Category: News

In this GDC 2018 talk, Owlchemy Labs’ Alex Schwartz and Devin Reimer break down the successes, failures, and lessons learned during the development of Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality.

The duo provide early development videos, failed prototype interactions, and share the horrors of building and implementing portals, interacting with characters in room-scale, zone-based teleportation, and managing performance.

It’s an insightful talk that’s definitely 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 UBM Americas.

An original Umihara Kawase (a Japanese platforming game developed by Studio Saizensen for the Super Famicom) developer has released video of the first two prototypes of the game, showcase drastic differences between early versions of the game and its final release.

While the YouTube video of the prototypes is in Japanese, the auto-translated English subtitles are actually pretty accurate and gives enough information to be useful for curious developers.

It’s always fun to see what changes throughout development, especially for games published outside of America. 

A Twitter thread by developer Brandon Sheffield (and Gamasutra contributor) explains how the design and name of the main character was decided from the start, but because of uncertainty around what kind of game it would be, two prototypes were developed first on the X68000 (a computer exclusive to Japan). 

In the first prototype, players could dig trenches and connect them to water and flood enemies out. There was also a pump used to attack them, but it was never implemented due to trouble with the water/trench system. After lots of trial and error the developers realized it wouldn’t work.

Instead, the team moved on to prototype two, which went in a completely different direction. Rather than digging and draining water, players would connect and break open doors in order to flood certain areas.

The way you attack enemies in this version is to jump on their heads, stun them, and then throw them out of the level. But killing enemies right away (and I presume so simply) wasn’t so interesting, so they threw that idea away. pic.twitter.com/sC5xxS0Ayj

— brandon sheffield (@necrosofty) November 20, 2018

There was an issue in prototype two where enemies were too easy to defeat, so in an attempt to figure out a more technically interesting way to attack enemies, the developers tossed around the idea of shooting something out of a wire to capture them. 

They had the sudden realization – what if you could attach that wire to everything? So it’s from all that trial and error – water, gates, and ultimately “what’s an interesting way to attack and capture enemies,” that the final unique physics-based design of Umihara Kawase sprung. pic.twitter.com/r5WgeCoe1J

— brandon sheffield (@necrosofty) November 20, 2018

Thus, the final version of Umihara Kawase was born. 

Daniel Mullins suddenly came to prominence in indie development for his unique and metafictional game Pony Island back in 2016.

Now he’s released The Hex, another mysterious and multifaceted game that includes sections from wildly different genres: point-and-click adventure, platformers, fighting games, top-down shooters, Japanese-style RPG, turn-based tactics and first-person puzzle-solving, to tell a cohesive story, in a way like Six Characters In Search Of An Author. (Six Game Protagonists In Search Of A Developer?)

It’s already become a hit, gaining a Very Positive rating on Steam at over 100 reviews and a laudatory review from RockPaperShotgun.

Here, Daniel Mullins tells us a bit about how he put The Hex together, from his creative process to the challenges of constructing a game that covers so much design ground.

My process, if you can call it one, is very haphazard! I think it’s something I could improve upon going forward. I seem to acquire a handful of exciting ideas that pop into my head while I’m not working. I try to think about how this or that idea will fit into the overarching structure of the game but, ultimately, if it gets me excited then I force it to fit in somehow. Eventually I construct a playable section of the game that is far more than a prototype (it usually has final art assets, sound, etc.) but is still a rough draft. Much of the cohesion that The Hex seems to have comes from making fairly large edits to the rough draft. This is a process that happens over a long stretch of time with a lot of playtesting and reflection. A lot of the foreshadowing and tying together of various story elements happens in edits.

I used Unity for both The Hex and Pony Island. This was the perfect tool for The Hex as it easily supports the development of both 2D and 3D games. 2D games in Unity are really just 2D assets sitting on a flat plane in a 3D scene. So it really isn’t much of a technical hurdle to have 2D and 3D scenes in the same game; I think it isn’t done as much due to convention.

As for easing the development of multiple genres, I was able to share things between the chapters like the dialogue system, the point-and-click interaction system, save file system, etc. However, the differences between the game genres included in The Hex were great enough that they all required plenty of unique systems and code that only served the purposes of a single chapter/genre. This was a lot of work! It was eased to a degree by my experience doing smaller games and game jams. I have made turn based tactics games, platformers, shooters, and RPG’s before.

