Category: News

The PlayStation 4 has sold through over 91.6 million units worldwide, according to the latest figures from Sony. 

The Japanese company broke the news in a press release, where it revealed the console sold through over 5.6 million units during the 2018 holiday season, helping push it past the 90 million mark.

More than 50.7 million PS4 games were sold around the world during the holidays, taking lifetime physical and digital PS4 software sales to 876 million units. 

Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO John Kodera also talked up the performance of the PlayStation Network, and said the online service now boasts over 90 million monthly active users. 

You can see how the PlayStation 4 has performed since launching back in 2013 by checking out the graph below.

Cosmic Top Secret is an unusual game, about as close to non-fiction as video games get. Games like the Cold War board game Twilight Struggle may seek to simulate historical events, but Cosmic Top Secret, in an abstract and whimsical way, is autobiographical.

Produced by Copenhagen-based film and game studio Klassefilm, Cosmic Top Secret recounts the experience of game director Trine Laier as she discovers her parents’ role in the national security of her country of Denmark.

Laier’s background in game development goes back to the 1990s as an animator, and in 1998 she established her own company, Those Eyes, co-producer of Cosmic Top Secret. Here’s Laier in her own words on the topics of storytelling in games, personal journeys, and game design.

Cosmic Top Secret is produced by Klassefilm and co-produced by Those Eyes, hence it’s probably more like a joint venture taking advantage of our different backgrounds and mutual interest in telling ”real” stories, if possible as video games. We met at the conference Nordic Game seven years ago, when we were both scouting for business partners and possibilities in the cross-media area.

Games are by many still considered to be a waste of time, and that’s what we’re humbly aiming to change with Cosmic Top Secret. By working with serious matters that are usually dealt with in film, literature, art, graphic novels, etc. At the same time we totally honor games as a suitable form, if not better than any other media to tell this particular, for us important, story about being estranged from one’s origin. 

It is about both, in terms of the history of the Cold War and my parents’ role in that, what we call ”The Big Circle,” and ”The Little Circle,” about my personal relationship with my parents. You may ask, ”Why does it need to be personal?” It’s because we believe it’s through honest and detailed descriptions of other people’s lives that we reflect on and evaluate our own life. We believe those kind of themes can be dealt with both via mechanics, involving your body more directly than a film can, and via regular story elements.

For us [a personal experience] was quite suitable as the backdrop for an investigative game, where you have to explore and put bits and pieces together to form a bigger picture; where you the player, to a certain extent, can design your experience, like how much do you want to go in depth into specific areas and missions. 

About 50 percent of the game’s content is in optional missions. If you, for instance, take a special interest in early computer technology, you can freely choose to pick up all the ferrite cores for the ”Bits” dossier that are used as ”guiding coins” during the game, and if you find them all, you’ll get a video about cryptographs etc. 

If you’re more up for crazy (but true!) anecdotes, you can choose to complete the ”Khrushchev’s Poop” dossier and get the story about the Soviet leader’s visit in Copenhagen in 1964, where Danish Intelligence installed extra pipes in his hotel room to take out a stool sample because of rumors said he was seriously ill. He was not. 

Should you care more about how it was like to be platoon leader for the Danish queen in the Women’s Auxiliary Force, and be headhunted to the flight division O3 at Intelligence as my mother did, you can choose to follow that branch.

So many game premises are alike, and we believe there’s a vast potential for developing new interesting games with unseen, unheard of premises without compromising quality of gameplay. They may even add new angles to the development of gameplay.

We stuck to the initial idea of the game all the way through: You, the player, controls me trying to reveal what my dad worked on for real at Intelligence during the Cold War. It should consist of real people and real material and real feelings. And it should, as much as possible, integrate the story in the mechanics, and vice versa.

Actually, we aimed for developing the game’s mechanics and the story simultaneously, not favoring one from the other. That may just be an idée fixe, but it has encouraged us to keep prototyping on the mechanics, without exactly knowing what would happen in the story.

