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Epic Games Valued At $17 Billion

Reported on Venture Beat by respected games journalist Dean Takahashi, Epic Games are looking to raise an addition $750 million dollars, valuing Epic Games at an eye watering 17 BILLION dollars.

Fortnite maker Epic Games is raising $750 million, according to two sources who spoke to GamesBeat. Bloomberg reported the news first, but we have independently confirmed the details in our story.

The deal would give Epic a pre-money valuation of $16.3 billion, with a post-money valuation (the value of the company after the deal is done) of $17 billion. Epic Games is the developer and publisher of Fortnite, which has more than 350 million users. And it is also the creator of the Unreal Engine, a fundamental toolset for building many games (and increasingly, making movies and TV). Epic declined to comment.

A valuation on 17B would mark a hefty return on the earlier $825M Tencent investment, which resulted in Tencent holding a 40% minority stake in Epic Games.  Epic Games are not the only company looking to raise further capital.  Unity have long been rumoured to be looking at an IPO, with recent discussions heating up again.  You can learn more about both companies in the video below.

GameDev News


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Unity Fantastic Fantasy Asset Bundle

Today on the Unity Asset Store, they are running the Fantastic Fantasy bundle, a collection of Unity assets around a common medieval/fantasy theme with a consistent low polygon art style.  The bundle is organized into tiers, purchase a higher value tier you get all of the asset in the tiers below it as well.  The bundle assets consist of:

10$ Tier

  • Simple Fantasy UI
  • Fantasy Village Pack
  • Interface and Item Sounds

20$ Tier

  • POLYGON Fantasy Characters
  • 2000 Fantasy Icons
  • Low Poly Medieval Castle Pack
  • Tower Defence Pack
  • Fantasy Game (Sound FX)

30$ Tier

  • Stylized Fantasy Forest Environment
  • POLYGON Knights Pack
  • Fantasy Adventure Environment
  • Fantastic Village Pack
  • Low Poly Animated Animals
  • Emerald AI 2.0
  • Low Poly Terrain Polaris V2

The bundle runs until the end of June 2020, purchasing the bundle using this link provides a small commission to GFS (and thanks if you do!).  You can learn more about this bundle on the Unity blog or watching the video below.

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Get a job: Join Insomniac Games as a Lead Level Designer

The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!

Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Location: Burbank, California

Insomniac Games is searching for its next Lead Level Designer. This should be someone who’ll lead the Level Design team in the operation of designing, developing, and polishing game levels including level geometry, enemy encounters, puzzles, and unique gameplay. The individual in this position works closely with the project Leads, Design Director, Game Director, and/or Creative Director to help ensure game levels have cutting edge features, are creatively entertaining, and well balanced. This role will schedule team through the pre-production, production, and polish phases.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities include the following:

  • Works to make high level direction from the Creative Director a reality, and work with the other project leads to meet these goals
  • Works with Game Director and/or Design Director to establish concrete plan/s to accomplish the design goals of the project
  • Leading the team to craft unique geometry that allows for level composition to form memorable experiences.
  • Communicates level design goals for the project to team members and ensure they are understood
  • Manages design team and mentor individual designers, establishing goals for individuals and holding them accountable
  • Works with the Director of Design and/or Design Director to establish design processes; carry out implementation of those processes across the design team
  • Works with project management to schedule design planning and implementation
  • Performs reviews of game levels and provide feedback to the team
  • Works closely with all departments to investigate solutions that best fit with the products goals, and ultimate goals of the game
  • Ensures all design and implementation deliverables are up to Insomniac’s high standards of quality
  • Checks development progress against milestone deliverables and, if necessary, correct course
  • Identifies design gaps and work with the design team to find solutions
  • Other duties may be assigned

Supervisory Responsibilities: Directly supervises design team. Carries out supervisory responsibilities in accordance with the organization’s policies and applicable laws. Responsibilities include interviewing, hiring, and training employees; planning, assigning, and directing work; appraising performance; rewarding and disciplining employees; addressing complaints and resolving problems, in conjunction with the Director of Design.

