Category: News

Happy holidays! It’s a popular season for mobile games, what with so many people traveling for the holidays, and at next year’s Game Developers Conference you’ll get an inside look at how one of King’s latest and greatest was made.

As part of GDC 2019’s Mobile Summit, King will be presenting a postmortem look at its latest Candy Crush game in “Expanding the World of ‘Candy Crush’: A Postmortem on ‘Candy Crush Friends Saga’.”

Featuring principal game designer Jeremy Kang, studio lead (narrative design) Tracey John and senior director of visual development Robert Mackenzie, this session will walk through the process of how the development team expanded the game world and built upon this billion-dollar IP to create a more accessible game, including adding collection and other gameplay elements, redesigning the look of the characters, and retrofitting a new narrative foundation.

Make time to attend, and you’re likely to walk away with practical learnings about the game design, art vision, and strategy behind the making of this new Candy Crush game, as well as the goals and challenges of expanding the world of this successful IP.

For more details on this talk (and many more!) check out the GDC 2019 Session Scheduler. There you can begin to lay out your GDC week, which takes place March 18th through the 22nd at the (newly renovated!) Moscone Center in San Francisco. 

Bring your team to GDC! Register a group of 10 or more and save 10 percent on conference passes. Learn more here.​

For more details on GDC 2019 visit the show’s official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent company Informa

Equilinox is a soothing game of shaping nature, having players create their own ecosystems of plants and animals living in harmony. Through the flora and fauna that you place throughout the world, you’ll feed into the needs of your living beings, creating a healthy world.

Karl Wimble, developer of Equilinox, put a deep love for the nurturing, calming power of nature into this sandbox title, using his own happy experiences with plants to create a slower, more relaxed game.

Not only would it be relaxing to play, but in some ways, its nature also made it more relaxing to develop, creating ways for even the developer to unwind while creating it.

Intrigued to learn more about Wimble’s naturalistic approach to game development, we caught up with the man himself for a quick chat about what happens when game dev and mother nature cross paths. 

How a love of nature created Equilinox

I’ve always been very interested in nature and love being outside in general. When I was young my mum used to teach me all about the different birds and plants in our garden and I really enjoyed growing things of my own, especially vegetables! I still do that to this day, in pots, on the balcony, or anywhere that I can find space for it! So, back in 2015 when I was deciding what project to do next, I wanted to make something nature-related to allow me to tie together two of my passions: nature and game development.

When I was deciding what type of game I wanted to make, I first considered making something similar to a farming simulator, as I’ve always enjoyed growing vegetables myself. However, there were already a lot of farming games in existence, so I decided to go for something similar but with a bit less “structure” – something a bit more organic. That’s where the idea of creating and balancing ecosystems came from. 

At the start, I had plans for a very sandbox-y simulation game, but as the project progressed, my ideas for the game altered slightly and I started incorporating more aspects of city-builder style games. Concepts such as paying currency to buy new objects for the world, earning currency back from certain objects, unlocking newer and more interesting objects as you progress, and managing your world to ensure nothing gets out of balance.

The appeal of building a natural world

For me, personally, I’ve always found something inherently satisfying about nurturing something, putting effort into growing it, and watching it thrive and grow over time. It’s like a very physical representation of progress – you put in the time and effort to look after something and you get to see the results very clearly as the plant grows. It’s even more satisfying when the plant produces fruit or vegetables, so that you can literally harvest the fruits of your labor. 

So, I imagine that it’s a similar feeling with the wildlife in Equilinox – you have to make some choices and put in some effort to make the habitats suitable for living in, and you then get to see your work pay off as the plants and animals flourish. Plus, in Equilinox, this happens a lot faster than in real life, so the satisfaction comes a lot quicker. Combine that with completing tasks and continuously unlocking new species with different behaviors as you progress, and you get a rather satisfying experience.