This was a method that was met with a lot of skepticism from the outside: “First you have to write the story and then you can do the game.” Instead we tried to form a structure of the possible story elements: we had game jams where we played around with those elements, and chose the ideas that seemed to correlate the best with the theme. For instance, we discovered there was a good connection between the story aspect, where you have to follow dad, and the mechanics that suited that aspect of motion. I would then follow my dad in reality with some sort of recording equipment, and be especially focused on capturing him while in motion.

In that way, we went back and forth with story and mechanics, and the ideas of fragile paper characters in a just as fragile paperworld (tip: throwing a hand grenade on the right spots can open secret passages) emerged, and we prototyped the best ideas. [Ideas were] pretty much based on the ‘natural’ abilities of paper: paper can crumble, fall apart, shred, glide as paper planes, etc. Then we mocked up the levels very roughly. Early in development we decided on a six-level structure, and to have each level represented by one side of a cube and each side divided in nine fields, meaning you need to collect nine objects for each level and 54 objects to complete the game.

It was, in my opinion, a good plan to decide on this structure early, and then keep an open mind to other aspects of the game during the further development. It’s never too late to add crazy ideas, but it’s impossible to change the game fundamentally.

When I followed my dad during recording and he accidentally fell and hurt himself while throwing a hand grenade, it became the turning point in level 1, because I realized there was something important for me, connected to the memory of a physically strong and active dad always protecting me, and the scary fact that he was getting old and fragile, and somehow it corresponded with the history of the little kingdom of Denmark and its role in the Cold War. 

The term ”need to know,” used in Intelligence, means you’re only allowed access to information you’ll need for your specific mission, nothing more. It became the emotional mission, so to say, to get to know dad as a human being and not only a dad or somebody who worked for Intelligence. We have worked with it as what you would call a C-plot in a film. The B-plot is about the relation between father and daughter. Whereas the A-plot is the main plot: What did they work on? Was dad a spy?

Around the same time I called Danish Intelligence and asked for permission to investigate my parents dossiers, which became the turning point in level 2. They were very kind and helpful and actually invited my parents (not me) for a ”declassification” meeting where they were briefed about what and what not they could talk with me about. But I’ve also talked with less helpful former employees at Intelligence who advised me not to proceed. 

So I’d say, under the googly eyes and the relaxed everyday chitchatting lies a more uncertain no man’s land kind of atmosphere, where you never really know when to stumble over invisible threads connected to automatically firing machine guns. It might be an imagined thread or unexplained subconscious fear of doing something wrong both in term of family traumas and national security, but I think that might be the root of the tension one may feel dripping from the trailer.

The eyes came on a little later in the process. Actually me and [producer] Lise Saxtrup where at a talk at Nordic Game and I was working on the model sheet for the characters on my laptop, when I maybe, just for fun, added those googly eyes to the dad model. It was hilarious, and when I showed it to Lise next to me, we were dying of laughter and ruining the talk we were supposed to be attending.

But actually [the eyes] solved a problem with communicating feelings. In the previous design it was only the mouth that could animate and that is not enough–the big white round eyes show clearly the different moods of the characters and they can easily be reused between characters, also making it possible to work cost-effectively with a cast of more than 30 personalities.

A piece of advice [for establishing your own style] would be to do silly stuff and believe in it: to encourage the team to not be afraid of trying something outrageous. I read a long ago that Walt Disney always asked his visual artists and animators for something more wild. “Yes, that’s great, but try to exaggerate it even more!”

Another bit of advice could be to combine, to crossbreed different genres, like what would happen if you mixed Warhammer with chick lit, etc. In our case it’s probably ’60s cool spy style The Spy Who Came in from the Cold mixed with a more humorous Fritz the Cat kind of style. I think we should initiate more visual jams – we operate a lot with game jams but actually the visual style is not up for jamming in the same way. I’m sure that there would come up some interesting styles, if we tried to do that more. 

The music is made by electronic composer and performer Bjørn Svin and the sound is designed by Anne Gry Friis Kristensen. Bjørn Svin composed some of the music as live sessions while we played early versions of the game.

For instance the track ‘Underverdenen’ (Underworld) was composed like that, while playing a level that took place under the paper tapes, so to say. If you fell down the holes of the paper tapes you would land in an abstract black world together with all the mistakes and bugs. That level later became the fourth level in the game and instead of having a dark underlying level under each level in the game, we introduced the sudden nightfall in each level and the dual idea of objects being easier to find in the dark, but at the same time it’s easier to get lost in the dark.

