Category: News

The Forza Horizon series seems to be Microsoft’s opportunity to demonstrate the technical prowess of the Xbox One. Forza Horizon 2 served as both a launch title and a showcase for Microsoft’s cloud computing technologies. Now, Forza Horizon 3 seems to be how Microsoft wants to show off both the tech prowess of the Xbox One S and the new “play everywhere” Windows 10 initiative. 

One of the standout features in Playground Games‘ new racer has nothing to do with the cars or the roads–the skies are eye-poppingly gorgeous. During a gameplay demo at E3, creative director Ralph Fulton explained that to create the game’s breathtaking firmaments, the development team spent several days in Australia with a custom high-dynamic-range (HDR) camera rig to capture footage of the sky and import it into the game. 

The process is sort of similar to photogrammetry, a technology that multiple large developers have used lately to effectively scan real-world objects into their games. (DICE was able to scan old Star Wars props into Star Wars Battlefront to create props and costumes for characters.) And it looks like the technology will be getting more use, if Playground Games’ work is any indication. 

Speaking to Gamasutra, art director Benjamin Penrose explained that Playground Games went all the way down under to get real skies to put into their game in order to help create a strong visual hiearchy for players “When you’re playing a driving game, the three most important things are the car, what you’re driving on, and the thing you’re driving underneath. That means the sky is actually super important.”

Penrose says that since the photography team was able to capture on-location lighting using HDR photography, they were able to import the HDR photos and build a lighting system that was closer to natural outdoor lighting, and create a set of images they could import into the dynamic weather system they created for Forza Horizon 2. 

“You see storm clouds starting to build on the horizon, and it’s actually going to drive rainfall in the environment.”

“All the weather systems we put in place for that game hook into the same system perfectly, so it’s like a new data input it,” he says. “You see storm clouds starting to build on the horizon, and it’s actually going to drive rainfall in the environment.”

Which means, of course, that the Playground Games team actually had to sit in Australian thunderstorms and blistering hot days in order to capture these skylines.

It’s a grueling process, but Penrose says one of the biggest technical challenges was actually the act of photography itself. “Anybody can go out with a camera and take a high dynamic range photo, but the thing that we’ve pushed is the ability to start taking photos at low light, at night, all the way up to midday when the sun is at its most powerful.”

“We had to be constantly changing exposures, lens filters, all that kind of stuff. The whole rig has to adapt to each time of day.”

“That involves some really complicated work,: he adds. “We had to be constantly changing exposures, lens filters, all that kind of stuff. The whole rig has to adapt to each time of day.” 

Penrose also says the art team spent time in the Australian Bush photographing the trees, rocks, cliffs, and more to import into he game. It’s an interesting shift in the way games like Forza handle their art pipeline systems, and a big indicator that aspiring game artists may need to start expanding their technical skillsets. 

And amidst all the discussions about why Xbox is creating the more powerful Xbox One, it’s also an indicator that the company may be gunning to catch up with the HDR TV market, which would be able to display the full lighting capabilities of this new Forza Horizon tech. 

The Forza series may be a series about driving ridiculous cars with your friends across giant open worlds, but for developers, it may be worth to watch this latest entry’s progress to see how its technology may shape the industry. 

In the games business, music and rhythm games tend to focus on letting players mimic the use of real-life instruments, with not a lot of design space for other thematic ideas. 

But in Wandersong, the new game from Greg Lobanov and collaborators Em Halberstadt and Gordon McGladdery, music isn’t just for singing songs, it’s for solving puzzles, making dialogue choices, and bringing friends and family back together. 

It’s an amazingly refined design that piqued our curiosity at Gamasutra, so we invited Lobanov onto the Gamasutra Twitch channel for a conversation about Wandersong’s design and development. If you’re interested in making unique, impactful musical games, click on the video above to watch our full chat! 

And while you’re at it, be sure to follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel for more developer interviews, editor roundtables and gameplay commentary. 

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: Sydney, Australia

Plastic Wax is an award-winning animation and production studio specializing in the creation of premium digital content for the global video games and film industry.

