Category: News

General game developing news and updates.

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Secret techniques, exclusive moves, and more revealed in latest Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee! announcement

Secret techniques, exclusive moves, and more revealed in latest Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee! announcement

The Pokémon Company International and Nintendo announced new details about exclusive Pokémon moves, Secret Techniques, and much more in the highly anticipated Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee! games, releasing on November 16 on the Nintendo Switch™ system. Both games are designed for players taking their first steps into the Pokémon video game world as well as for longtime fans wanting a new way to play Pokémon.

Clear the Way: Secret Techniques
Pikachu or Eevee can help players overcome obstacles they encounter and make travel easier in Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee! by learning Secret Techniques. These special skills can be used by the player’s partner Pokémon outside of battle to clear away trees (Chop Down), glide across water (Sea Skim), and quickly revisit towns and cities that have already been explored (Sky Dash).

Powerful Partner-Exclusive Moves
The player’s partner Pikachu or Eevee can use exclusive moves that no other Pokémon can use. These exclusive moves will help players face any challenge during their adventures in Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee! And once the player’s relationship with their partner reaches a certain level, the partner Pokémon will occasionally send a sign during battle that its partner power (one of its exclusive moves) can be used. Even if the partner Pokémon is not in the battle, it may still send a sign. If the player responds, the partner will bolster the Pokémon in battle by boosting its stats.

Two of Pikachu’s exclusive moves are Pika Papow and Splishy Splash. Pika Papow is also a partner power, so it’s performed when the partner sign appears during battle. The power of Pika Papow can increase depending on how strong the player’s bond is with their partner Pikachu. The Water-type move Splishy Splash can paralyze opponents.

Eevee’s exclusive moves include the partner power Veevee Volley as well as Bouncy Bubble, Buzzy Buzz, and Sizzly Slide. When Eevee uses Veevee Volley, its power can increase depending on Eevee’s relationship with the player. Bouncy Bubble, a Water-type move, will heal Eevee for half the damage dealt to the opponent. The Electric-type move Buzzy Buzz paralyzes the opponent. An opponent will always be left with the burned status condition if it is hit with Eevee’s Fire-type move, Sizzly Slide.

Best of Friends: Befriending a Partner Pokémon
Players can interact with their partner Pokémon when they are not in battle by selecting the Pikachu or Eevee icon on the main menu. By petting and playing with their partner Pokémon, players will improve their relationship with Pikachu or Eevee and can receive in-game benefits such as presents. When the game is in handheld mode, players can use the touch screen to play directly with their partner Pokémon.

Explore the Kanto Region: Celadon City
Celadon City is one of the many interesting locations in the Kanto region that players can explore in Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee! This large city, known as the “City of Rainbow Dreams,” has an arcade and even a department store. Erika, sometimes called “the Nature-Loving Princess,” is the Gym Leader of the Celadon City Gym and specializes in Grass-type Pokémon.

Special Nintendo Switch Bundle
A special bundle that includes a Nintendo Switch system, Pikachu- and Eevee-themed Joy-Con™ controllers, a digital copy of Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! or Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee!, and a Poké Ball Plus will be released on November 16. The front of the dock features Eevee and Pikachu, while the back of the console has silhouettes of both partner Pokémon.

Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee! will be available exclusively on Nintendo Switch on November 16, 2018. For more information, please visit https://pokemonletsgo.pokemon.com/en-us/.


Mild Cartoon Violence

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Video: How developers can find and engage a great artist

In this GDC 2018 session, Chickadee Games’ Adam deGrandis covers the basic how’s, what’s, and why’s of finding and engaging an artist that can help indie games shine.

Tailored specifically for non-artists, deGrandis provides an overview of what developers need before approaching an artist, where to search for one, how to find the best fit, and how to deal with compensation.

His insight is useful for developers wondering what they need in order to be productive over the course of their project and it’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.

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Two Riot employees depart after defending controversial PAX panel

Systems designer Daniel Klein and communications associate Mattias Lehman were let go from Riot Games yesterday after defending League of Legends PAX West panels which were open only to women and non-binary individuals. 

As The Verge reports, Klein and Lehman, who were known to publicly defend diversity efforts, left company yesterday in response to apparent controversy around that PAX session.

The private panel, led by women from Riot, was intended to help women and non-binary participants enter the games industry; men were prohibited from attending.

While men were barred from physically attending the panel, they could still rewatch the panels from Riot’s Instagram account, but the policy was met with anger by League of Legends players on Reddit.

After Klein spoke up in defense of the PAX West decision and explained it to Reddit users who voiced their criticisms, he confirmed to The Verge that he was “fired for violating our social media policy.” It currently isn’t clear what those policies are.

Their departures come a month after several current and former Riot employees discussed the toxic workplace environment which ultimately drove women out of the studio, leading the studio to issue a public apology and plans to correct the company culture that has enabled those past wrongs.

Riot responded in a statement to The Verge, saying “these departures are independent from our efforts to evolve our culture. Our culture remains our top priority, and we remain committed to taking the steps that we need to become a leader in Diversity and Inclusion.”