I really enjoyed making the Final Fantasy-esque RPG as well as the turn-based tactics game within The Hex. There’s something that I find immensely satisfying about creating little bits of data such as items, upgrades, special moves, etc. I could make little icons with associated stat boosts and special powers all day… Why do I make narrative games instead of roguelikes?!

I think the two chapters that would work best as their own games would be Rust’s chapter (turn-based tactics) and ???’s chapter (first person puzzle game similar to The Witness). Both had the potential for interesting mechanics that were far from being exhausted by the ~1 hour segments they got in The Hex. I’d be especially excited to continue creating Waste World, the post-apocalyptic turn-based tactics game.

I pulled a bit of (fictional programmer character) Lionel Snill’s character from my own experience but he’s largely a fictional creation. This was different earlier in the ideation process. I imagined that the character would directly represent me and his name was going to be “Lienad Snillum” (my name backwards). As more details fell into place his character drifted a bit and I renamed him. I wouldn’t want to be mistaken for that guy in his final incarnation, haha. I do find that writing for a game developer character comes very naturally to me.

I’m not sure if putting secrets in a game is especially risky. It’s true that no one player will find them all and that some may never be found if the community isn’t dedicated enough. But the experience of the player can be made much more exciting even by uncovering a single secret. It can make the player feel like there’s a secret around every corner if they are observant enough. There are ways to create this kind of intrigue without blowing the budget with extra art or sound assets. Sometimes a simple line of cryptic text can create a sense of mystery and the desire to start digging.

I’m a bit concerned about datamining ruining the secret-hunting experience and have took some basic steps to prevent it. I was more naive when creating Pony Island and included the final secret in its own Unity “scene” file. This made it extremely easy for a hacker with some knowhow to boot up that specific scene without getting to it through the intended flow. This time the deeper secrets are embedded within existing scenes. I have also taken some precautions to obscure certain sensitive strings. All that said, even if things are spoiled a bit by datamining the secret hunters are often eager to uncover things the proper way.

As most gamers and developers know, being on Steam is sort of mandatory for PC. It gets so much more traffic than any other PC digital distributor that you would be crazy not to put your game on it. I think its algorithms have favored me for Pony Island. I still get plenty of players referred to the store page from elsewhere on Steam. As for The Hex, it remains to be seen.

I would love to have my games on consoles, especially the Switch. However, both of my games require a lot of pointing and clicking and this is hard to translate to gamepads. For this reason it’s unlikely that Pony Island or The Hex will end up consoles. I’m interested in making a more universal control scheme for my next game!

Because of recent technological advances with game hardware, sound designers have become able to apply real-time audio processing to their games in more creative ways.

In this GDC 2018 talk, PlatinumGames’ Shuji Kohata explains the spatial audio techniques used in NieR: Automata’s desolate landscapes and natural environments, and the noise and retro effects used to augment its mechanical themes.

It’s an insightful talk that’s definitely 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 UBM Americas.

Activision has released a statement regarding the lack of subtitles during cutscene sequences in Spyro Reignited Trilogy, an omission which greatly impacts accessibility for players who are deaf or hard of hearing. 

Accessibility in games is important, and developers should be aware of the resources at their disposal in order to make sure all players are included.

The studio may want to look at how Microsoft worked with accessibility advocates in the future when considering a patch to include subtitles. 

First noticed by GamePitt, Spyro 2 and Spyro 3 both feature general subtitles, but when the player enters a pre-rendered cutscene they vanish.

GamePitt reached out to Activision and Toys for Bob (of Skylanders fame) regarding the issue and received a statement from an Activision spokesperson. 

“The team remained committed to keep the integrity and legacy of Spyro that fans remembered intact. The game was built from the ground up using a new engine for the team (Unreal 4), and was localized in languages that had not previously been attempted by the studio,” the statement reads.

“While there’s no industry standard for subtitles, the studio and Activision care about the fans’ experience especially with respect to accessibility for people with different abilities, and will evaluate going forward.”

A few developers have chimed in on the matter, noting that nothing in game development is easy, especially when it comes to implementing subtitles. However, it seems pretty clear that game development is all about solving tough problems, and that includes ones around accessibility too.