Category: News

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, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend.

This week’s highlights include a look at innovative ‘alternative arcade’ Two-Bit Circus, a retrospective on the creation of GoldenEye for the N64, and lots more besides.

The newsletter’s going out a little early this week, primarily because I have to take my kid to the zoo this weekend (priorities, y’all!) But seriously, loads of interesting games coming out even though we’re not at ‘holiday 2018 primetime’ for releases, which starts with Insomniac’s PS4-exclusive Spider-Man on September 7th & goes rapidly busytimes from there.

This week alone, there’s debuts for Tomorrow Corp’s latest, 7 Billion Humans, also Drinkbox’s Guacamelee 2, a Switch-first release for Bad North, which I’ve been intrigued by, and lots more besides. Can you keep up? Nope, and you shouldn’t even try…

Until next time…

– Simon, curator.]

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The game changers: meet the creatives shaking up the gaming world (Simon Parkin / The Observer – ARTICLE)
“Just as the kaleidoscopic dramas of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, the pseudo-non-fiction murk of Alan Moore’s comic From Hell and the domestic pragmatism of Jamie Oliver’s 15 Minute Meals meet under the fat banner of prose, so the body of video games becomes an ever broader church. It is impossible to enforce orthodoxy in a medium where shifting technology defines the canvas. [SIMON’S NOTE: An article in association with the V&A’s London games exhibition, which I continue to be excited by.]”

The 10 Secrets to Indie Game Success (and Why They Do Not Exist) (Paul Kilduff-Taylor / Medium – ARTICLE)
“Since we started out, indie game development has ascended from being the preserve of back-room tinkerers to the lofty heights of an aspirational career path. This kind of cultural shift can lead to the rise of meta-industry of advice-peddlers who do not have directly relevant experience of developing and releasing successful games.”

Meet some of the indie devs quietly pushing the JRPG genre forward (Steven T. Wright / Gamasutra – ARTICLE)
“Over the past few years, it seems as though the breathless paeans enthusiastic fans have sung for the ‘90s “golden age” of JRPGs has finally reached the ears of their slumbering god, Square Enix, which has deigned to publish some newer games that strike at this once-depleted vein.”

How Dead By Daylight proved analysts wrong and became one of the biggest games on Steam (Wes Fenlon / PC Gamer – ARTICLE)
“Since its release in 2016, the horror game of hide-n-seek, one powerful killer pitted against a group of weak survivors, has sold more than four million copies. I talked with game director Mathieu Côté about Dead By Daylight’s growth, developing a game alongside a passionate community, the challenges of asymmetrical multiplayer, loot boxes, and more.”

Amazon Has YouTube Envy (Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg Businessweek – ARTICLE)
“Amazon in recent months has been pursuing exclusive livestreaming deals with dozens of popular media companies and personalities, many with large followings on YouTube. Twitch is offering minimum guarantees of as much as a few million dollars a year, as well as a share of future advertising sales and subscription revenue, according to several people who’ve been contacted by Twitch. [SIMON’S NOTE: more about Twiitch expanding beyond games – but still very relevant for all of us.]”

Researchers gave AI curiosity and it played video games all day (Tristan Greene / The Next Web – ARTICLE)
“The more times the bricks are struck in a row by the ball, the more complicated the pattern of bricks remaining becomes, making the agent more curious to explore further, hence, collecting points as a byproduct. [SIMON’S NOTE: Creepy but interesting, eh?]”

Helping Players Hate (or Love) Their Nemesis (Chris Hoge / GDC / YouTube – VIDEO)
“In this 2018 GDC talk, Monolith Productions’ Chris Hoge describes philosophies and features implemented in the design of both Middle-earth: Shadow of War and its predecessor, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor to give players an antagonistic relationship with their enemies. [SIMON’S NOTE: the Middle-Earth sequel wasn’t too well appreciated, but still some interesting design decisions here!]”

ROM sites are falling, but a legal loophole could save game emulation (Kyle Orland / Ars Technica  – ARTICLE)
“But what if there might be a middle ground that could thread the needle between the legality of original cartridges and the convenience of emulated ROMs? What if an online lending library, temporarily loaning out copies of ROMs tied to individual original cartridges, could satisfy the letter of the law and the interests of game preservation at the same time? What if such a library already exists? In fact, it has for 17 years.”

How Two Bit Circus is turning its 21st century carnival into one giant game (Bryan Bishop / The Verge – ARTICLE)
“Throw out the term “amusement park,” and it conjures up visions of roller coasters and rides and costumed characters in massive, franchise-themed lands. But inside a warehouse in the downtown arts district of Los Angeles, a company called Two Bit Circus is building its own idiosyncratic riff on the idea, focused on the power of games.”