On giving players a variety of worlds to build

The main variety in the game comes from the fairly large number of species and the various different biomes. Over the years that I’ve been working on Equilinox, I’ve continuously been adding in new species to the game, and tried to give many of the plants and animals their own unique behaviors and effects. Even the plant species mostly have their own different purposes in the ecosystem, such as providing food, improving the biome quality, healing sick animals, calming the bees, producing fruit or providing a place for birds to nest, etc. 

There were actually many more animals in Equilinox at one point during development, but I decided to cut back a bit to ensure that each animal really added some value and something unique to the game, instead of just being another generic bouncing animal with a slightly different model. There’s every chance that I’ll add more of these species back into the game in the future, once I’ve spent the time to give them interesting behaviors and characteristics.

Choosing which animals & animals to add to Equilinox

To start with, I was somewhat limited by my artistic skills. As a programmer, I don’t have much experience with 3D modeling, so the first few animals I added were ones that I thought would be simple to make. The sheep was the first animal in Equilinox because I could make it using just a white blob with a few bits attached! As the project went on, I did manage to improve my low-poly modeling skills a bit and was able to add some more interesting animals. 

I often chose animals based on the behaviors that I thought would be interesting to add to the game, such as the beavers that cut down trees and make dams, or bees which build hives and produce honey. As for choosing plants, it was usually either because I thought the game was lacking something, or because I’d seen a nice tree outside that I wanted to recreate! I found modeling nature to be quite relaxing, and I would often create a new plant model for fun, just to relax a bit after hours of complex programming.

When to move away from real-world animal behaviors

It wasn’t really an intention of mine to make the game particularly educational, but if Equilinox helps to get people more interested in nature and ecosystems then all the better! A lot of the choices I made in terms of species are based on reality, although sometimes I had to make choices for gameplay reasons. 

For example, in Equilinox, the bees build their beehive directly on the floor instead of in trees. This is because I wanted the beehives to take a while to be created, and most of the trees have a relatively short life length, so it would have been hard to even start producing honey before the tree died and fell down. There are various other things like this in the game where I had to favor gameplay over reality.

City-builder inspirations in a game of nature

As I’ve already mentioned, I got quite a bit of inspiration from city-builder games. I saw how they made a game out of building and managing cities and I, to some extent, tried to apply the same concepts to creating and balancing ecosystems. 

The main gameplay points that I thought people would enjoy were the world creation aspect, the balancing/managing aspect, the feeling of progression, and the simulation of nature. So, I concentrated a lot on these four things, making sure there was enough freedom and variety to allow players to be creative in making their own worlds, ensuring that there were various things to balance and manage to keep the game interesting, allowing players to progress by unlocking new species through the evolution system, and making sure that there were plenty of interesting behaviors and interactions that would make the simulation feel dynamic and engaging.

Creating a soothing experience

I’ve always wanted Equilinox to be a calm and relaxing experience – a lovely way to de-stress at the end of a busy day. It’s not a fast paced game and it’s not full of action; it’s a simple game where you can immerse yourself in low-poly nature, enjoy the dynamic evolving world, and slowly expand your areas and shape the ecosystems to your liking. I hope that the cute art-style, quirky animations, and the peaceful sound effects and soundtrack help to make it an enjoyable and completely stress-free experience!

I think the style of game lends itself well to being a more relaxing experience. It would be quite a challenge to create a relaxing action game or first person shooter, but it’s rather easier when it’s a sandbox simulation/management game like Equilinox. The fact that the theme is nature also helps as I’m sure many people would associate nature with relaxation. 

As I said, the sound effect and music were also meant to add to the calming feel of the game – I explained to the musician who was making the soundtrack how I wanted the music in Equilinox to be gentle, ambient, background music (almost like the sort of music one might associate with meditation), and I tried to choose natural simple sounds for the UI sound effects; nothing too electronic sounding.

