tried my own hand at making 'unplayable' games but my inner game designer just won't let me go there."
So there's one question I have for you that I wanted to bring up: Who is Davey and who is Coda? (The characters I mean). Maybe it's just me, but when I first played it I immediately assumed Davey and Coda were the same person and it was completely metaphorical. I mean, we have the developer inserting himself into his own game, and then telling you the game just HAPPENS to be made by some fictional character who can't talk to you. This really primed me to think of the game as about a relationship between an artist's outward side and their inner side, a kind of tug-of-war between the ego and the id. I latched onto the idea that Coda was the muse that could only ever speak through art, and Davey was the logical part of the brain trying to make sense of it, explain it to the press, and edit it to be more commercial (accessible, usable, player-friendly, etc.). My first time through I totally missed the more literal interpretation that this was about a relationship between a player and a developer. What about you? Same/different? I have a tendency to miss the forest for the trees sometimes...
I totally want to grapple with your last point though - whether games can have value without being played. Maybe in a follow-up email, since I've written a ton already. Have you read Robert Yang's commentary to this?
"It's more important to witness a game than to play it." I really liked his approach to this, with the idea that games can be experienced without being played (whether we like it or not) and those experiences might be totally different than the real thing (and we should learn to be okay with that). I'd be curious what your thoughts are on it - it's a complex subject, for sure.
I've tried my own hand at making 'unplayable' games but my inner game designer just won't let me go there. I can't not put lamp posts in my levels.
-Liz
To: Liz England
From: Samantha Kalman
Subject: The Beginner's Guide
Hi Liz!
I never really thought about Stanley as a prison, either. Maybe it's a strange hybrid of a prison and a funhouse. It's the only other game of Davey's I played too, but I feel okay about picking up the similarities and calling it "Davey's style." Part of me hopes he rebels and breaks his style in future work. Another part finds comfort in the idea that he continues to strengthen his established style without deviating much from it.
I love what you're bringing up about how players ascribe meaning where none may have been intended. To me, this is the Yin to the Yang of the game's cardinal sin. Though we may never know the truth about what a work was intended to say, finding places to project (inject?) meaning makes the connection between us and the work more personal. I think about how many people feel ownership of the media they love -- music, television, films, games -- and how upset they get when a work does something different than those who love it and feel like they own it would have wanted it to be. Analytics-based game design practices operate under the pretense that giving the players what they want is the way to make the best games. Is that more important than carving out our creative path in the direction we feel drawn to? What does "best" even mean in this case?
"Though we may never know the truth about what a work was intended to say, finding places to project (inject?) meaning makes the connection between us and the work more personal."
Are any of Coda's games "good"? Is the answer even important in the context of the game? Why does Davey feel so compelled to spread Coda's games around, when he was supposedly content operating in isolation? It's super interesting to me that you interpreted Davey and Coda to be the same person! I took that relationship at face-value: Coda is just a guy making strange games as he likes, and Davey is another point of observation that perceives worth in the work and wants to share it on Coda's behalf, even without his permission. If Davey and Coda are the same person, then The Beginner's Guide becomes more about cowardice. The shameful feeling of wanting to create something for selfish reasons but being too embarrassed to do so. Davey had to create an alter-ego; a straw man to bear the brunt of the praise and the abuse alike. If they're different people, then the game becomes more about violation of trust. Coda asked Davey to not do a thing, Davey did that thing, and Coda had to cut all ties. I'm curious about Coda's compulsion to remain invisible. How many Codas are out in the world in 2015, coding away on personal experiments with zero desire to be seen? It's an overwhelming thought, especially right now with the number of games being made that have a strong desire to be seen.
This train of thought leads me to Schrödinger's work and quantum theory -- an atom transforms simply as a result of being observed. Maybe the game is a simple story about a person who changes as a result of his work being observed. The interesting part is how it's told -- by demonstrating the changing person through their work, filtered through the perspective of the person doing the observing. It makes my brain hurt. After reading Robert's piece that you shared, I have to think even more about the role of observation, broadly, creatively.
Speaking of the work, I'd like to ask what you think about the game's one recurring puzzle -- the dark space between two doors. I've been thinking about it so much but I want to hear your thoughts before I share my own interpretation.
Until the next lamp post,
Samantha
To: Samantha Kalman
From: Liz England
Subject: The Beginner's Guide
> Are any of Coda's games "good"?
Okay, look, I know this was a rhetorical question but I just want to say (again, I think, but you can never say it too much) that I adored every single one of those little vignettes attributed to Coda. Each one was an excellent art game in its own right and I am just really humbled by Wreden's skill that he's able to bring together not only an amazing game in The Beginner's Guide but that each part of that greater whole is so, so good.
Anyway, you asked about the dark space between the two doors. I may be completely wrong but I think it's meaningless. I think it’s a deliberate red herring.
"Somehow I just spent two paragraphs talking about how something in the game has no meaning. This is one of the things I love-hate about The Beginner's Guide."
I think that so-called space between doors is an example of Davey reading far too much into everything. I feel like this puzzle returns each time to remind us that this is a game, and that games often have these weird incongruous gameplay elements built into them for arbitrary reasons. I don’t think -- at least from the fictional Coda’s point of view -- that there’s any reason for it.
But it’s so interesting how Davey latches onto it and tell us how important it is. The door puzzle is easily the least meaningful thing in anything Coda makes and yet Davey is thrilled by it. Why? Do you remember the game where you clean house? It’s likewise meaningless busywork -- fun because, I guess, it’s interactive in a way that most of Coda’s work is a very passive experience for the player. It’s a repetitive grind that is oddly satisfying. Davey adores it but it’s completely meaningless. It lacks all the subtle (and not-so-subtle) art that Coda puts into the rest of his work. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the clean house game occurs entirely in the space between those two doors.