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Fortnite on Android reaches 15 million downloads sans Google Play

Epic Games announced last month that it wouldn’t be distributing Fortnite’s Android release through Google’s official Google Play Store, and it seems that decision hasn’t hurt the game’s growth.

The studio reports 15 million Fortnite downloads and 23 million players on Android only 21 days after the game’s beta release, despite still being in an invite-only phase for the platform. 

As detailed in a blog post, Epic details the technical challenges encountered for the Android port, which might be useful for developers.

Even though Epic limited the Fortnite Android beta to a small number of devices with up-to-date software, the team still encountered difficulties managing Android’s fragmented hardware.

Memory management was among these problems, with Epic realizing that even restarted phones only allowed 50 to 75 percent of their total memory to be allocated by the game.

Applications running in the background could cause memory issues as well, since some of those apps would automatically restart after Android tried to reclaim their memory history. 

“We’ve updated our testing processes to install and run more of the common applications that most users run so that we can find these problems earlier but we still needed to reduce memory usage and fast,” the post reads. 

Epic also acknowledges the rise of malware developers who have tried to direct players to download fake Fortnite installers onto their devices, saying it’s working with browser makers and third-party anti-fraud detection sites to find and eliminate these sites as they present themselves. 

“Right now we are focused on making the game run well on all currently supported devices and clawing back enough memory so we can improve both visual quality and stability.” 

To read the entire Android launch blog, click here.

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Don’t Miss: Treyarch’s classic 2002 postmortem of Spider-Man

In this reprint from the August 2002 issue of Game Developer magazine, Spider-Man developer Jamie Fristrom writes about what went right and what went wrong with the game’s development process. Fristrom’s current project, Energy Hook, strongly builds upon some of the design principles first explored here and in Spider-Man 2.

Treyarch was finishing up Max Steel and Tony Hawk’s Pro-Skater 2 for Dreamcast when we agreed to do a game that would tie in with the Spider-Man movie, and release it simultaneously on all three of the next-generation consoles: Playstation 2 (PS2), Xbox, and Gamecube. We formed a new team out of parts of the others to begin work on the proof-of-concept and design. This team of four programmers, four designers, four artists, and a producer wasn’t starting totally from scratch; we had Activision’s previous Spider-Man game for the Playstation (PSX) to look at.

We wanted to improve some of the things about the game, such as giving the web-swinging more freedom, and play to that game’s strengths, such as the hostage modes and variety of ways in which you could be Spider-Man. We also wanted to add a whole new type of gameplay: aerial combat, the ability to take on flying villains as you swing around Manhattan. Sony/Columbia gave us a ton of concept art and stills from the movie on which to base our work.

The PS2 was our lead SKU, because it has the largest installed base and was the easiest to get development kits for. We figured if we could make our game run on the PS2, we could make it run on anything. We began work on the Xbox a few months after the PS2 and the Gamecube a few months after that.

1. Good people.

“All you need is good people,” says the submarine commander in Das Boot, after the chief engineer repairs the boat and saves their lives. It’s true, with good people you don’t need to enforce process because it happens automatically. Everyone makes sure they do a good job: they volunteer for code reviews, they write their own unit tests, they find better ways to do things instead of the ways passed down from on high.

Our team was made up of a number of talented individuals, who each made their own unique, lifesaving contributions. Even the interns were amazing.

Because I’m not in HR, I don’t know how we got these people, but I think part of the reason is that the people in charge of interviewing know their stuff, whether it’s art or code. Part of it is the referral bonus we give employees for recommending new hires; part of it is that Treyarch is an environment not too many people are willing to leave. (We’ve seen what’s out there, and it’s worse.) Part of it may be the free soda, and free dinners during crunch time, and part of it is our policy of not hiring just anyone to fill a position. (We do hire out of desperation occasionally, but rarely. And when we discover we’ve hired someone who is just average, we let that person go.)

This team was not only talented but also motivated. Even though adding unplanned features was discouraged, many of us stayed late, on our own time, to get stuff in we thought would make a real improvement to the game. This is where the playing-as-Green-Goblin mode came from, and the secret bowling level, the rats in the sewer level, and a lot of special effects.

2. Developed cross-platform libraries and intermediate file formats.

Treyarch was developing a few titles for the next-generation platforms, and it was obvious that having one crossplatform library to do the rendering, which all the teams shared, would be a big advantage. We formed a new team, Next-Generation Libraries (NGL for short). The Spider-Man graphics/PS2 programmer split off from our group to lead the team, providing the architecture and API to which the various platform graphics libraries would be written, and he developed the initial PS2 graphics library.

NGL had disadvantages as well as advantages: the advantage of more efficient use of coder resources was balanced with the worry that we might not be able to rely on a separate team. The NGL team wasn’t always kept in the loop about when our deliverables were due and sometimes weren’t available on a weekend or night when they were needed. Finger-pointing would occur: is it an NGL bug or a client-side bug? And sometimes finger-pointing didn’t happen when it needed to: a client-side bug would linger on the plate of an NGL programmer who didn’t know how to fix it.