The gameplay itself it meant to be pretty stress free – it’s a very casual game; you don’t have to have your eyes glued to the screen the whole time, no terrible disaster is going to occur and require you to suddenly react, you can go away and come back again, and there’s no chance of you really losing much progress. There are also no time pressures of any sort; if you want you can just enjoy watching the birds make their nests for a while or watch the beavers as they go around collecting sticks to build their lodges. There are no punishments for not progressing fast enough.

On taking care of yourself during development

I’m extremely lucky – I love game development, it’s a huge passion of mine, and I get to do it every single day, so I have nothing to complain about on that front. However, spending all day every day in front of a computer is not the best for my health or sanity, so I do ensure that I take enough breaks, get outside, and meet with friends on a regular basis. 

There were times during the last years where I didn’t put so much importance on this and just concentrated on making progress with the game but it would inevitably lead to a burn out, eventually. So, I do put a lot of importance into having a good work-life balance, and this is something that I also try to get across in my devlog videos that I do each week on my YouTube channel. As for staying relaxed while actually working, I tried to mix up my tasks quite a bit to keep things interesting; for example, doing coding during the morning and then 3D modeling in the afternoon. It just helped to stop me getting too bogged down or burnt out on any particular task.

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.

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[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from video game industry ‘watcher’ Simon Carless (GDC, Gamasutra co-runner), rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend.

This week’s highlights include a multitude of ‘best of’ lists of the top games of the year – from video through group round-ups to individual highlights. And there’s also pieces on the current (The Outer Worlds & Atlas) and classic (NES history, the quarter-century of Digital Extremes), among others. 

Happy holidays to you and yours, by the way! Hope you’re having a wonderful one – with a little time off to click on links about video games.

Until next time…

– Simon, curator.]

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5 trends that defined the game industry in 2018 (Kris Graft / Gamasutra – ARTICLE)
“The year 2018 lasted approximately 30 normal years. From studio closures to the Fortnite phenomenon, here are the trends that defined the game industry in the longest year in the history of humankind. [SIMON’S NOTE: also see 5 events that rocked the game industry in 2018​.]”

Staying With Power: 35 Years of NES History – Museum Tour (Kelsey Lewin / YouTube – VIDEO)
“Helping plan and curate the museum at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo was one of my favorite things I’ve done this year. This video is the guided tour that we never quite got to give — with lots of history and extra information. I also included a bit about our planning process and challenges we faced at the end if that sort of thing interests you. [SIMON’S NOTE: masterminded by the Video Game History Foundation‘s Frank Cifaldi, Kelsey, and many others besides, this was an AMAZING pop-up museum exhibit!]”

The creators of The Outer Worlds on learning to make better RPGs (Wes Fenlon / PC Gamer – ARTICLE)
“I recently visited Obsidian Entertainment to see the studio’s new RPG The Outer Worlds, which I called a blend of Firefly and Fallout… You can read a lot more about The Outer Worlds in my feature, but I also talked to Tim and Leonard about their careers making RPGs, and how that experience and working at Obsidian is affecting this new game. Here’s what they had to say.”

The brilliance of video game maps (Various / Eurogamer – ARTICLE)
“Hello! Earlier this year, Thames and Hudson published a beautiful book on literary maps. It’s called The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands… A few of us ordered the book to arrive on day one. And as we read through it, our thoughts inevitably turned to video games and their own relationships with maps. Below you’ll find some of the things we ended up thinking about.”

Atlas is a pirate MMO where players run the seas (Matt Cox / RockPaperShotgun – ARTICLE)
“There’s a pirate MMO on the horizon, and its sea-farers look ambitious… I spoke to project director/lead programmer Jeremy Stieglitz and creative director Jesse Rapczak over Skype. We chatted about singing to stave off boredom on voyages, player politicking, ship combat as a team sports game – and a plan to save every player before they die of old age.”