We seek a veteran VR/UE Blueprint/C++ Developer to Lead our Unreal Department onsite in our waterfront studio in Rhodes, Sydney. We’re after someone who is passionate about developing real-time capture & render technologies to redefine the process of film & television production and empower the Director and creative team’s vision for our projects.

As a Technical Team Lead, you will help grow and nurture the Unreal team. You’ll be trusted to spearhead development efforts as well as work closely with stakeholders, Head of Studio, producers and relevant heads of department. As the Lead UE/VR Developer, you will have the incredible opportunity to create & influence the future of our VR/AR process.

Responsibilities

• Direct the translation of concepts into engineering requirements.

• Spearhead and lead the development of real-time capture & render technologies

• Technically develop and deploy VR and AR content and projects

• Create and maintain a visible product roadmap and project schedule.

• Report directly to stakeholders and Head of Studio

• Lead, grow and mentor the Unreal and real-time capture team

• Manage source control, quality assurance, and continuous integration pipelines

• Research, develop, and Implement current virtual reality software technologies in the industry

• Build on current technology and implement better solutions in terms of efficiency and interaction

• Software development of real-time 3D VR/AR capture Interfaces

• Developing and testing new tools and applications and perform quality assurance

• Write well-commented, unit-tested code

• Design, review, and maintain functional specifications, wireframes, etc.

• Collaborate with art team, motion capture team, and producers

• Provide guidance to visual and technical artists where required

Requirements

• BS, BA and/or MS in Computer Science or related engineering field

• Expert C++, Unreal Engine Blueprint, GIT, Perforce

• Strong background in real-time capture, VR and AR

• Solid R&D experience, including creating and updating R&D documentation

• Self-motivated with strong communications skills and able to work both in a team and independently

• Solid professional software development experience

• Strong problem-solving skills and a good eye required

• Proactive, positive and excellent communication skills

• Excellent knowledge of software development and demonstrated technical aptitude.

• Proven leadership and project management ability

• Strong knowledge of CG animation, VFX and/or pre and production processes

• Ability to balance multiple priorities effectively

• Demonstrated proof of work is essential, preference given to experience with broadcast/screened, shipped work; completed experiences/technologies/games

• Strong knowledge of software architecture, patterns, and design

• Demonstrably excellent technical collaboration and communication skills

• Enthusiasm, motivation, and desire to create and develop for emerging platforms

• Extensive familiarity with source control

Pluses

• Hands-on ability with 3D/vfx tools such as 3dsMax, Maya, Houdini, Ornatrix, Marvelous Designer

• Knowledge of additional programming languages

• Performance and optimization experience

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.

“If some number of people are playing Fortnite for some massive amount of time, well, that’s a lot of people who aren’t even opening their Steam client. “

– Devolver Digital’s Nigel Lowrie points out another factor devs deal with when competing for player attention

A recent story on Polygon seeks to chart the struggles and changes that have occurred as game platforms continue to become more and more saturated with new releases by talking with devs and members of the game industry that have experienced that shift first hand.

While discoverability issues are already a huge struggle for developers, Devolver Digital’s Nigel Lowrie points out that the changing way players interact with games has made time a significant commodity as well. 

Concerns that potential players only have the budget to pick up a set number of games per month have been replaced by the fact that there just aren’t enough hours in the day for players to invest into new titles. 

“Even if the most hardcore gamer plays 14 hours a day, that’s still a finite amount of time. And if you’re spending 10 of those in a PUBG, or a Fortnite, what does that leave for the rest of us?” says Lowrie. “It’s true that timing of release is critical, sure, and I don’t think that single-player, smaller-scope games are going to go away; there’s always going to be room for that. But time is something that you really can’t move, and you have to account for that when people move into these long-term relationships with games.”

“If some number of people are playing Fortnite for some massive amount of time, well, that’s a lot of people who aren’t even opening their Steam client,” he continues “If you’re a developer out there complaining that you can’t get your game on the front page of Steam, well, this is a whole new thing you have to worry about.”

Lowrie elaborates on his sentiments in the full story on Polygon alongside comments from developers like former id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead, Housemarque’s publishing head Mikael Haveri, and more. 