I'd love to know if you have a different impression. There's a lot of emphasis on that space in the game, but my takeaway was that it was a lie, a fake-out, a trap for us to fall into when we try to look for meaning when there is none (and that obviously manifests as a literal trap for Davey within the game).
Somehow I just spent two paragraphs talking about how something in the game has no meaning. This is one of the things I love-hate about The Beginner’s Guide. Like I said in my first email -- the game preemptively judges you for trying to interpret it and yet it dangles all this juicy metaphorical detail in front of you daring to figure it out. I feel like we’ve barely touched on the game, to be honest. When I initially finished it, I felt wonderfully satisfied by the experience but the longer I think about it (and the more I talk about it with you) the more unsatisfied I am by it, the more I want to dig into it and find out what all the different parts mean. I wonder if Wreden knew that would happen when he made the game... but I suspect I'll never know.
-Liz
To: Liz England
From: Samantha Kalman
Subject: The Beginner's Guide
Liz,
This has been an incredible exchange that's been very thought-provoking for me. Thank you for the conversation. One of the beats I take away from The Beginner's Guide is the unstable nature of friendships between highly creative people. This is a case where two people who literally didn't know each other before are having a deep conversation that's manifested a connection which didn't exist before. Whether or not we become friends and stay in touch after this is over is yet to be seen. Like Davey in the game, I've had unexpected conflicts drive a wedge between me and people I admire. I think that aspect of relationships is revealed in the game in an incredibly honest way, even if it's a little heavy handed. Making friends with like-minded people is super important to me as someone who works (mostly) alone. When we began this exchange I looked up your games and played many of them. I almost want to ask you about your decisions and intentions with the games to find out if my assumptions were intentional decisions. But I believe at this point it would be a terrible idea to ask. So I'll just say I admire your work and I'm looking forward to your future projects. I'm glad we both did this letter series so I had a chance to learn about your perspectives.
In service of revealing truths, I'll admit that I know Davey (the person, not the character) and I was privileged to play an unfinished version of Beginner's Guide earlier this year. In the game's credits my name is in the Special Thanks section. I can't say for sure if playing that unfinished version influenced the final product, or skews my perceptions about how the game turned out in the end. I can say it strikes me as an incredibly honest story about creativity, people, vulnerability, self-worth, and self-protection. These days so many vocal people are negative, sarcastic, cynical, dismissive, and outright cruel to others who do intensely difficult and creative work. It's important to me to balance that voice with a positive outlook. I believe that all human expression is valuable, and our nature to step on each other, and claim ownership of something we like that somebody else made needs to be surfaced. It's important for us to speak with honesty about these issues, so that we may understand ourselves and others a little better. Steve Jobs never wrote a line of code that powers the iPhone, but culturally he's considered the inventor. What's up with that?
"One of the beats I take away from The Beginner's Guide is the unstable nature of friendships between highly creative people."
To finish, I want to talk about the space between the two doors. From a literal perspective, the two doors are a recurring puzzle with the same solution: pull the lever to open the front door, close in and step inside before it shuts. On the other side of the closed door is another lever which opens the other door. It's a puzzle about permanently closing a gate separating you from the place you came from; from the past. It's a metaphor for time, for being unable to look back, restricting yourself to only moving forward. And it lets you take your time to sit in the dark space as long as you want to. It's hidden, like a place shut off from the world; from people, from observation, from sensory stimulus. A place to rest, peacefully until you are ready to do the only thing you can do -- move forward.
I love how the beautiful house that is filled with mundane chores and another housekeeper is situated in the dark space between the doors. It's almost like the space between everything we strive to do is a space of necessity. A single friend to talk to and a lot of simple but tedious life tasks to perform. And it's one of the most graphically rich sequences in the game. I don't know about you, but I get so lost in my thoughts while writing code -- "does this work?" ~ "what would make this better?" ~ "how do I communicate this to players" ~ "will people find this fun?" -- it can be all-consuming of my consciousness and I forget about my chores, my cat, the time of day, how long it's been since I've eaten. The idea of just tending to my home in a simple way with a friend to talk to sounds like a kind of paradise. And I'm glad Davey took joy in knowing that Coda thought it was his finest work.
The first title of the credits is "For R." Who is R?
-Samantha
A few days ago my column focused on hard retail sales figures for the U.S. Wii U launch . Now I want
to look at something decidedly less rigorous: launch game review scores. Review scores are already a contentious subject amongst game developers, publishers, marketers, media, and ultimately the consumers themselves.
Sizing up a history of hardware launch review scores
Review scores are already a contentious subject amongst game developers, publishers, marketers, media, and ultimately the consumers themselves. For today, let us just put aside those arguments, consider it as a data set - a somewhat messy data set.
The data here was gleaned from the review aggregators Metacritic, for newer games, and GameRankings, for older games.
The systems shown here represent a 17 year period in the video game industry, and a tremendous amount has changed over that time. When the original PlayStation launched in 1995, the video game industry was much smaller than today, and the number of reviews for those early systems is quite small. The reliability of the data really starts around the time of the Sega Dreamcast, but I've included the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 as interesting artifacts.
I should mention that I took a rather liberal view of Nintendo 64 launch games. I've included everything that launched in 1996. After all, only Pilotwings 64 and Super Mario 64 were available the day the system came out in the U.S.
The data for the latest system, Nintendo's Wii U, is still changing. Just this week, several more reviews were recorded for some of the system's games. But as the number of reviews for each game goes up, the average review score begins to settle down. In many cases there are already dozens of reviews for each Wii U game, so the averages shown here are at least a strong indicator of where the average will end up eventually.
Finally, I've not tried to measure digitally-distributed launch games. So anything that launched on Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, or Nintendo's eShop hasn't been considered.
With all that out of the way, let's just get down to the numbers and graphs.
In the figure below I've shown the consoles released in the U.S. since 1995 from top to bottom in release order.