Heavily Pixelated: S01:E07 – Shane (Heavily Pixelated – PODCAST)
“Hosted by veteran writer and TV host Scott C. Jones, Heavily Pixelated examines the moments when gamers are at their most vulnerable, and the ways video games helped them endure those difficult moments. Half Freudian-style therapy session, half celebration of a particular video game,.. When his parents separate, Shane uses a vintage NES game to reunite his newly fractured family.”

Xbox is poised to dominate the next console generation (Jessica Conditt / Engadget – ARTICLE)
“Well, this is certainly a surprise. Xbox has been the bumbling underdog of the eighth console generation, playing catch-up to Sony’s PlayStation 4 and watching from a distance as the Nintendo Switch reignited the passion of video game fans worldwide. However, over the past five years, Microsoft has doggedly climbed its way out of a PR and reputation pit with items like the Xbox One X and the Adaptive Controller as well as its public support of cross-console play.”

From Epic Pinball to Warframe: 25 years of Digital Extremes (Tom Senior / PC Gamer – ARTICLE)
“Today Digital Extremes is known for its big free-to-play hit shooter, Warframe, but the studio has been around since PC gaming’s early days… Founder James Schmalz started out learning coding tidbits from magazines before working alongside Epic luminaries Tim Sweeney and Mark Rein. DE’s story is one of a studio that has fought hard for the opportunity to create its own property in an industry that’s often tough on mid-sized independent developers trying to break out.”

The 15 Best Video Games Of 2018 (Andrew Webster / The Verge – ARTICLE)
“It’s hard to top a year like 2017… But this year was also surprisingly strong, offering up an incredibly varied mix of interactive experiences. There are the blockbusters, of course, like the free-wheeling Spider-Man and the meticulously detailed Red Dead Redemption 2. But 2018 was also a fantastic year for smaller games.”

Market correction in esports? (Ben Fischer / Sports Business Journal – ARTICLE)
“Esports insiders are increasingly convinced that many team organizations are overvalued and a market correction is coming. In the two years since traditional sports teams started acquiring esports organizations, faith in the long-term potential of video games has grown stronger. But pessimism about the short- and medium-term prospects of esports teams is also growing, as spending pressures grow faster than revenue.”

Gamasutra’s Best of 2018: Bryant Francis’ top 10 games (Bryant Francis / Gamasutra – ARTICLE)
“Amidst all the challenges, a lot of great developers put out some seriously great games this year, and we’re getting a lot of chances at Gamasutra to celebrate them this week. Today, here’s some of the games that your humble contributing editor/video producer has truly enjoyed in 2018. [SIMON’S NOTE: also see some really well-considered lists from my other colleagues, including from Chris Kerr, from Alissa McAloon, from Alex Wawro, from Emma Kidwell, and from Kris Graft.]”

Frank Lantz – Director of NYU’s Game Center and Creator of Universal Paperclips(YCombinator – PODCAST)
“Frank Lantz is a game designer and Director of the NYU Game Center. He cofounded Area/Code Games and most recently released a game called Universal Paperclips in which you’re an AI that makes paperclips.”

The 50 best games of 2018 (Polygon staff / Polygon – ARTICLE)
“A list of the best games of the year is more useful, more thoughtful and more complete, we believe, if it accumulates all year long. That’s why we made a change. Throughout the year, the Polygon team collected its game of the year list in real time. We updated the list as new games made the cut. Now, with 2018 in the books, we’ve reorganized that list, ranking entries into a Top 50.”

 

‘They make him feel normal’ – the role of video games in a children’s hospice (Keith Stuart / The Guardian – ARTICLE)
“I’m watching Shay play video games in a big, bright social area at the Keech children’s hospice in Luton, where he is a regular and very enthusiastic visitor. “Whenever he comes here, I know the staff need a rest when he leaves,” says his father, Alan. “He’s a character. In a way, the disability has made him who he is – with the family sarcasm added on.””

