Category: News

In this 2015 GDC talk, Ubisoft Montreal’s Remi Quenin discusses game-changing improvements applied to the programming pipeline of Far Cry 4 that resulted in day-to-day workflow improvements for the entire production.

With five platforms to support and twice as much content as Far Cry 3, the sequel presented a big challenge for pipeline efficiency. 

Quenin explains how the team built a network cache for “binarized” assets on commodity PCs, outperforming million-dollar commercial hardware and provides examples of how the team accelerated package distribution to be instantaneous for hundreds of concurrent users.

He also shows the tools the team built to allow patching a running instance of Far Cry 4 with locally modified assets for rapid content iteration.

It was an insightful talk that’s 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 UBM Americas.

Since 2015, journalist David Wolinksy has been interviewing game developers through his series Don’t Die, which focuses on discussing certain problems and misperceptions within the industry.

Many of these interviews have been converted as audio and uploaded to YouTube, which may be of interest to developers curious to hear what their peers have to say about video games on a broader spectrum. 

One audio interview uploaded recently includes a conversation with experimental game developer and academic Pippin Barr from 2016, where the two discuss topics ranging from fast food to Pac Man. 

At one point Wolinksy inquires about criticism in games– more specifically, the positivity of the indie community discouraging critical or negative opinions about games that get made.

“So, again, I’m not — I feel weird, like, weighing in too much on criticism just because I tried to do it for a while and greatly enjoyed it but, yeah. This is probably a broader cultural thing than just games I’m guessing,” Barr explains. 

“That criticism and perceived negative statements about anything that anybody makes, it’s feeling less acceptable now maybe just culturally. I don’t know if that’s a generational thing or what that is,” he adds. 

“And not even that — it’s interesting that you say that: ‘I think that your thing could be better.’ I don’t think I even have ever thought of it in such a positive way before.” 

Developers interested in the rest of Barr’s interview should head over to Don’t Die’s YouTube channel here. There are more interviews with indie and triple-A developers alike, which are all worth listening to. 

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.

Here are just some of the many, many positions being advertised right now. If you’re a recruiter looking for talent, you can also post jobs here.

Location: Los Angeles, California

As a Technical Artist at The Game Band, you’ll be charged with setting up our shader pipeline and creating stylized environment shaders, particles, and visual effects to enhance the mood and narrative of our game world. You’ll be joining a small team where you’ll have a central role bridging the gap between departments. You’ll work closely with our engineers, designers, and artists to provide visual support and enhancements to every corner of every level, narrative moment and seamless transition. This position prioritizes Art over Tech, as your primary focus will be creating polished visuals as opposed to tech-heavy systems.

Location: San Jose, California

Are you passionate about creating a game where people feel engaged and successful? Do you revel in turning visions and ideas into playable events? Awesome. Come join our creative, collaborative studio and add stories to the Alien universe with a tight, integrated team of game developers. you can expect to be responsible and accountable for translating the vision of the creative director into in-game story and playable events, writing missions/jobs that are fun, challenging, and fit the overall game, and more as a member of the California based team.

Location: Silicon Valley, California

Wombat Studio is building the world’s first platform that empowers everyone, not just professional artists, to create amazing 3D animation with help of machine learning. We are looking for highly competent product designers who are excited about reinventing 3D animation to lead the ideation and design of features that make the 3D creative process easy and fun. You will be working with an exceptionally talented team with experiences at top companies and universities such as Google, Uber, Blizzard, Stanford, MIT, and Yale.

Location: Hamburg, Germany

If HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3 are your passion, you like to get started with the latest online developments right away, and you believe strongly in open standards, New Moon Production wants to hear from you. The studio is looking for an HTML5 Game Developer to develop new strategy games, create HTML5 game development workflows as part of a small and dynamic team, and leverage new technologies to provide rewarding cross-platform game experiences.

Location: Los Gatos, California

Cryptic Studios is looking for an experienced visionary project Art Director to lead the visual development for the Magic the Gathering MMO! As the leader of a talented and passionate art team at Cryptic, you’ll work with concept, character, environment, animation, VFX and UI artists to establish, evangelize and drive the art style and visual storytelling of the project. The ideal candidate has an impeccable eye for aesthetic quality, excellent visual and verbal communication skills as well as a deep, hands-on understanding of current gen game development from concept and to launch.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is coming to the Switch in Japan as a “Cloud Edition”, although there’s no word yet if the game will be released in a similar format globally. 