The bar itself shows the spread of the scores, from the lowest average score to the highest. The purple dot in each bar shows the average score across the system's launch games. Further, the color of the bar indicates the platform holder. Blue is Nintendo, red is Sony, green is Microsoft, and orange is Sega.
This particular view shows that the last three systems released in the U.S. market, the PlayStation 3, Wii, and Wii U, all had an extraordinarily wide spread of launch review scores. The PlayStation 3 and Wii U are also noteable for having their launch game review averages skewed toward the upper end of the range of all their review scores.
On the other hand, the Xbox 360 and the GameCube both had an exceptionally narrow range of review scores for their launch titles. Also, we can see that the Dreamcast had the fortune of having the best-reviewed launch game ever, SoulCalibur . The second-best was Halo: Combat Evolved on the original Xbox.
If we sort the systems by their launch review averages, we get the following figure.
An interesting split appears between the Wii U and Wii and Nintendo's earlier systems. The GameCube has the best-reviewed launch slate of any system while the Nintendo 64 comes in third behind the Xbox 360. Yet the Wii is near the bottom, near the PlayStation for which little data is available. And the Wii U is currently just above the Wii, albeit with a lower maximum and a much lower minimum.
There is perhaps a discussion to be had there about what that means. Does it represent a cultural shift away from Nintendo and its brand? Have reviewers simply become more discerning? Or, perhaps we can point to an increasing number of licensed titles and sequels as dragging generally on the novelty of a system's launch. I'm at least willing to ascribe some of the Wii's lower scores to both developers not quite knowing how to utilize motion controls and reviewers not knowing how to score motion control games.
Finally, I thought it might be interesting to look at the number of games released at launch for each of these systems.
The Wii U has had the most titles available at retail for launch since the PlayStation 2 over 12 years ago. Before it launched, the Wii held that particular spot. And for the Wii U, this total doesn't count the handful of titles available exclusively online in Nintendo's eShop.
The GameCube and Nintendo 64, both of which had highly-respected launch titles, also managed to have nearly the fewest.
So it does appear that Nintendo and its third-party partners have spent some effort to offer more software at launch. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft and Sony manage the software for their launches, which I currently expect sometime in late 2013.
In fact, the Wii U could be the last major system whose main method of distribution is through retail. When new Sony and Microsoft consoles arrive, the average early adopter will likely also be a heavy network services user. When that happens, the distinction between retail and digitally-distributed software will largely disappear.
Temporus: Time-travel, missiles, and a whole lot of jellyfish
If you’re a fan of shows like Babylon and Battlestar Galactica but want more focus on the space side of things and less on the dramatic love triangles, then Firebelly Studios’ Temporus just might be the game you’re looking for.
While on the planet Temporus , you take on the persona of an anonymous, pseudonymous ore miner who is busy slaving away with work, until one fateful day when the emergency lights begin to flash-the entire planet is being ambushed. Although you and your crewmates scatter, upon your return to Temporus, everything you’ve come to know and love has been utterly obliterated, and the only way to find out how is to set off on a mission to get some cold, hard answers.
Temporus’ gameplay style is that of a classic time-travel 2D side-scroller, with parts that are somewhat reminiscent of xLand Games’Eric Umenhofer, the lead developer of Firebelly Studios mentions that Temporus in fact drew inspiration from games such as MegaMan, R-Type, Gradius, Cave Story and Bionic Commando. The game itself is broken up into a slew of different levels, where you can collect ancient artifacts, witness flashbacks of past battles, and use history in your favor when you take on some primitive tech tools that just might save the universe from certain doom.
At the time of this publication, Temporus has managed to attract $2,454 of it’s target Kickstarter goal, but is still yet to get the Greenlight on Steam.
Temporus is planned for release on PC, Mac, Linux, and if we’re lucky-PlayStation 4, XBox One, and PS Vita.
Halo 4 spoiler alert: Has a major battle with the game's true antagonist already been blown by the game's own developers?
If any story ever seemed to exemplify the dangers of trying to be too clever when teasing your fans, it could be this one. Because unless this is all an elaborate red herring (and to be honest, there's a decent chance it might be), then Halo 4 developer 343 Industries might just have accidentally leaked a fairly significant page of the game's script all over the internet. Originating in a post on NeoGAF
Halo 4 extended trailer not really extended, shows Master Chief watching UNSC Infinity from slightly different angle
If you live in the UK and were watching England vs France kicking a ball about on TV last night, then you will almost certainly have seen the new extended trailer for Halo 4 during the ad break. If you didn't see it, no bother - you can watch it here: You may notice that it's not 'extended' in the traditional sense of the word. As in it's not actually longer than the version of the trailer shown during
With all the talk about "open world," "mayhem," and "power fantasy," it's easy to forget how confining
the Grand Theft Auto series now feels, writes Gamasutra's Leigh Alexander. I wanted to do something nice for Michael.
Opinion: The tragedy of Grand Theft Auto V
I wanted to do something nice for Michael. He'd been rejected in turn by each member of his family, as it seems he is every day. Even with medication and therapy he can't seem to deal with his anger or find a sense of purpose, and his doctor is hiking up the treatment rate again.
I'm controlling this guy Michael, standing on an LA sidewalk at sunny midday. I pull out his phone and I go through his contacts and I dial every single one.
The only one who answers is accidental pal Franklin, a young car thief trying to go legit. The bewilderment in Franklin's voice is palpable -- why is Michael calling? We just saw each other, man.
Michael is standing on a sidewalk, graying hair, dorky polo and cargo shorts, peering down at his phone as cars whizz past on some bleak LA highway. The sky takes on a late-day tinge and if I don't press anything he will stand there forever, looking sad, waiting for someone to call.