Facebook has learned of a security vulnerability that has opened up millions of its users to account theft over the past year, though the company notes it is still investigating any impact the exploit has had to date.

While the exploit wasn’t related to Facebook’s game platform itself, the issue potentially affects 50 million Facebook accounts, making it an issue developers using the platform should be well aware of.

The issue itself is detailed in a blog post shared by Facebook and has since been fixed and reported to law enforcement. While the cause for the vulnerability seems to, by Facebook’s reports, be the result of several different small issues in the platform’s code, the core issue itself involved the “view as” feature that is intended to let a user see what information they’re showing other Facebook users. 

However, an issue with “View As” instead let attackers take access tokens from Facebook accounts and allow them to hijack those accounts themselves by using the tokens to log in as an exploited user. 

Facebook says that it has now reset the access tokens of the nearly 50 million accounts it knows to be affected, and has reset the access tokens for an additional 40 million accounts that aren’t known victims but had “View As” activity in the past year. Any affected users will have to log back into Facebook, both on the site and any third-party apps or locations using Facebook login, and have been sent a notice about the issue.

“Since we’ve only just started our investigation, we have yet to determine whether these accounts were misused or any information accessed,” reports Facebook. “We also don’t know who’s behind these attacks or where they’re based. We’re working hard to better understand these details — and we will update this post when we have more information, or if the facts change. In addition, if we find more affected accounts, we will immediately reset their access tokens.”

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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(This is an interview conducted on the Game Dev Unchained podcast)

Richard Khoo is a Game Design Director that has been working in the industry for over 15 years. He spent a decade at Blizzard working on titles like Starcraft 2 and was the lead systems designer for Heroes of the Storm. Shortly after, he was at Riot Games to help with Leagues of Legend. Richard spent several years working with startups, pitching to investors and did consulting work for companies like Wargaming. He currently is focused on mobile and is at Pocket Gems working on unannounced IPs.

Starting in QA

Over a span of 15 years RIchard has touched all corners of the industry such as AAA, Indie Startups, and am currently tackling mobile. His impressive background at working at the most influential and successful companies, such as Blizzard and Riot, gives credence to his perspective of how these different sectors in the game industry compare to each other.

Richard first started his career at Visual Concepts “as QA and while I was a QA tester I actually was modding for ostensibly for Blizzard for Warcraft 3.” He remembers “actually taking in my laptop while QA testing and maximizing my time. Like while I’m waiting for, like you know, the build to reload because I crashed the game I’m just like turning to my laptop and actually scripting in Warcraft 3 and making cool stuff.” His hard work eventually paid off and Richard “got promoted to lead, at some point. I forget when. Because I was modding on the side, it allowed me to do my QA job really really well. I wrote something like, you know, over 900 bugs for the games that I was working on. Yeah, they took notice they were like ‘you’re really good at writing bugs.”

Working at QA and crossing the bridge to development is sometimes a great way to transition but requires a huge amount of dedication. Richard’s constant drive got him “working [as part of the] night crew. So if you work night crew QA, you’re a special kind of dedicated developer because you don’t get home ‘til like 5 o’clock in the morning and then you sleep during the day.” This sound crazy but Richard puts it into context as his “previous job was actually as a Gamestop employee in New Jersey. So what happened was the assistant manager, one of the associates, and myself all like caught wind of ‘oh hey, they’re hiring at Visual Concepts. It’s for QA tester, I think, we should all apply for it!’ So the three of us did and we all got the job and the three of us moved out all the way from New Jersey to California all at the same time. So it was a really special time, you know. We hung out a lot we talked a lot about our game, QA stories. We’re all really excited about it all. Just felt, you know, we were all just young kids with dreams wanting to get into the video game industry.”