Announced during yesterday’s Nintendo Direct, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey will launch on the Switch October 5, granting players two years worth of access for ¥8400 (~$75). Players may also choose to pay a daily rate of ¥730 (~$6.50).

This isn’t the first time a game has been published through cloud streaming, as Capcom brought Resident Evil 7: Biohazard to the Switch earlier this year using a similar model.

For Resident Evil, players need to download a 45MB base game application before streaming the rest of the title from the cloud, and it can be assumed that Assassin’s Creed Odyssey will follow suit.

Newsbrief: Schell Games’ I Expect You To Die has officially brought in $3 million since its late 2016 launch, with the majority of that sum being earned in the last year alone.

The game debuted on Oculus Rift in December 2016, later coming to PlayStation VR and HTC Vive. Schell Games announced in August 2017 that I Expect You To Die had generated over $1 million in revenue, meaning that at least $2 million of what the developer is celebrating today came in during the last year.

The team behind I Expect You To Die has spoken at length about the development of the game in the past as well, including a Level Design Deep Dive on Gamasutra earlier this year that explored building VR puzzle levels on a budget. 

While much has been made about VR’s potential for video games and the healthcare business, it’s the automotive industry that has been quietly investing large amounts of time and effort into virtual reality, something several speakers will be discussing at this year’s XRDC. 

One of those speakers, Chris O’Connor, will be giving a talk about his work at ZeroLight, a company dedicated to recreating different vehicles in virtual reality. To learn more about O’Connor’s work, and what he’ll be discussing at XRDC, we reached out to him for a quick chat that you can now read below. 

Attend XRDC 2018 to learn about immersive games & entertainment, brand experiences, and innovative use cases across industries.

Tell us about yourself and your work in VR/AR/MR.

I worked as a graphics programmer in the games industry for 8 years, specializing in racing games for a whole range a platforms. 

ZeroLight was created 4 years ago, utilizing our expertise in real-time rendering to disrupt the world of automotive visualization. We developed an omnichannel platform and using XR is a natural way to enhance the sales experience, enabling the customer to see any vehicle and configuration in stunning detail on a 1:1 scale.

Without spoiling it too much, tell us what you’ll be talking about at XRDC.

I will be talking about the challenges involved and the solutions developed when creating VR and AR projects for automotive brands such as BMW, Audi, Nissan, Toyota, Porsche and Pagani. We have to consider the OEM’s target market and understand that many potential customers may not have experienced real-time interactive CG before, never mind XR. 

Because of this intuitive user experience, solid performance and high graphical quality are extremely important to ensure the highest possible level of realism and immersion. We have learnt a huge amount over the last 4 years and I will be sharing the highlights from many of these XR projects during this session.

What excites you most about AR/VR/MR?

I love how fast XR hardware is developing with amazing new innovations every few months, this gives the team at ZeroLight new ways to improve immersion, quality and performance. We are now seeing the next generation of VR devices with wider field of views, higher pixel densities and varifocal lenses. GPUs and CPUs are becoming more powerful, pushing graphical quality to a new level. AR is also starting to meet the mass market with many great devices and use cases on the horizon.

Who would you like to meet at XRDC?

I’m really looking forward to meeting like minded developers across the wide range of industries that are innovating in the world of XR. It’s fascinating to hear about the latest projects incorporating cutting edge graphics and new XR hardware.

What kind of XR projects do you see gaining traction in the automotive business?

XR was used in the automotive industry prior to the availability of current generation XR devices. Automotive design teams would use the medium to aid in the design and review process. The sector is now going a step further with the digitization of entire car libraries for use in sales and marketing. XR is key, empowering customer to see and explore cars at scale as part of the purchase journey. This allows automotive manufacturers to promote new models, accessories and options without the need for a physical car.

XRDC is happening October 29th and 30th in San Francisco at the Westin St. Francis Hotel. Now that registration is open, you’ll want to look over XRDC passes and prices and register early to get the best deal!

For more information about XRDC, which is produced by organizers of the Game Developers Conference, check out the official XRDC website. You can also subscribe to regular XRDC updates via email, Twitter and Facebook.