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With all the talk about "open world," "mayhem," and "power fantasy," it's easy to forget how confining the Grand Theft Auto series now feels: All of that endless vista, and you with your eyes too-often glued to the mini-map. Orbiting missions and objectives that dot your map like bites to be scratched. You have to shoot. For a game defined by its attitude to freedom and openness, it gives you very little liberty to escape its structure. You can go for a drive, or play tennis or do yoga, but you're delaying the inevitable.
To make progress, you eventually submit to going to a place, and you drive there, and pull up, and you're in it , and only after a long pause do you realize nothing begins until your car touches, precisely, the indicator halo in the middle of the sidewalk.
I feel for the characters in this game: They're living lives on rails, and they can't seem to get out, nor reconcile how to be happy and secure given the directions they've chosen. As Franklin, I drove for miles and miles away from the neighborhood where I've been taking over my cousin's tow truck shifts to keep him and his awful girlfriend afloat while they struggle with crack addiction. I drove what felt like forever, and I rode my bike the wrong way down a train tunnel and emerged on a railway bridge at dawn.
I had Franklin take out his phone to snap the view. It was the first time I'd used the phone in the game, and I noticed I could click the right stick to make Franklin turn the camera around on himself. The character model's position, expression -- phone at arm's length, slightly angled, the selfie-expression open, bewildered, positive -- was perfect. Innocent, even. I don't belong to Rockstar Social Club, the social network membership required for me to be able to save photos, but I took it anyway, pretending Franklin could show his unhinged friend Lamar back home, the one who claims his "Apache blood" forces him to escalate dangerous gangland conflicts.
Then the train came. It struck my parked bike, and then me. I saw Franklin's stunned and mangled body. Then I saw him dazedly exit some small town hospital, as if the adventure had all been a dream. There really wasn't anything else for me to do but drive back. Find another mission. Probably kill some more faceless gangsters, in a game where the best compliment you can give to its third-person shooting is that it's practically automated.
This game gives me everything, and yet I can't stop feeling sad. Trapped.
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The "mayhem" thing, the freedom thing. I remember when that was an actual feature of Grand Theft Auto : I've always said Vice City was my favorite game in the series, drenched in the mad, manic excesses of 1980s Miami. You killed every gyrating bunny in a dance club because you could: not just because there was a freshness to the gesture, a newness, a transgressive excitement, but because the garish world felt so silly, so impermanent. You never even dirtied your awful polyester. I'm sure I died again and again and didn't mind. It wasn't a real world, not really. It was a story of a set of values in a certain time, just like San Andreas , a hyper-textured early-90s hip-hop video -- where you could also drive weary and wary through the fires of the L.A. race riots. That was a thing.
Punching out a stranger for cash is something I could do in pointy-collared Tommy Vercetti's blocky world, or even in C.J.s, as a way of asserting control, of taking ownership of whatever bleak expectations people had of me. It's important to me to tell you that, in Vice City I chased down a prostitute in the rain and beat her to get my money back. I mean, I think I did that a lot -- hired and beat a lot of prostitutes -- just the one in the rain is the one I remember, cackling madly because Foreigner's "I've been waiting for a girl like you" was on my car radio. These were the times GTA felt illicit, rebellious, guilty, challenging.
I had to confide about the prostitutes, because I'm one of the people who said I thought it would have been better if GTA V let you play as a woman, and that I thought the game was misogynistic. I still feel that way, but it's not because I'm offended, or because I'm sensitive, or because I want to intervene upon anyone's vision , or because I regret the things I did in older games. It's because I want new monsters . It's because I want to be shocked again.
When Vice City came out, we had a young man doing heists and punching upward against expectations, misconceptions and the traditional boundaries of "permissible" game content. It's more than a decade later, and we have all grown up, and we're given an old man shuffling around his expensive pool in a dorky polo, doing the same heists. We have yet more characters who cannot get out.
I remember old Grand Theft Auto : You're driving around, and you see a car you've never seen before, and it looks expensive, and you want it. And when you fight for it and you shake the cops and you bring down the helicopter and you repair and re-paint the car, and you finally, wincing every tiny turn, drive that fucker to your garage because you worked for it? You felt the needle move.
In GTA V you shoot down a police helicopter within the first couple of hours, with no consequences. I feel gluttonous and bored. I start the game with a gorgeous car because I am a car "reposesser." And if I see another car I want, I pull over and I get it. When my fender gets too banged up, I pull over and I get another car. Nobody ever even really stops me. Neither GTA IV or GTA V have ever given me, personally, a Wanted Star for stealing a car.
I throw some poor guy into the street and I take the car. Some poor lady. I always like to know what they were listening to on the radio when I drive off, unpunished.
Am I coming up in the world, or am I just throwing terrified people into the road?
The thing that feels the most "correct" in GTA V is to drive within the lines, to stop at red lights, to try to do the right thing. To try to call people for Michael to hang out with. To make sure he goes to his doctors' appointments.
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Where do I go from here? Edge concluded its GTA V review with the quote "Beat that." Do I have to? What constitutes "more" when you have enough? What constitutes transgression when you're some mean, over-the-hill bully?
GTA V is that character -- the $800 million man who doesn't know what to do next. Who used to be a rebel, who pulled the same damn tricks until they stopped working, and then kept doing it.
I know that's not what Rockstar wants. I read all the Dan Houser interviews that are parceled out so rarely, always about vision and never about execution. Always about games and Hollywood, as if there's a competition, and about how interactivity offers us the potential to tell better stories than we did before. In that regard, GTA V is profoundly disappointing: One of the earliest jokes in the game involves a dog doing another dog in the butt. The game is constantly grating you with frat humor whenever you're trying to Have a Moment with it.
Always prescient, the game aims to lampoon the modern obsession with smart devices, social networks -- none-too-subtle "LifeInvader" subs for Facebook, and "Bleater" for Twitter -- and internet politics, but is mostly heavy-handed about it: any elderly pundit at a middle-American local paper can skewer Twitter as an outlet for narcissists' boring snippets. "Information isn't about imparting knowledge anymore," gloats Bleater obtusely, "the internet changed all that."
