Author: sick skills

Where do we go from here?

It was a common topic of conversation at VRDC Fall 2017 in San Francisco this week, as developers and other industry types try to suss out what the future holds for virtual- and augmented-reality experiences.

XEODesign chief and game designer Nicole Lazzaro tackled the topic in a talk at the show about what the future looks like for mixed-reality, outlining a number of possible futures and walking devs through what they can expect to do to get there.

“I believe that where we are now is not where we’re going to be…we’re going to have whole new genres come out of this thing we call virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality,” she said. “As designers, it’s our job to think about where we’re going.”

Lazzaro is currently working on the VR game Follow the White Rabbit (pictured), so it’s fitting that she compared virtual reality experiences to “taking a trip down the rabbit hole to explore Wonderland.” With that in mind, she encouraged fellow developers to view mixed-reality experience design as the future of this technology: the point after we grow comfortable with virtual reality and augmented reality and blend the two, in terms of both technology and design.

Her talk was full of interesting suggestions, including five techniques game designers can use when creating mixed-reality spaces intended to have strong, meaningful narratives.

“I want narrative spaces to do one thing: give me the feels,” she said. “I want to feel amazed and connected to my friends, for more than 15 minutes.”

For Lazzaro, a “narrative space’ is basically any space that evokes a series of emotions. Referencing her famous “4 Keys 2 Fun” philosophy of game design, she encouraged developers to try and make mixed-reality games that encourage serious fun, hard fun, fun with people — anything beyond easy fun, which refers to the sort of approachable 15-minute games that VR/MR designers are already doing well.

“In the MR space, most games only deliver one: easy fun,” she said. “It’s a great experience, but then you don’t have a reason to go back there again.”

The world is your genre

If you want to get to a point where the players of your VR/MR game are coming back for more, over and over again, you need to design a world with both breadth and depth.

“The world itself is the genre,” said Lazzaro. “And interaction with the world is the game.”

She predicts a future where mixed-reality game design heavily involves players interacting and playing within an environment that tells its own story. As an example, she references how the fictional Star Trek Holodeck tech fills an empty room with highly-detailed scenes, places the characters spend as much time exploring and interacting with as they do traversing.

That may not be technically feasible now, says Lazzaro, but it’s something game designers should be moving towards now if they want to be making more meaningful VR/MR games.  

Gameplay is all about depth — literally

“If you can’t play your game with a depth map alone, just with the depth, then you really don’t have a virtual- or mixed-reality game,” said Lazzaro. “If all of your action is in 2D, that’s great, but it doesn’t need to be in VR an it’s not going to be new or interesting.”

This may seem obvious, but Lazzaro cautioned that most game designers are instinctively used to designing within the bounds of flat screens. From her perspective we still haven’t fully explored what we can do when everyone has easy, convenient access to depth as a game design tool, and designers should be exploring that axis now.

To use depth in a meaningful way, she said, you want to think about making things that nest or interlock; things that open and close, or nestle within each other.

This encourages to players to reach in and play with things in your world — and of course, that means you have to make sure those objects are well-made and stand up to close scrutiny, since players will want to pull them close and look at them. 

Progress through the world can be your game’s story

“If the world is changing as you move through the game, then that world is going to feel mch more alive,” said Lazzaro. “You want to be sure that the player feels like they made a difference, like they changed the world.”

As an example, Lazzaro calls back to the film “The Matrix” and the points in that film where the world changes because the viewer’s perspective shifts.

If you can give your players a similar sense of changing the world (or at least, their understanding of the world) based on their actions, you’re on the path to creating a mixed-reality game that’s fun for more than 15 minutes at a stretch.

Make NPCs that can be explored

“We really want NPCs to be explorable, just like a space is more explorable,” said Lazzaro. “It’s not necessarily realism, either; NPCs will be very different in mixed-reality.”

The suggestion here is that characters in your game gain a new dimension of meaning when a player can walk up and talk to them in VR/MR. That doesn’ tmean you need to make your NPCs realistic human doppelgangers; it’s okay to create characters that are artful, animated, or otherwise simplistic as long as they can be explored by the player.