Tim Rogers Roasts The 2018 Games Of The Year (Tim Rogers / Kotaku – VIDEO)
“So, so many good video games came out in 2018 that I knew for sure I wanted to do a video about my favorite games of the year. However, I didn’t have time to also do a “worst” games of the year video. So I decided to combine the two ideas: click play and listen to me say the worst, most bluntly honest things I can think of to say about my absolute favorite games of 2018.”

Heroes of the Storm eulogy: For once, Blizzard couldn’t balance the casual and competitive (Rowan Kaiser / Venturebeat – ARTICLE)
“Heroes of the Storm isn’t dead. But it isn’t alive, either. Blizzard Entertainment’s announcement this week that it was ending Heroes esports entirely, shifting developers off the game, and “changing the cadence” of updates effectively stated that the game was shifting away from active development. The maudlin tone of the piece, even though it said the game was continuing development, made it fairly clear: Blizzard will support Heroes as it is for a while, but it’s halting its attempts to make it a hit.”

In 2018, Video Game Developers Took Unionization Seriously (Dante Douglas / Waypoint – ARTICLE)
“At the Game Developers Conference in March of this year, International Game Developers Association chair Jen McLean—along with other representatives of the IGDA—were met at a roundtable with a standing-room-only crowd eager to speak loudly about issues that had been too often relegated to whispered asides and quiet addendums. Crunch. Gendered pay parity. Workplace culture. Frustrations that had been long considered untouchable by game development culture.”

‘Fortnite’ Dance Lawsuits: The Carlton, the Floss, the Milly Rock, What Is Going On? (Brian Crecente / Variety – ARTICLE)
“When is a dance a dance and not just a move, and can you copyright it? That seems to be the lynchpin question in a series of lawsuits filed this month against “Fortnite” creator Epic Games by a rapper, an actor, and an Instagram star.”

How Crowfall is trying to redefine open world PvP in MMOs (Steven Messner / PC Gamer – ARTICLE)
“Crowfall, which was first kickstarted to the tune of $1.7 million back in 2015, is an ambitious PvP-centric MMO with one unique twist: Eventually one side reigns supreme. Instead of having persistent servers where players are expected to make characters that last indefinitely while fighting an endless tug of war, Crowfall centers around impermanent campaigns that span weeks to (eventually) months.”

Welcome to Hades – Developing Hell Episode #1 (Noclip / YouTube – VIDEO)
“In the first episode of our series covering the development of Hades, we meet the team at Supergiant Games who are preparing to launch in early access and finish their announcement trailer. All in preparation for Hades’ secret public debut at The Game Awards.”

 

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[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at tinyletter.com/vgdeepcuts – we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to [email protected] MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra & an advisor to indie publisher No More Robots, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

The folks Discord snuck in here today at the end of 2018 to announce they’ve raised $150 million in another round of funding led by Greenoaks Capital. 

The company – which the new investment values at $2.05 billion – seems to be riding high after the recent full-fledged launch of its own in-client games store, replete with Early Access system and an attractive 90/10 rev-share split in devs’ favor. It now claims a global userbase of over 200 million.

Prior investor Tencent also put some money into this funding round, alongside Firstmark, IVP, Technology Opportunity Partners and Index Ventures. 

In this GDC 2011 talk, Valve’s Mike Ambinder explores how the company is making use of biofeedback (the measurement, display, analysis modification, manipulation, and response of psychological signals) to both explore new avenues of gameplay and improve in-house playtesting processes.

Using Valve’s own Portal 2, Left 4 Dead 2, and Alien Swarm as examples, Ambinder explains how the studio measured players’ skin conductance response, heart rate, and eye movements to design titles that effectively toy with player’s psychological limits.

It was an insightful talk that’s definitely still worth watching, so developers shouldn’t miss the opportunity to do so now that it’s freely available on the official GDC YouTube channel!

In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its accompanying YouTube channel offers 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 or VRDC 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 company Informa