This is watching your sharp, witty father start telling old fart jokes as his mind slows down. And as much as the internet is habituated to defending GTA as "satire," what is it satirizing, if everything is either sad or awful? Where is the "satire" when the awful parts no longer seem edgy or provocative, just attempts at catch-all "offense" that aren't honed enough to even connect?
Here's a series that has been creating real, meaningful friction with conventional entertainment for as long as I can remember, and rather than push the envelope by creating new kinds of monsters, it's reciting the same old gangland fantasies, like a college boy who can't stop staring at the Godfather II poster on his wall, talking about how he's gonna be a big Hollywood director in between bong rips. You call the trading index BAWSAQ? Oh, bro, you're so funny, you're gonna be huge.
Everything it seems you'd want to compare GTA to, from The Sopranos to Breaking Bad, includes interesting and antagonistic women. GTA is not brave. Anna Gunn gets death threatsfor her incredible performance of Skyler White, the primary antagonist to Breaking Bad's Walter. You can't avert your eyes from their scenes in this last season. That is brave.
Whenever cinema and dialogue start happening on GTA V , I check Twitter. What am I doing this mission? I don't know, chasing the yellow dot, as always. Killing the red ones.
All a video game had to do to be seen as brave, edgy, risk-taking again would be to give it a shot: Try to write a monstrous woman, a frustrated woman, a hungry, opportunistic woman, and treat her frailties with nuance. This isn't something even TV and cinema regularly knock out of the park.
Instead, we have another GTA . It is so big, and so beautiful, and it's fundamentally just another GTA . It's good. I like it. It's fun to mess around in. It's like an SUV through a glass storefront, declaring that you cannot ignore video games.
We can't help but acknowledge what Rockstar has wrought: No one has ever seen a game world this size, this lifelike. If you squint a little, it almost looks completely real, creepy-real. It approximates the absurdist fantasies futurists have always had about video game, it is like what a movie about the future thinks video games are. Can you do this? Yes. Can you do this? Yes. Yes. Yes.
Sometimes it's too smart for video games, and too cool: The impeccably-curated music selections for the game's radio stations, or the way the game's light behaves, warm, slow haloes flickering across a low-riding luxury car. It understands cool-hunting, power-hunger.
And it's ruthlessly researched that you have to be dazzled, as if in the presence of a mothership of a mind much more observant, much more well-traveled, possessed of much more social wisdom than you, some chump holding the controller.
And still: so confined, so trapped, so tragic. A shame.
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I drive my shiny car around Los Santos and I kind of wish I had a turn signal. Stranded in traffic, I honk the horn over and over again, and nobody moves. I am triangulated by some missions, none of which I really want to do, stuck in the city's web of repetition. I want to do something nice for Michael. I want to get him out of this sad, sad cycle. It seems to be what he really wants. I can hear it in every note of his pained, excellent voice performance.
My son and daughter have ditched me at the beach. I ride the roller coaster all by myself, a slow, cotton candy sunset-tinged arc across a neverending beach vista. Walking along the beach, I press the wrong button by accident and swing my hairy fist impotently at the sunset, at nothing.
It's dark, maybe. But it's not brave. It's not that funny. It's not a power fantasy, it's not your escape. It's just sad.
Halo 4 multiplayer gameplay from PAX 2012 is 35 seconds of pure joy
Nope, that's not a joke--we have 35 seconds of Halo 4 footage from PAX 2012 showing off multiplayer. Yes, 35 seconds. We're serious. But, you know what? Sometimes, 35 seconds is all you need to make an impression. Take a look. Thought so. Flagsassination? Oh, 343 Industries, don't ever change.
Steam's new 'Community Market' could mean new revenue opportunities
Valve is opening up a new revenue stream on its popular Steam service by allowing its players to buy and sell virtual goods.
The Steam Community Marketbegan a beta period on Wednesday, currently applicable only to Valve's premiere free-to-play game, Team Fortress 2 .
What does this mean for game developers? Potentially, a new source of revenue. While Valve will pocket 5% of the revenue from these virtual sales (to recoup "nominal fraud incidents"), the company says there is also an additional game-specific fee for each transaction, which is determined and collected by the individual game's publisher. Currently that fee is 10 percent for Team Fortress 2 .
More information at the official FAQ.
Indie Intermission – ‘Murder Dog IV: Trial Of The Murder Dog’ It’s A Dogs Life
Murder Dog IV: Trial Of The Murder Dog (Murder Dog) is a rather interesting take on the judicial system that is full of comedy from start to finish.
is a rather interesting take on the judicial system that is full of comedy from start to finish. Created by Thecatamites Murder Dog is a point and click adventure through court as you take command of a murderous dog on the look out for blood.
It is up to you to try to get this Dog off the hook, although this will not be easy considering just how much of rampage you have been on prior to this hearing so expect a rather bumpy ride. Full of humours dialogue and awesome witnesses the game feels like a great deal of fun with ever surprising outcomes.
Although the visuals often feel lacking the game seems to have been constructed rather well overall and the dialogue makes up for it creating a rich and interesting game.
Average play time – 10 minutes
Murder Dog is a fun little game that has some rather fun dialogue really transcending the game above the average. With numerous different outcomes for our hero you can spend quite a while trying to figure out ways to play the system and maybe even get the dog off the hook.
Be sure to check out Murder Dog nowand see if you can say the murderous dog.
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!
Fallen Earth Dev Diary: When plants rule the earth
PC Gamer routinely features Developer Diaries: tales of what goes on behind-the-scenes in the development studios making your favorite games.