Anyways, Bjørn was part of the development from the very beginning and we talked a lot about the feelings operating in the game, especially those more subtle ones about feeling insecure and feeling like doing something you’re not allowed to do or not supposed to do.

Well, I think there’s a lot of tendencies here, one being the general opinion in the game business that we need to categorize games and be clear on the target group, style, genre etc. before anything else. It makes sense, but it also cuts down on the possible variations you could come up with before you reach decision makers who would actually be able to acknowledge the quality of your original game.

And yes, games are still perceived as childish, but you would also need to be pretty involved in following the indie game scene or triple-A [in order to find games that] actually try to do work with more subtle storytelling and mechanics; to know that there’s much more to be found in games than just having casual fun.

With Cosmic Top Secret, for instance, we’re dealing with quite heavy matters, but dealing with them in a humorous way and using a child character as the helper throughout the game. Together with the googly eyes it lead some people to think that this is only for kids, but on the contrary, it’s a game for the mature gamer on the lookout for something that actually reflects their life and feelings–a meaningful experience, we call it. Whereas you can find lots of games with huge amounts of storytelling, most of it is so very conventional and seldom surprising.

Grab whatever tools you have at your disposal and get something started: Write, draw, talk to a friend or record your thoughts, build paper or digital prototypes, test it out as early as possible. Ask yourself and your team, is there a theme? Is there a situation from your life that fills you with joy or haunts you and what is it about? Can it be formulated as a statement, a premise? Can it be played out as a game? Can you come up with mechanics that resonates with your statement? Or if you started with the mechanics, what kind of statement would suit? Can you exaggerate it more, make it wilder? Voila! There’s your concept. 🙂

Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa has suggested the company might one day move away from home console development as technology changes. 

In a recent interview with Nikkei (translated by Nintendo Everything), the recently appointed president — who replaced Tatsumi Kimishima back in June 2018 — stressed that “flexibility is just as important as ingenuity” in the business world, and that Nintendo must be able to adapt as the games industry evolves. 

Speaking more broadly, he explained the company will always strive to offer people around the world “innovative and unique ways to play games,” but that might not always mean building hardware like the Nintendo Switch and Wii. 

“We aren’t really fixated on our consoles. At the moment we’re offering the uniquely developed Nintendo Switch and its software — and that’s what we’re basing how we deliver the ‘Nintendo experience’ on. That being said, technology changes. We’ll continue to think flexibly about how to deliver that experience as time goes on,” commented Furukawa.

“It has been over 30 years since we started developing consoles. Nintendo’s history goes back even further than that, and through all the struggles that they faced the only thing that they thought about was what to make next. In the long-term, perhaps our focus as a business could shift away from home consoles — flexibility is just as important as ingenuity.”

You can hear more from Furukawa by checking out the full interview over on Nintendo Everything. It’s well worth a read.

Pol Vilaseca is senior economy designer at King, and Pietro Guardascione is senior director of envelope design at King.

Hero was an action RPG that was developed by King and soft launched during 2016 in different countries in Asia. In the game, you could choose among three heroes (warrior, mage or archer) to play through levels that consisted of sets of successive combats against groups of enemies of various types. Although the game was cancelled before making it to a global release, the design challenges that we faced during its development gave us some valuable learnings about designing mobile RPGs. The purpose of this article is to collect our experiences while designing some of the systems in the game.

The main loop of the game was rather simple. By completing quests players accumulated gold that could be spent buying new items. Stronger equipment increased the overall power of the hero, which in turn allowed quests of increasing difficulty to be played.

With the simple main loop described above, the overall player experience was determined essentially by 3 game systems:

A combat system, consisting of all the elements that contribute to the outcome of a combat and their inter-relations. As in many RPGs, these elements include player stats like attack, health and defense, chance of dealing critical damage, elemental or splash damage etc.

The outcome of a combat is determined through the combat equations that relate the stats of heroes to those of enemies. For instance, given the attack power of a hero and a monster’s health, the equations of combat determine the number of hits it will take to kill that monster.