At times, the NGL programmers became de facto Spider-Man programmers. They were building the Spider-Man code base on their machines to make sure their changes worked with it, to optimize for the game’s worst cases, and to make sure the Xbox and Gamecube matched the PS2 close enough. In the end, NGL worked out great, finishing features and fixing bugs in time to ship.

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Weekly Jobs Roundup: Cold Iron Studios, Endnight Games, and more are hiring 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.

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: Chicago, Illinois

Wargaming Chicago-Baltimore is looking for a Gameplay Engineer for its growing studio with over 150 employees. This role tasks a developer with coding, debugging, and managing gameplay systems, developing and maintaining gameplay systems in a client/server environment, collaborating across disciplines to implement new gameplay features and improvements, and more. 

Location: San Jose, California

Cold Iron is seeking an experienced Console Gameplay Engineer to join us in creating a shooter set in the Alien universe for consoles and PC. The team is after a dev with over 5 years of C++ experience and excellent programming, debugging, and optimization skills. While not required, experience with Unreal Engine and various scripting languages like Javascript, Python, Perl, or HTML are also a plus.

Location: Farnborough, England, United Kingdom

Experienced in the dark arts of real-time VFX? The team at nDreams is on the search for a talented VFX Artist to join the VFX team and become an integral part of the creation of its upcoming VR titles. For this role the studio is open to either someone with lots of VFX experience or someone who is newer to the role.  As a minimum, they’d be looking for someone with a years’ experience or a relevant degree or equivalent qualification. The position tasks that dev with creating real-time VFX across a variety of styles, from character and weapon-based effects to environmental and destructive elements, concepting or visualising VFX when proving out new art styles and rendering executions, including playing a key role in the early development of entire product art styles, and working closely with the Character and Animation team, and following direction from the Art Director, to assist and create various character-based VFX solutions or materials.

Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Located in Vancouver, BC Canada, Endnight Games is an independent video game development company known for its game The Forest. The Senior Generalist Programmer will work to create and optimize game systems. This challenging role requires efficient problem-solving skills and the ability to juggle multiple tasks simultaneously, and the studio notes that it can only consider candidates already authorized to work in Canada. 

Location: Portage, Michigan

Plarium Michigan Studio is looking for a passionate, product-focused game designer with a background in free to play mobile games. The team is after a dev with the ability to work within a number of systems and tools over with a wide range of content, and the ability to iterate and refine content given many different development challenges.  Ideally, an applicant is someone who is undeterred by impediments, and capable of self-managing daily tasks in pursuit of larger long-term goals.

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Google partners with Unity for open-source matchmaking tool Open Match

Google has teamed up with Unity to create an open-source, but engine-agnostic, matchmaking system called Open Match.

The goal of the project is to give game developers access to a tool that doesn’t require them to build a matchmaking system from the ground up in order to implement multiplayer in their games.

Developers instead can integrate Open Match into their projects and tweak inputs and player selection logic to best fit their own games, but the bulk of the grunt work has already been done for them.

There’s a GitHub repository up right now that devs can contribute to or find out more about the open source project from, and Google has a more in-depth blog post up already on its site. And while Open Match will work with any engine, Unity does have plans to base matchmaking tech in its engine of Open Match in the future. 

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Bad North’s Richard Meredith talks about making good ‘gamefeel’

A couple weeks ago, Bad North splashed onto the Nintendo Switch, showcasing its unique aesthetic and stripped-back strategy game style. It would launch on other consoles soon after, but seeing a mobile-inspired game launch on a mobile console piqued our curiosity over at Gamasutra. 

Because of that, we decided to invite developer Richard Meredith onto our Twitch channel for a chat about the programming of Bad North’s unique controls. Since it supports both gamepads and touch capabilities on a console that has both, it’s interesting how much of Meredith’s work went into making sure Bad North “felt” good no matter how players experienced it. 

Be sure to click on the video above for our full conversation with Meredith. And while you’re at it, you can follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel for more developer interviews, editor roundtables and gameplay commentary. 

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In the name of accessibility, Spider-Man offers toggleable puzzles and QTEs

Insomniac’s recent game Marvel’s Spider-Man has a number of options directed at making the game more accessible to a wide variety of players, something that is becoming more common in modern games.

Those features are nested under an accessibility menu in-game and include options to disable parallaxing, enable large subtitles, autocomplete quick time event (QTE) sequences that would otherwise require button input, switch button taps to holds, and more. 

By including options like this, the dev team removes obstacles that may prevent players from being able to play an enjoy the game in its entirety because of issues with rapid button presses required for QTEs or missed information from difficult-to-read small subtitles, ultimately opening Spider-Man up to even more players. 

Including additional accessibility options like this has become more and more common in recent games, points out a tweet from Game Makers Toolkit creator Mark Brown. Just this year, games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, God of War, and Celeste have introduced similar settings that individually tweak different aspects of a game’s difficulty or offer customizable subtitles.