PC Gamer routinely features Developer Diaries: tales of what goes on behind-the-scenes in the development studios making your favorite games. This Dev Diary comes from Art Director Chris “Devo” Deavellar of the Fallen Earth development team, and provides insight into the development of the new zone being added to the game--Section 4.
Sector 4 has been talked about for a while now, and we're getting close to the big unveiling. I'll admit that the art department is part of the reason why it's taken so long. We really wanted to push the technology and create an environment that looks different from what's been presented in Fallen Earth to date. In this dev diary, I'm going to give some background on our conceptualization process.
Up until this point, real-world designs like deserts, forests, and suburban-style towns have dominated the art style of Fallen Earth. In Sector 4 players will finally see some of the amazing and terrible things that uber-corporation Globaltech was up to before the apocalypse struck.
Globaltech was experimenting on all manner of plant life. But something went wrong: giant trees and vines started to grow uncontrollably, ripping apart buildings and contorting the ground into masses of choking roots. It's a great story, but capturing this idea properly in the game's art has been a major challenge. The idea of plant life running amok is one that could easily drift into D&D territory, and because we certainly don't want that, we had to be careful how we presented it.
We used a few real-world plants to inspire our designs. The first, kudzu, is a vine that grows up to twelve inches per day (fun fact: that's half-an-inch every hour). A second plant we used is a species of fungus called Cordyceps. Cordyceps invades the brain stem of an insect and then uses the insect both as food and transportation. We let our imaginations (and nightmares) run wild with these ideas. As a result, our plants aren't sentient, but they're still extremely aggressive. They are also horribly unnatural. Roots ooze blood-like sap. Large, cancerous pustules cluster on the sides of skyscraper-sized trees and where the bark has split, players can see meaty flesh underneath, instead of wood.
Another challenge in creating the look of Sector 4 was giving players a hint of what the place used to look like before the apocalypse and how it's changed afterwards. In Alpha County, it's clear that the natives fought back against the invading plants by scorching the ground to ash and putting up a giant wall to contain the plants that survived. The architecture also reflects this history: the masses of machinery that compose Globaltech's buildings would have looked impressive once, if a little unsettling. But now they are monstrosities. Barnacle-like shanties made from fragments of ruined steel, cables, and glass cling to the walls. It is clear that the people who have managed to survive here lead miserable lives and have no way of escaping.
Each county in Sector 4 will have its own unique look. The gray desolation of Alpha County will give way to slime and swampland in Epsilon County. In Theta, players will see the happy face that Globaltech put on for its investors and the general public. The architecture is a shining beacon of the future (although we already know how that failed to pan out). Lastly, in Omega County, players will see what happens when nature wins and the mutant plant-life completely takes over.
It was clear early on that we were going to need new tech to bring all of these environments to life. As a result, we created better water, better terrain textures and sculpting, new trees and also improved the lightstate technology. We're committed to delivering better graphics instead of just rearranging old elements that players have already seen.
I'm psyched for our players to see what's in store and I hope they enjoy the results.
Origami Crush Comes to Android Devices
Studio Red Potion recently announced the release of their new mobile game Origami Crush to the Google Play store.
to the Google Play store. The game is currently available for Android devices for $0.99, with indications that an iOS version will be released in the future.
Players select a paper airplane model and take to the skies in a classic arcade style shoot ‘em up. The game includes many of the standard features found in titles of similar genres, such as waves of enemies, multiple bosses, ship upgrades, score multipliers, and various unlockable ships. The paper airplane aesthetic carries into the level and enemy designs, with the “bullets” appearing as wadded up paper balls. A total of 9 levels and ships are currently available or unlockable.
Red Potion also chose to include both short and hardcore versions of the game, with the latter forcing players to restart from the beginning if they die. The game does not include any ads or in-game purchases, so gamers who purchase the app will experience it in its entirety for the upfront cost.
Those interested can likewise opt to download the free version instead, which includes all the features of the paid version but includes advertisements. Red Potion has also indicated that additional challenges will be provided in future updates. For additional screenshots and a short gameplay trailer, visit the Origami Crush Facebookor Google Play page.
Indie Fund Backs Musical Exploration Game ‘FRACT OSC’
The fine folks behind the Indie Fund have announced they’ve thrown their collective weight behind Phosfield Systems and its upcoming award-winning title, FRACT OSC.
The fine folks behind the Indie Fund have announced they’ve thrown their collective weight behind Phosfield Systems and its upcoming award-winning title, FRACT OSC. The game’s history dates back to 2011, when an early PC build took home the IGF award for Best Student Game. It also picked up an IGF Honourable Mention for Excellence in Audio this year.
Dubbed a musical exploration gameinfluenced by Myst, Tron and synth music, FRACT has you wandering through an open world driven entirely by sound. You have real-time control over sounds and as you complete puzzles, you also rebuild mysterious machines that create their own melodies to impact the abstract setting.
FRACT OSC is due out on Steam later this year. Phosfield stated on the game’s official websitethat the Indie Fund partnership is a huge boon in the studio’s effort to get through the final stages of development and launch the title prior to the end of 2013.
Indie Fund itself has built a nice track record in its first three years, successfully funding indie gems such as Monaco, Antichamber, QUBE and Dear Esther. Most recently, The Swapper recouped its Indie Fund investment in less than two days.
Sword of the Stars II Dev Diary: Building a graphics engine
PC Gamer routinely features Developer Diaries: tales of what goes on behind-the-scenes in the development studios making your favorite games.
PC Gamer routinely features Developer Diaries: tales of what goes on behind-the-scenes in the development studios making your favorite games. In this particular entry, Darren Grant, Lead Programmer on Sword of the Stars I and II at Paradox, walks us through the process of building a brand new graphics engine from the ground up . For more information, read the first entry, and let us know what you'd like to see developers discuss in future diaries in the comments.