Dropping out of Cornell…

What makes Richard’s story even more compelling is that he comes from a household where both his parents had a doctoral degree (PhD). Richard himself was finishing his education at Cornell University before refocusing his career path towards game development. “I’ve realized that my life is actually punctuated by kind of like these ridiculous like beliefs that I have in myself. Because I originally went to Cornell to be a doctor… so this is back in 1998, you know, the stereotypical Asian going to become a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer or whatever right? And all I wanted to do is make video games. Prior to that I had been using the Blizzard Starcraft and Warcraft 3 editor to make mods and stuff. So I always enjoyed entertaining people and being creative. As I went to Cornell the reality is, you can get all straight A’s. like I did in High School. you can win all sorts of awards, which I did, but then you go to college and then like it’s another level of these motherfuckers are like the better doctor. So my grades started slipping and I started to fall back on what do I actually want to do? And that got me to think about how I want to make games I want to write stories, I want to compose music…”

As Richard rediscovered his interest in game development his grades started to slip. Furthermore, he doubled down and laser-focused on his new path and “decided to make video games. And [my friend and I] were going to do everything that we can to get into the video game industry. And yes so we just started consciously doing things that would help develop our creative skills because back then nobody knew what does it mean to be a game designer, you know, right?” But “after I realized I wanted to do games, I kind of just stuck with it and got a job as a Gamestop employee. And kept my eyes open for any opportunities.” That opportunity led him to move to California from New Jersey to start work as QA for $10/hr and the rest was history.

Working at Blizzard

“When I started at Blizzard like I definitely felt, ‘oh my god!’ I was the first level designer hired out of the modding community, not the first one, but the first set of people who are coming in. And I remember just feeling so weird with pride and assurance that like my shit don’t stink like I’m the best thing ever since sliced bread and all that. But within the first like week of being at Blizzard I [realized] there’s some really smart people here and I’ve got a lot to learn, right? So I became a sponge. I felt that I never was conscious about the fact that I was at Blizzard therefore I should just learn everything I’ve always wanted to learn.” Richard, never one to let an opportunity slip, absorbed everything he could and slowly climbed the ranks at Blizzard during his 10 years there. “So working on Warcraft 3 and then Starcraft 2 I was focused mostly on content design and I like learn how to use the tools that we had at world-class levels. So you know, learning how to work with the tools engineers working with the artists and narrative and creative in general to make really great stories. Working with the multiplayer system designers to like create great units for multiplayer. Mentor like some of the designers on how to use the tools really well so just try to add as much like value as possible and Blizzard, like any really well established video game studio, they recognized it. They put me in positions where I could affect more areas of the game I was promoted a lot and I look back and I’m really thankful for all of that. And I just kept adding lots and lots of value so I think Blizzards not in terms of ‘you got to make a game, you got to like communicate to people you got to do.’ All that stuff.”

Richard carried forward of all his lessons learned climbing the ranks at Blizzard. He attributes many of Blizzard’s success “to being around for 25 years and has since crystallized into pillars on best practices around how to creatively collaborate, how to prioritize certain types of development, how to think of the long-term.”

My time at Riot

When Richard took his talent to Riot Games he compared his experience there to like “maintaining this Tea Garden where it’s been release it’s been approved and in a way, formulaic, where they don’t want to mess with the formula to to hurt any existing sales or customers or upset the community they built so long for. And the longer that continues the harder for designers to actually design anything new. It’s just when you look at the constraints, right? Like ‘hey, this is all that you’re allowed to work with it. This little box and everyone on the team has to be in that same little box as a designer but you still have to come up with original concepts or original implementation energies for the new types of heroes that you want to introduce to that game. Then there’s what like 300 of them, at this point, I don’t know probably closer to 100.”

One can imagine with an established franchise it can be frustrating for a designer trying to be creative in that space and instead, the job entails developers to maintain more than change. However, even Richard admits, that Riot does some things better than Blizzard and “use social media more effectively than Blizzard ever did and I can say that confidently because I felt like [Riot Games]  basically they ran circles around [Blizzard]. In terms of really drumming up a lot of excitement around the League of Legends versus Heroes of the Storm. So I think the lessons are they’re like the blueprints on how to make super awesome games.”

Startups

“After Riot I realized that a lot of my passion was actually in building new games from scratch. And there was a gap of time between when I left Riot and when I actually started consulting for Wargaming and that was when I was actually a freelance game designer director. It was effectively the position that all the startups that I was talking to were offering. I worked with a lot of different startups, so I just said ‘okay I’m a game director.” Richard proceeded to spend some time in the open market doing consulting work for companies that needed help getting started with game design. He took advantage of his skillset and did freelancing for several years.