By that Lazzaro means that your NPCs should be compelling, they should ask questions, and they should offer choices to the player. Most importantly, says Lazzaro, you should think about designing NPCs the same way you should think about designing narrative spaces in VR/MR — you want them to have a sense of depth that the player can explore.

Don’t skimp on player customization — it can be a key narrative tool, even in VR/MR

“When we look down, we see ourselves in the world,” said Lazzaro. “The question to ask for your design team is, then, what can you do increase the storytelling potential of the player character?”

She cautioned devs to always “leave room for the player” in your game design. Rather than shoehorning the player into your vision of what the game should be, try to leave room in your narrative and your game world for the player to express themselves. 

You might fill your narrative spaces with objects players can pick up and put on themselves, for example, or you could implement interactive ways for them to leave a mark on the world.

Also, don’t forget that you can give players room to shift their own narratives — at least temporarily — by trying on different bodies in VR/MR.

“You can be male, you can be female, you can be big, you can be small,” said Lazzaro, noting that VR games like Mindshow let players do this and then set up ways (with mirrors, for example) for the player to see and identify with their new form.

In closing, Lazzaro encouraged developers exploring virtual-, augmented- and mixed-reality game design to think more deeply about what kinds of fun they foster in their work. Years from now, she reasons, the VR/MR games that stand out will be the ones that give players room to have meaningful experiences, letting them explore, dig into, and change the world around them.

Final Fantasy Brave Exivus developer Gumi has reclaimed its website from a band of hackers that gained access to the site and seemingly a smattering of Gumi’s other files this past Thursday.

According to a record of the events collected by one NeoGAF user, a hacker under the moniker ‘HaxAC’ replaced the developer’s website with a taunting image and ransom demand yesterday afternoon. 

The hacker in question claimed that it had access to more than just the website, threatening to release source code for a number of Gumi’s games if the developer did not send between 75-300 bitcoin (roughly $266k-$1.1 million) within the timeframe specified. 

“Your security is a joke. Fortunately, we will not be touching any of your files,” read Gumi’s hijacked website Thursday afternoon. “But it would be quite unfortunate if the source codes of your (9?) games were to say, LEAK. Well, you know what, we don’t actually feel like leaking anything today. But, we do feel greedy.”

The intruder than reportedly distributed roughly $40 worth of in-game currency to players before the game itself went down for ‘emergency maintenance’ shortly after. The developer has since reclaimed its web pages and released a statement via Facebook to say the game would remain offline as it ensured “the integrity of the game system including all game data and players’ personal information”

“We have determined upon investigation that this disruption was caused by someone who gained unauthorized access into our system for the FFBE game, and made a threat to our hosting company,” reads the post. We are currently conducting maintenance to ensure the integrity of the game system including all game data and players’ personal information.”

“We would like to assure all players that this matter is of utmost importance to us. We sincerely ask that you bear with us in the meantime while our teams are hard at work, trying to resolve this matter, and resume the game services as soon as practicable.”

Pierre Sylvain ‘Pehesse‘ Coq released his quirky visual novel / fighting game hybrid Honey Rose: Underdog Fighter Extraordinaire one year ago. I talked to him about his latest project, unique payment models, and the state of the game industry at large.

I was looking to develop a player-friendly model where they could express their support towards something they’d like. Unfortunately, while I’m proud of the game and glad of how it was met by some players, I can’t count Honey’s business model as a success, as to this day, the game has sold an incredibly low amount of copies relative to its number of players (that, on the other hand, is one of the model’s wins). On Steam, the game has sold 199 copies for over 20,000 players, which makes for an even smaller ratio of sales compared to traditional F2P.

There are a number of reasons for which the model failed, many of them stemming from the game’s quality, appeal and marketing (or lack thereof), so I still believe in the theoretical potential of the model applied to something with a bigger and better track record, but as it stands, I will not be able to attempt it again until my own financial situation gets much more stable. For Pachacuti, I will have to go through the now classic pipeline of crowdfunding and traditionally priced release, and hope for the best!

I’m currently working on Pachacuti, a 2D modular action-platformer. I make it using Construct 2, for its ease of prototyping, and target desktop PC for now, with plans for console release down the line if the finished game turns out all right! The game is set in an Incan inspired environment and uses 2D tradigital animation, meaning digitally hand drawn imagery reproducing the workflow of traditional animation. To see it all in motion, you can check out the devlog here.