A progression system, which consists of the set of rules that determine how the different hero and monster stats grow as the player progresses through the game. In Hero, progression was mainly driven by gear. The stats of a character were determined by the gear he had equipped. The higher the level of an item, the more it would contribute to the character stats. The current level of a hero determined the level of the gear that the hero could equip, and hence the stats that the hero would have.

A chest system, which was a random reward system through which gear was delivered. The chest system consisted of the different types of chests present in the game and the rules to which they were subjected (drop rates, frequency, item probabilities). There were chests of many types, each of which had its chances of delivering items of a given rarity.

Each of the systems described here could be analyzed on its own. However, the three systems were highly interdependent on each other.

For example, since the progression system was essentially driven by gear and gear was obtained by collecting chests, this meant that the chest system was the core driver of progression. Setting up the right chest rules and their drop frequency was crucial to fuel an appropriate progression rate for the heroes.

On the other hand, the progression system determined how the different hero and enemy stats scale. These in turn determine the outcomes of a combat. Hence, the combat system had to be carefully designed to accommodate the specific character progression we had designed. 

Finally, the outcome of a combat determined the chests that a player was going to get, which again connects to the progression system.

Once we understood these interrelations, it became evident that we needed a way to explore the consequences on the overall player experience that arose from each game system and its impact on the rest of the systems. We achieved this through a combination of mathematical modelling, prototyping tools and simulations.

In the following, we’d like to review some of these approaches.

Combat systems are at the heart of any action RPG. When a combat system is coupled to a progression system, they both need to be carefully designed to be compatible with each other. Otherwise, it is possible that a combat that seems to be balanced at some stage in the progression behaves in a completely different way at later stages.

To understand this, let’s consider a minimal combat system in which a hero and a monster are characterized only by two stats: attack and health. During combat, the hero will have to attack the monster several times until it runs out of health and dies. The number of hits it will take for the monster to die is given by the ratio:

N = H_E / A_H

where N is the number of hits, H_E is the health of the enemy and A_H is the attack of the hero. The higher the enemy health, the larger the number of hits it will take to kill him. The stronger the hero, the smaller the number of hits it will take him to beat the enemy. 

Although health and attack determine the outcome of a combat, these stats are “hidden” to the user. The only variable that the user perceives in practice is the number of hits that it will take to kill an enemy (or to get killed by it), and not the attack or the health on their own. Hence, we can say that the sensation of combat is given by the number of hits it takes to kill or die.

On different lines, the hero and enemy stats evolve following the progression system. This means that the parameters A_H and H_E depend on the hero level and the enemy level respectively. Hence, the number of hits it will take for a Hero of level x to kill an enemy of level y will be a function of both hero level and enemy level:

N(x, y) = H_E(y) / A_H(x).

A main requirement in the design of the game was to preserve the experience of combat through the whole progression. This essentially meant that a Hero of level 5 fighting a monster of level 7 would have the same combat perception as if the Hero was level 65 and fought an enemy of level 67. As long as the differences in hero and enemy levels were equal, the combat experience should remain invariant. This requirement can be expressed in a mathematical way by demanding that the function giving the number of hits depends only on the difference in the levels x – y, and not on the levels themselves,

N(x, y) = N(x – y).

This requirement imposes strong constraints in both the progression and combat systems. For a combat equation based on the ratio between health and attack, scale invariant combat requires stats to grow at a geometric rate. This means that the functions that give the player and monster stats have an exponential form,

A_H(x) = A • exp(a • x), and H_E(y) = H • exp(a • y),

where A and H are the base values for the hero attack and enemy health respectively. The parameter a sets the scale for the growth of stats from level to level.  Plugging the previous expressions for A_H and H_E into the formula for N(x, y) we obtain

N(x – y) = H / A • exp(–a • x – y)),

which clearly depends on the difference of levels x – y and not on the levels themselves. This ensures that the combat experience of a player will remain balanced at any scale.

More realistic combat systems include aspects like damage mitigation, critical hits or elemental damage. Special care has to be taken when setting up their corresponding equations of combat such that they depend only on the difference x – y.