Education and/or Experience:

  • Bachelor’s degree (B.A.) from a four-year college or university; seven to ten years related experience and/or training; or equivalent combination of education and experience.
  • Completed work on several published game titles.
  • Advanced knowledge and experience with level editing tools and scripting (Unreal Engine, Unity, or similar editors).
  • Intermediate knowledge of Maya or other major 3D modeling program.
  • Adobe Illustrator experience and Photoshop skills are a plus.
  • Working knowledge of Microsoft Office Suite.

Other Skills:

  • Awareness of emerging trends that inform modern game design. Ability to analyze these mechanics and apply them to current game designs if appropriate
  • Intimate knowledge of how games work and what makes them fun.
  • Mechanics and level design experience.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
  • Proven ability to work within a team environment

If this is the opportunity that you have been looking for, we’d like to hear from you. Please use the link below to submit your application.

Interested? Apply now.

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.

Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.

Looking for a new job? Get started here. Are you a recruiter looking for talent? Post jobs here.

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An EVE Online mini-game is helping researchers better analyze COVID-19 data

Every so often, EVE Online developer CCP Games kicks off a campaign called Project Discovery to leverage EVE’s sizable playerbase and help real-world scientists chew through data related to everything from outer space to the human body.

This time around, CCP has brought Project Discovery back online to help scientists better understand how COVID-19 impacts human immune systems during a pandemic that has weighed on much of the world’s population.

Project Discovery asks EVE Online players to partake in a mini-game during their real-time space travels where they’ll identify clusters of cells and, in turn, help scientists understand how infection alters different cell types.

“At present, we face a viral threat unlike any seen before, a novel coronavirus that seems to spread more rapidly than most while also causing a range of symptoms in its victims, making it difficult to combat. Through the use of the newly-developed flow cytometry simulators, you will aim to contribute to decoding this debilitating pathogen,” reads the EVE Online site.

“In doing so, you will participate in analyzing COVID-19 data, as well as other related flow cytometry charts, which will help scientists understand better how our immune systems are impacted by this novel coronavirus.”

These latest steps to help combat the coronavirus follow the end of CCP’s latest PLEX for Good campaign that raised $135,550 for the World Health Organization COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

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Devs can now dig around in the source code for three games from Blendo Games

Blendo Games has opened up the source code for three of the studio’s projects, granting fellow game developers the chance to poke around in each game’s code and see what make them tick.

Studio founder Brendon Chung shared as much in a tweet this afternoon, announcing that the source code for Gravity Bone, Thirty Flights of Loving, and Quadrilateral Cowboy have all been uploaded to the Blendo Games Github page.

It’s an excellent opportunity to learn about three games that have, between them, seen a fair share of awards and nominations from the Independent Games Festival, IndieCade, and SXSW. All three were built using the Quake II engine, and are shared under the GNU General Public License, though Blendo Games notes that this open-source license doesn’t cover any of the assets, including art, models, textures, and audio, used to construct each game. More info on each can be found on the studio’s Github.
 

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PICO-8 Fantasy Console

PICO-8 is perhaps the most popular of the fantasy consoles and if you are extremely quick, you can pick it up as part of the Itch.io Racial Justice bundle along with a ton of other development tools and indie games.  PICO-8 is described as:

PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs. It feels like a regular console, but runs on Windows / Mac / Linux. When you turn it on, the machine greets you with a commandline, a suite of cartridge creation tools, and an online cartridge browser called SPLORE.

It emulates a very limited virtual machine:

Display
128×128 16 colours

Cartridge Size
32k

Sound
4 channel chip blerps

Code
Lua

Sprites
256 8×8 sprites

Map
128×32 cels

Additionally PICO-8 has several built in tools including a sprite editor, sound editor, level editor and music editor, as well as tools for publishing and sharing your creations with out.  The underlying programming language is Lua and is documented here.  You can check out PICO-8 in action in the video below.