Gamasutra, XRDC, and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas

While some are learning about the peculiar pleasure of Animal Crossing thanks to the series’ latest release on Nintendo 3DS, the game has long charmed and puzzled players and critics. In this excerpt from his 2007 book Persuasive Games, Ian Bogost discusses the game’s first edition (released for the GameCube in 2002) in relation to his theory of “procedural rhetoric,” the act of expressing ideas through rules. While some details have changed over the years, Animal Crossing’s overall themes remain constant: the strange, unresolved conflict between consumption and naturalism.

The Nintendo GameCube videogame Animal Crossing is an “animal village simulator.” Players move into a town filled with cartoonish animal characters and buy a house, then work, trade, and personalize their microenvionment. The game offers a series of innocuous, even mundane activities like bug catching, gardening, and wallpaper designing; like The Sims, Animal Crossing’s primary metaphors are social interaction and household customization.

Although the GameCube supports simultaneous play with up to four players, Animal Crossing only allows one player at a time. The game can store up to four player profiles in one shared town, and human players can interact with friends or family members who play the game, but only indirectly, by leaving notes or gifts, completing tasks, or even planting flowers or trees. Furthermore, Animal Crossing binds the game world to the real world, synchronizing its date and time to the console clock. Time passes in real time in Animal Crossing—it gets dark at night, snows in the winter, and the animals go trick-or-treating on Halloween. Since game time is linked to real time, a player can conceptualize the game as a part of his daily life rather than a split out of it.

This binding of the real world to the game world creates opportunities for families or friends to collaborate in a way that might be impossible in a simultaneous multiplayer game. Since the whole family shares a single GameCube, the game’s persistent state facilitates natural collaboration between family members with different schedules. For example, a child might find a fossil during the afternoon, then mail it to her father’s character in the game. At bedtime, she could let Dad know that she needs to have it analyzed at the central museum so she can take it to the local gallery the next day. As critics Kurt Squire and Henry Jenkins wrote of the game, “Families (of all types) live increasingly disjointed lives, but the whole family can play Animal Crossing even if they can rarely all sit down to dinner together.”

One of the most challenging projects in the game is paying off the mortgage on one’s house. Animal Crossing allows players to upgrade their homes, but doing so requires paying off a large note the player must take out to start the game in the first place. Then the player must pay renovation mortgages for even larger sums. While the game mercifully omits some of the more punitive intricacies of long-term debt, such as compounding interest, improving one’s home does require consistent work in the game world. Catching fish, hunting for fossils, finding insects, and doing jobs for other townsfolk all produce income that can be used to pay off mortgage debt—or to buy carpets, furniture, and objects to decorate one’s house.

Animal Crossing deploys a procedural rhetoric about the repetition of mundane work as a consequence of contemporary material property ideals. When my (then) five-year-old began playing the game seriously, he quickly recognized the dilemma he faced. On the one hand, he wanted to spend the money he had earned from collecting fruit and bugs on new furniture, carpets, and shirts. On the other hand, he wanted to pay off his house so he could get a bigger one like mine. Then, once he did amass enough savings to pay off his mortgage, the local shopkeeper and real estate tycoon Tom Nook offered to expand his house. While it is possible to refrain from upgrading, Nook, an unassuming raccoon, continues to offer renovations as frequently as the player visits his store. My son began to realize the trap he was in: the more material possessions he took on, the more space he needed, and the more debt he had to take on to provide that space. And the additional space just fueled more material acquisitions, continuing the cycle.

Nintendo announced that it plans to release a duo of wireless Switch controllers modeled after the gamepad for the original NES, but the way the company plans to sell those controllers is somewhat unusual.

The NES controllers go up for sale in December, but would-be purchasers will be limited to only one set of controllers and will need to have a Nintendo Account with a paid Nintendo Switch Online subscription to make the purchase.

It’s not unusual for console-makers to offer certain sales or features to those that sign up for online subscriptions, but tying hardware goodies to paid accounts is a notably unusual move.

The Nintendo Switch Online subscription service goes live on September 18 and, in addition to granting Switch owners access to the NES controllers, opens up the use of cloud saves for the duration of the subscription, offers a playable library of classic Nintendo titles, and is required for online multiplayer on the system.