Once we had a robust model for combat that would ensure the right scaling, we built a combat simulator in Python that calculated the number of hits it would take to kill a given enemy or to get killed by him. We used the tool to explore different values of the hero and enemy stats appearing in the combat equations. For each set of values, we visualized how the combat experience scaled when facing enemies of higher or lower levels. This allowed us to balance the hero and enemy stats and ensure that the combat experience satisfied all design requirements. Moreover, any new enemy type or item could easily be incorporated into our model and the tool allowed us to produce its corresponding stats with no cost at all.

Figure 1: snapshot of the combat simulation solving the combat equations.

Chests were the main element of the random reward system that deliver items from an item pool with a given probability. In many games, the pacing at which players progress is determined by the inflow of items. In these cases chests become core elements in the progression. It is then crucial to understand and control the rules of the chest system.

Roughly speaking, one can think about a chest as an abstract function that maps all possible items available in a game to a probability of dropping them. Different chest algorithms would be different mappings from the item space to the probability space.

After a large number of drops, the chest algorithm will be responsible for how the distribution of items in player inventories looks like. A variation on how items are mapped to probabilities can lead to very different player experiences.

When designing the chest system in our game, we created a simulation tool that would allow us to explore the evolution of player inventories after opening a given number of chests. In the tool one could set up different drop rules by fixing the mapping between items and probabilities of dropping them. For each rule we thought about, we could perform multiple runs in which several chests were opened and the status of the inventory was saved at every step.

The simulations allowed us to measure concepts such as the amount of chests that would be required to complete a section of the inventory, the number of chests needed to level up an item to a specific point, or the amount of in-game currency that a player needed to spend to obtain at least one legendary weapon. 

Having a clear way to explore how the chest rules impacted the player progression was crucial for determining the details and parameters of our random reward mechanics. We used the simulation to iterate the design of our chest rules until they delivered the player experience we wanted to provide.

Figure 2: Snapshot of the random reward simulation tool.

Once we had explored the dynamics emerging from the relations among different systems in the game, we wanted to have a global view on how they all fitted together and on how they impacted the player progression. For this purpose, we produced a tool to simulate the whole metagame and its mechanics in complete absence of gameplay.

The tool consisted of two parts:

1. A simulation engine containing a model with all the rules, systems and mechanics of the meta. This included the chest system, the gear system, the progression of character stats, the xp and gold rewarded at every quest …
2. A UI plugged into the engine with widgets to trigger all the actions a user could perform in the game.

Every time an action was performed (opening a chest, equipping an item, upgrading an item) the state of the player evolved according to the game rules in the engine. Data on the player state was collected at every step of the progression to visualize the evolution of the state.

This allowed the designers to manually play around with the metagame and get understanding and feel on how the different systems of the game were working together and impacting the hero progression. We could explore the long term progression allowed by a given set of rules in a matter of seconds. Moreover, we were able to add new metagame features to the simulation tool and understand how these interacted with the rest of the components already present in the game.

Figure 3: snapshot of the Hero metagame simulation tool.

Although we conceived the tool as a way to manually interact with the features of the metagame, once it was ready it could also be used to plug in automated agents programmed with different behaviors. By running simulations with millions of agents interacting with the metagame we could gather valuable information on different aspects ranging from distributions of times to achieve certain states in progression to the presence of potential loopholes in the chest system.

Metagames with many systems and complex economies lead to behaviors that are very difficult to anticipate. In these situations, game systems often require a considerable amount of mathematical modelling.

In our experience, simulating game systems is a very useful approach to understand how the different components of a game will behave and impact each other. New features can be added into the simulation for evaluating their effect on the player experience before implementing these on the real game. Building a simulation can help to validate, iterate and even reject the design of a system. Moreover, playing around in a simulation environment allows designers to build intuition on the emergent behaviors arising from each game rule.

We find Python to be a very appealing language for this type of approach, mainly due to its ease of use, its human readability and due to all the statistical and data visualization libraries it has available.

Overall, we believe that any game can benefit from the right combination of mathematical modelling and simulations during all phases in the design, from the validation of high level ideas to the tuning of the low level details when balancing the game systems.