GameDev News


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wren Programming Language

Very similar in scope and purpose to the recently covered Gravity language, today we are looking at wren.  wren is a class based programming language that aims to bring Smalltalk like programming to a Lua sized footprint, with the intention of being embedded in application code.  Highlights of wren include:

  • Wren is small. The VM implementation is under 4,000 semicolons. You can skim the whole thing in an afternoon. It’s small, but not dense. It is readable and lovingly-commented.

  • Wren is fast. A fast single-pass compiler to tight bytecode, and a compact object representation help Wren compete with other dynamic languages.

  • Wren is class-based. There are lots of scripting languages out there, but many have unusual or non-existent object models. Wren places classes front and center.

  • Wren is concurrent. Lightweight fibers are core to the execution model and let you organize your program into an army of communicating coroutines.

  • Wren is a scripting language. Wren is intended for embedding in applications. It has no dependencies, a small standard library, and an easy-to-use C API. It compiles cleanly as C99, C++98 or anything later.

Wren is open source under the MIT license with the source available on GitHub.  You can also try out the wren language in your browser using this handy site.  You can learn more about wren in the video below.

GameDev News Programming


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A new Lord of the Rings mobile game is in the works

The new mobile games announcements keep on coming. NetEase and Warner Bros. have revealed that they’re working on a new strategy title based on The Lord of the Rings. Little is known about The Lord of the Rings: Rise to War apart from the genre. The Lord of the Rings: Rise to War release date is currently unknown, too. So it may be a while before you learn anything else.

“With NetEase, we have an excellent partner for The Lord of the Rings: Rise to War bringing gamers the mobile experience in this rich universe they are looking for,” says Warner Bros. president David Haddad. “This adaptation will unlock new opportunities for players to explore the iconic settings and characters of Middle-earth while utilizing their strategic skills in battle.”

This isn’t the first time NetEase and Warner Bros have worked together. NetEase is also working on a mobile RPG game with card elements based on Harry Potter. It’s called Harry Potter: Magic Awakened, and it’s currently being tested in China. Not much on a Harry Potter: Magic Awakened release date there, either – but as it’s now in beta, we have more hope that you can play that one sooner.

If you don’t fancy waiting to get your strategy fix, though, then you can always check out our best mobile strategy games article. We also have a list of upcoming mobile games, too, so you can see some of the best games releases that are over the horizon.

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For sale to good home: Warner Bros’ gaming division

CNBC is reporting that AT&T, the parent company of both the global telecom firm and the multimedia entertainment arm of Warner Bros. HBO, etc., is looking to sell off Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment to the tune of about $4 billion. 

If you’ve forgotten just how big that video game arm is, you wouldn’t be blamed. The entire video game division of Warner Bros. includes Rocksteady, Netherrealm Studios, WB Games Montreal, Monolith Entertainment, and 5th Cell, the developers of Scribblenauts

In the last decade these developers have been largely focused on developing games based on Warner Bros.-owned intellectual property. The makers of the Arkham series, the Middle-earth games, and other WB-based titles would be caught up in this sale. 

Seeing AT&T attempt to sell these developers is a particularly surprising turn of events considering how wildly successful all the listed franchises have been. According to CNBC, Take Two Interactive, EA Games, and Activision-Blizzard have all expressed interest. 

Of the above franchises, Netherrealm’s Mortal Kombat games represent the largest “game-first” property in the bunch. The rest are obviously adapted from properties that AT&T either owns or has exclusive rights to. It’s not clear if this deal would allow (or require) the studios to keep working in these franchises (which include DC Comics, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones) or if the sale would mean that they’d be working on non-WB-focused efforts. 

If this sale goes through, it probably does change the odds that anyone will adapt a video game out of Friends, at least. 

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Video Game Deep Cuts: The Last Of Us, The First Little Orpheus

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.


This, by my rough estimation, is edition number 199 of the Video Game Deep Cuts newsletter (now on Substack), crazily. That’s a few links – probably towards 50,000 over the entire life of the darn newsletter. But what’s going to be different for issue 200? Well, different links, for starters…

– Simon, curator

The Current: New Games To Consider

The Culture: Game Culture & Deep Dives

The Past: Game History

The Other Goodness

Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
Simon.