It’s intended to be a small, replayable series of linear levels where the player’s choice of playstyle (a heavier focus on platforming or combat) will determine the challenges that they face. It’s essentially an “exercice de style”, a smaller-scope project where I try to work on the focus and quality of the game, rather than explore new genres, mechanics or concepts.

My dream would be to make it an experience newcomers to the platforming genre would enjoy, and act as a gateway to the breadth of other platformers out there, yet still manage to hold experienced player’s attention enough to eventually be run at an event like AGDQ. Admittedly, that’s the long term goal, the short term plan is “simply” to make the tightest possible 2D platforming experience I can put together!

In short: make gifs! Animated footage of the game in action, or of work in progress usually has been met with the best kind of audience reaction. There are so many games out there now, people simply have to leisurely scroll down their timeline to stumble upon a few dozens. To catch their eye, it’s important to have something that “looks” interesting first and foremost, before diving into the intricacies of why your game might actually be of interest at all.

I’ve also been posting about the game’s development every step of the way to try and be as open and transparent about the process as possible, both in an effort to engage the audience on a “development journey” alongside me, keep my motivation up, and manage the audience’s expectations by sharing the successes and failures, the intentions and questions, the speedy progress and the crippling doubt. [Players’] expectations often become an important factor to handle as early as possible to avoid creating confusion and potentially devastating misunderstandings.

Unfortunately, I have a pretty sour outlook on the industry at the moment as it seems we are knee deep in controversies, issues and all around negativity stemming from a number of wildly different sources. I’m hoping to participate and help promote a more positive attitude towards all aspects of gaming as a whole, from the way games are made and presented to their critical reading and reception.

It saddens me that we ultimately find ourselves in situations where we’re pitted against each other, where devs are afraid of their audience, where journalists are viciously attacked when speaking out and where players are preyed upon by conning monetary practices.

Of course, I don’t believe in “too much positivity” as a solution to all issues, but as far as the current climate goes, we need a much stronger push from people who wish to have a positive impact on their favorite aspects of the medium, as silence at this point only helps spread the overall toxicity. It may “just be games”, but more than ever, we need good people to speak up and do something, else we drown in the noise and furor from those who only wish us harm.

Thankfully, that’s where I’d say there’s a positive to look forward to: the tools to make more diverse games are accessible, and the means to communicate about them are widely available, so every one out there can be a force of change and good for the medium if they care to be one. It all starts, and ends, with us!

Epic Games has managed to rile up PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds developer Bluehole by announcing a new battle royale mode for its own game, Fortnite.

It might’ve seemed like a relatively innocuous reveal, but the South Korean studio isn’t happy at all. 

In a press release fired out this morning, Bluehole vice president Chang Hang Kim expressed frustration at Epic Games — which incidentally creates the Unreal Engine 4 that powers Battlegrounds — for endorsing Fortnite’s new mode. 

“We’ve had an ongoing relationship with Epic Games throughout Battlegrounds’ development as they are the creators of UE4, the engine we licensed for the game,” he explained.

“After listening to the growing feedback from our community and reviewing the gameplay for ourselves, we are concerned that Fortnite may be replicating the experience for which Battlegrounds is known.

Hang Kim also seems irritated by the fact that Epic cites Battlegrounds as the inspiration behind Fortnite: Battle Royale. 

“Yeah, we made a PvP mode for Fortnite. We love battle royale games like Battlegrounds and thought Fortnite would make a great foundation for our own version,” wrote Epic’s worldwide creative director Donald Mustard in a post on the PlayStation blog. 

It’s a comparison that’s clearly upset Bluehole, which claims the statement “was never discussed with us, and we don’t feel that it’s right.” The studio added it may take “futher action,” but it’s unclear what that means, and where it would stand legally if it chose that route. 

After all, it’s worth remembering that PlayerUnknown himself, Brendan Greene, cut his teeth working on battle royale mods and modes for other titles like ARMA 2 and H1Z1.

You can compare the two titles for yourself by checking out the Fortnite: Battle Royale trailer at the top of the page.