“The Dragon Prince” on Netflix, was one of the first projects that Richard jumped on to help create a game for after Riot. Anyhow, he had to move on and “worked with them for like a couple months but actually left. Because one of the things you start to realize when you’re working for startups is that you’re working for no money and no benefits and just equity. It was a good salary and all on paper but the question was like we still needed to find funding.”

Being out on his own he found that “the first rule of working at startups, it’s tough- because like you gravitate towards your friends and it’s the highest risk possible so you want to be with people that you can hang out with and it’s cool, and you can really go toe to toe with like when the shit hits the fan. But you subtract money out of the situation and then it’s like it’s a deeply personal question.” Working with friends can be a very scary or fruitful experience and it requires a deep connection to celebrate the good times and battle through the harsher times. After a while, Richard was approached by Wargaming for consulting and he jumped at the chance. It was a perfect situation for him to balance something secure and continue to work with startups for game design pitches. At the time Richard “was trying to be fiscally responsible because I had like my my son and daughter at the time. But if I wasn’t I think I would have done harmful things to my body just trying to like keep up the pace in order to keep adding value with the hopes of impressing this investor  and then we’ll find the that the magic innovation somewhere just right around the corner. That stuff is really really really hard.”

Mobile Games

After two and half years working in startups, eventually Richard was personally recruited to Pocket Gems by the CEO and believed in their “mission statement to pioneer new experiences. Mobile gaming is growing. The devices only get stronger I mean you can just see read all the business report words for it. That may or may not be for everybody, but like, I think that’s another reinforcement why to get into it I’ve always loved like designing games and I always believed in elegance above everything else. So if you can execute a AAA quality type of game on a small screen like that’s that’s awesome, like the to me, that’s a work of art and a reason to get into mobile games in and of itself. I think that there will always be challenges because mobile games have only been out for 10 years so like not all of like the best practices have been established. But when you’re thinking about making games, you always have to ask yourself… like there’s a big split between games where you know you’re trying to pioneer and do something new and crazy. Or games that are just kind of like, to me,  products. There’s nothing wrong with that. It comes down to do you want to work on an established franchise that already has a pretty established IP or do you want to try to create something new? And I always advise people to think about what kind of risks do they want to do because again it all comes back to economics for me. It’s like are you super super risky? If you’re super super risky go join magic leap and go make some like crazy fucking AR VR game, I have no idea that people will actually want to play. But for me I’ve always been sort of like moderately aggressive.”

[this is a repost from www.gamedevunchained.com– the original article can be found here with resources and links]

“With a modern PC, you have so much extra power, you don’t need to be a hotshot programmer to make a game people love.” 

– Oculus CTO John Carmack calls out the differences in power between PCs and the Oculus Quest

Speaking at Oculus Connect 2018, Oculus CTO John Carmack likens the power of the Oculus Quest to last-gen video game consoles, something devs will have to compensate for while approaching their own projects for the system.

Ars Technica has a solid roundup of several of Carmack’s talking points, but his comments on the hardware’s limitations are something developers should pay extra attention to.

Carmack explains that the power of the Oculus Quest is similar to the level seen in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game console generation, though it isn’t a 1:1 comparison exactly.

He warns developers that they’ll have to adapt their programming style in order to best make games on a platform with restricted resources, likening the mindset needed for creating games for the Quest more to developing Nintendo DS or PlayStation 1 games than modern PC titles. 

“With a modern PC, you have so much extra power, you don’t need to be a hotshot programmer to make a game people love,” says Carmack. “You don’t really have that convenience on any mobile platform, really, but especially not on our platform.”

Carmack also notes that he expects the majority of the Quest’s usage to be for video games (the inverse of what Oculus has seen with the Oculus Go) and sees the Nintendo Switch as the Quest’s number one competitor since, in his mind, players see both portable devices as supplemental systems to a console or PC.

“I don’t think there’s going to be that many people who say, ‘I’m not going to buy a PS4, I’m going to buy a Quest instead.”