Over the last five years--through two expansions, a weapons pack and a tech pack--the graphics engine that fueled the original Sword of the Stars game (MARS) has done everything we asked of it. More than we'd originally intended, really. Sword of the Stars II seemed like the perfect time and opportunity to look back at our previous engine and build the future from the ground up.
Part of the process of designing a new engine architecture is identifying exactly what can be improved over the previous iteration. For MARS2, we took a number of new approaches to accommodate our goals for the sequel: provide the player with the capability for additional immersion and interaction with the universe. Below, I break down the different elements that we've added/upgraded in order to bring our full vision of SotS II into existence. It can get a bit technical at times, but I hope you find it enlightening!
Direct 3D 10
For most gamers, the benefits of stepping up to D3D10 is shrouded in mystery. That's partly because Microsoft's main goal with this version is mostly to ease the lives of OEMs and developers, by forcing adopters to agree on competent standards. What this means is that, unlike D3D9 (where hardware and drivers delivered a hodge-podge of mixed and matched features for developers to wade through--a compatibility nightmare), D3D10 guarantees a very powerful common baseline that stays the same. For example, as a graphics programmer, I know with near certainty that if the shadow rendering works correctly on my work station, it will behave correctly (albeit at different speeds) on any DX10- or DX11-era hardware and software. There were no such certainties in D3D9, which added to lost development time.
Shader Model 4
One of the more exciting features that D3D10 adopters get is the common Shader Model 4 baseline. A D3D9 game is limited to Shader Model 2.0 on average (which was the shader model target for SotS Prime). Sadly, the lack of basic computing power on the GPUs of that era severely limit the number of features that could be achieved concurrently.
That bottleneck caused us a lot of problems. You want skinned models? OK, the programmer would come back instantly with a solution! Now you want to add 2 dynamic light sources per mesh? Hmm, it's going to take a day for your programmer to rewrite the shaders to fit both features in the given space available. Now you want shadows? Your programmer grumbles, goes away for a couple weeks and comes back with a rewrite of the renderer that jumps through hoops to solve the problem. Just don't try to fit more in after that.
One of the things we learned developing SotS Prime is that if you don't set up the proper tools for the artists initially, our programmers would spend a lot of time attached to the artists, tweaking parameters. And toward the end of a project, when things are getting tight, we'd be forced to drop certain polish features in favor of actually going final. Upgrading our engine let's us avoid that this time around.
Render stack
Render stacks handle and sort the drawing instructions for each frame and optimize them before they reach Direct3D. There are two major categories of 3D rendering in games: Forward and deferred. Forward rendering is a technique where each pixel is drawn to the screen once, with all of the shading values already accumulated. This can be very efficient in situations where there are very few light sources, and is optimal in genres like FPS, where the world geometry is largely static and can therefore be heavily optimized. It doesn't work well with dynamic lighting, though, so there's also deferred rendering, which separates the lighting and material rendering passes, making it optimal for situations with lots of relatively small dynamic light sources.
Our render stack uses a deferred technique to produce some brilliant dynamic lighting and post-process effects, many of which can already be seen in various screenshots and videos. These effects can be tuned based on the class of video card available. For instance, the depth of field blur radius may be reduced, or flat-out disabled based on the player's preferences of image quality vs. performance. The gamut of effects that can be disabled include full scene shadowing, hundreds of dynamic light sources, decaling, refraction, local ambient occlusion, full HDR bright/bloom and image based ambient lighting.
Particle effects
Including the rich particle effects of the previous game in SotS II is big deal for us. MARS2's particle-authoring system has been greatly revised to enable integration with material rendering and control of dynamic lighting systems. With material integration, some complex and dramatic new effects are possible, and with control over dynamic lights, the particles can convey a much greater presence as they skirt past the hulls of nearby ships or fade into scorch marks.
Thanks to our deferred rendering system, the engine an handle hundreds of simultaneous light sources. There's no reason that a particle system can't be authored to provide a beautiful animated glow that casts light on surrounding geometry in the game. Having direct control over the lighting inside the particle authoring tool gives artists very direct control over the integration of emitted light and the particles they want to draw. In other engines this might have to be done by going to two separate tools, which disrupts work flow.
Shared material library
Another key component to ensuring our artists' efficiency is our shared material library, which enables artists to create and change the appearance of multiple models at once. Each material is based on existing shader class, which means that artists do not need to write code or cut and paste parts of cryptic shader trees--with the support of an in-house model viewer, the shared material library lets artists fine-tune the parameters only once and see the effect on all models that use that same resource.
For instance, an artist might create a material called CruiserGlass, which calls for a green-glass shader with all the fancy refractive and reflective trimmings, tailor the colors and light levels, and then share those settings with all of the glass panels in all Tarka cruisers. Without the help of a single programmer or having to tweak the models at all, an artist can change one paramater on the CruiserGlass model and see the changes across all Tarka cruisers in the game simultaneously.
Asset pipeline and multithreading
In order to further reduce load times between major state changes and improve the performance of the game in general, we built a massive asset pipeline. This pipeline combines a new offline build process with an engine-integrated background loader and cache. Most assets are mapped directly from their files by the runtime, and once they're in the RAM, they stick around unless the cache needs to recover space. This eliminates most of the long loading time problems that can happen when moving between encounters and the star map.
MARS2 had been designed to work with modern multithreaded architecture, which will also greatly help loading times. We're using a hybrid approach to target the 2-8 core PC's that are common today, with an eye to 16+ core desktop systems that are promising to emerge. One primary CPU thread does the heavy lifting and secondary threads are assigned to specific support jobs such as loading and processing assets, building render lists, or executing high level game logic. Using this logic, for example, the engine will prepare for an upcoming combat encounter.
Bullet Physics and 64-bit
Another way we're aiming to make the wide array of weapons and ships feel more alive is by adding Bullet Physics, a superb physics engine that has seen successful application in many major games and movies. It lets us model much more complex collision geometry than in SotS Prime. This greater level of detail goes a long way towards conveying the much larger range of scale in the game.
One of the questions I get asked the most is, “Will Sword of the Stars II ship with native support for 64-bit OS?”. The answer is most assuredly, “Yes!” In fact, we aimed the MARS2 engine to target both 32 and 64-bit builds since the first lines of code went in, a little over a year ago.
I hope this overview of the new game engine answers a lot of the questions people have been asking about SotS2 and maybe even a few that haven't been asked yet. As we head towards completion of the game in the coming weeks, we'll get into more of the fine details about the game itself, so stay tuned for our future dev diary entries!
Journey is very different on PS4, despite being exactly the same game
Journey is in a weird place on PS4. Its transition to Sony's new hardware very much mirrors the experience of its nameless protagonist... everything within the game looks very familiar, but the way it's actually viewed on this second outing is very, very different. Many people know about Journey this time around - they know what happens, and those who don’t expect to be wowed by this critically acclaimed
Hasta La Muerte’ Has Come For Your Soul
‘Hasta La Muerte’ Has Come For Your Soul
It’s fair to say that retro remakes are pretty popular on the App Store, in fact, it’s positively flooded with them.
It’s fair to say that retro remakes are pretty popular on the App Store, in fact, it’s positively flooded with them. Toss a pebble into the sea of apps that have been created to date and chances are that it will knock some game that’s taken some basic model from Tetris or Mario on the head before hitting the ground. To be clear, that’s not a negative thing, we love the retro vibe as much as developers seem to, and it’s great to see that Bulkypix seems to have taken a little inspiration from Pac-man to make its new game: Hasta La Muerte .
Dev Diary: City of Heroes' Mutant Pack
PCGamer.com routinely features Developer Diaries: tales of what goes on behind-the-scenes in the development studios making your favorite games.
PCGamer.com routinely features Developer Diaries: tales of what goes on behind-the-scenes in the development studios making your favorite games. This Dev Diary is titled " The Making Of: Super Booster V: Mutation " and was written by David Nakayama, City of Heroes' Art Lead and Floyd Grubb, Sr. Powers Designer.
We're celebrating the launch of the Mutant Pack by giving away 10 copies to our readers! Tell us who your favorite super mutant is and why in the comments and we'll send codes to our favorite ones today. Anyone that doesn't win can purchase the pack here.
Winners announced in the comments below! Thanks to everyone that participated.
David: Hey, folks. Today we'd like to share a little behind-the-scenes information on how the latest City of Heroes Super Booster came together. The Mutant pack is the latest in our series of 'Origin'-themed Boosters, and like all the previous entries, it includes new costume sets, new emotes and a unique power.
Floyd: Hi, I'm Floyd "Castle" Grubb, Lead Powers Designer at Paragon Studios. I worked with David to design a power to fit with the new theme.
David: So our first problem was simply picking aesthetic themes for something as open-ended and broadly-defined as 'mutation.' Because the word 'mutant' can refer to literally ANY deviation from the norm, every fan's probably got a different idea of what belongs in a set like this. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least 20 distinct aesthetic directions that fit the parameters of 'mutant,' and to truly cover the entire spectrum, we would need multiple Super Boosters.
Nonetheless, having done packs inspired by all the other origins previously, it made sense to continue the tradition, finish the series, and do a mutant-themed pack. We weren't trying to cover every single flavor of mutation in this one set alone of course, but we did come up with two really cool, distinctive flavors for our players that haven't been available in City of Heroes previously. Here's the lowdown:
BIOLUMINESCENT represents the change-from-within concept of post-humanity: with these parts, your hero or villain is clearly changing at a genetic leveland doing so in style--with tintable glows that really pop in dark environments. Given the new glow tech, we immediately looked to actual examples from nature for inspiration and got the set's name along the way. Production art from James Cameron's The Abyss also came in handy. The patterns themselves were designed to fit several different character types at once, and we tried to avoid anything too tech-y or too tribal.
As a set, the Mutant Pack gives you the ability to make new heroes or villains to fit a fairly wide range of aesthetic types: alien-corrupted, hell-spawn, genetic freak--all of that's doable with this set. And with 2 animated tails, wings, and a sword, there's a couple cherries on top.
And let's not forget the incredible Mutant Pack emotes created by animators Colin Brown and Nelson Tam with VFX support from Keetsie Braz da Cunha. Beside the all-new growl and showoff animations included in the Mutant Pack, we've got some fantastic costume change options. In City of Heroes, of course, your character can swap one costume for another with a cool animation, and this pack includes three of our best to date:
RAPID BOIL surrounds your character with bubbling green goo that then explodes off of you, revealing a new costume. Then there's ENERGY MORPH , which started conceptually as an organic pod enveloping the character but, to be more useful for more players, ultimately mutated into something else entirely—more like the energy spear from the Terminator movies. Last but certainly not least is DIMENSIONAL SHIFT , which is something you just have to see.
Floyd: So speaking of powers…..When it comes to Boosters, we always try to include some minor new functionality or power. In the case of the Mutant Pack, we knew it had to be a power that somehow “changed” the player, but how could one power represent so many different possibilities? There were some pretty far out suggestions (which you may see later), but we finally settled on “Secondary Mutation.” This new power applies a random buff (usually) to the player's character. Because these buffs are so varied, they will fit almost any characters' theme.
David: For me, as a player, the release of every new Super Booster feels like someone just dropped a bunch of newness in the COH toy chest, and I can't wait to try 'em all out. As an artist, the part I look forward to the most in our Booster Packs is seeing what our players do with them. They always come up with creative and unexpected new costume combinations that we never even imagined, and that's very gratifying. I hope you'll be just as excited as I am when you get to play with Super Booster V: Mutant.
If you want to know more about Super Booster V: Mutant, including videos of the new emote, check out the City of Heroes Facebook Fan Page.