Making Games Better for Gamers with Colourblindness & Low Vision (Mark Brown / Game Maker’s Toolkit / YouTube – VIDEO)
“In this series of videos, I’ll be sharing guidelines and best practices for making games more accessible to a wide range of disabilities. This time, I’m looking at design choices and menu options that will affect those who are colourblind or have low vision.”

People Keep Trying To Scam Their Way Into Free Video Games (Jason Schreier / Kotaku – ARTICLE)
“When Sean Noonan announced the Steam release date for his game, an infinite runner called Jack B. Nimble, he started getting emails from people who wanted review copies. Normally, this would be great news for any developer. Getting enough attention from media outlets and streamers can pull a game from the dregs of Steam and turn it into a skyrocketing success. But something didn’t seem right.”

Harsh headlines, failed festivals and, finally, friends: Pokémon Go, two years on (Louise Blain / The Guardian – ARTICLE)
“While the monthly community days, where trainers spill on to the streets to hunt down swathes of one particular Pokémon, are exciting for the team, it’s the real-world events where Niantic is pushing the boundaries of how the game is played. In Lincoln Park, thousands of people who had flown in from across the world followed a tailored 1.8-mile walking tour, passing giant mobile cell towers specially installed to cope with the extra network traffic.”

Winter Storm Draco – Annotated Source (Ryan Veeder / Gamasutra Blogs – ARTICLE)
“Whenever I release a text adventure through my Patreon, I also annotate the source text from one of my earlier games as a gift for my top-tier Patreoneers. But these secret annotations can only be kept a secret for so long. One of my top-tier Patreoneers (the same guy who requested that I publicly release the source for The Statue Got Me High) recently asked me about releasing some more annotations. I picked a game with some code that I remain mostly unashamed of even three years after writing it: WINTER STORM DRACO. [SIMON’S NOTE: dear reader, IT WAS ME.]”

Know Your Market: Making Indie Games That Sell (Erik Johnson / GDC / YouTube – VIDEO)
“In this 2018 GDC talk, Infinite Monkeys Entertainment’s Erik Johnson analyzes trends in the Steam marketplace and explores how his game, ‘Life Goes On’, failed to match the market.”

Fortnite Is so Much More Than a Game (Keith Stuart / Great Escape / Medium – ARTICLE)
“Through a variety of clever design decisions, Epic has constructed a true digital Third Place, a hangout where players are given a huge amount of autonomy to seek out the experiences they want. As a child of the late 1970s and early 1980s, it hit me a few weeks ago that Fortnite feels like a skatepark.”

The Surprising History Of The French Bread Studio (Thomasaurus / Bas Gros Poing – ARTICLE)
“Thus, even though today’s French Bread is a traditional company of around 10 employees, its origins are rooted in a culture that did not exist in the West at the time. The doujinaims to create content referencing but also diverging from an intellectual property, sometimes without licensing.”

Stardew Valley: How To Find Comfort in Nihilism by Finding Meaning in Watering Virtual Crops (William Corley / ZEAL / Medium – ARTICLE)
“So maybe you play videogames to numb the pain of existence, and you pick up Stardew Valley because it looks cute and light hearted, and with each virtual day that passes you realize more and more exactly how alien this world free of consequences is. [SIMON’S NOTE: This is a really odd essay which is also very, uh, ‘now’.]”

Just Like Real Life, EVE Online Wars Are Won With Propaganda (Lee Yancy / Kotaku – ARTICLE)
“To help keep other players energized and ready to fight, EVE’s most dedicated tacticians have a long-standing tradition of producing spectacular propaganda to help drive their in-game efforts. Just like in real-life conflicts, propaganda is , information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.”

An Oral History Of ‘GoldenEye 007’ On The N64 (Quinn Myers / MEL Magazine – ARTICLE)
“‘GoldenEye lives on mostly because of nostalgia, at least for those of us still around from 21 years ago. The game is no doubt a classic and it holds up well today gameplay-wise, but new gamers have trouble with the low amount of polygons used for the models.'”

Twitch streamers are divided on Ninja’s choice not to stream with women (Julia Alexander / Polygon – ARTICLE)
“Why do some streamers choose to cast with people of the opposite sex, while others refuse? Responsibility. Friendship. Change. Unification. Those were some of the words several of the streamers we spoke to used when responding to the question. The answers seem simple, but co-ed streaming isn’t.”

 

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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!]

Reports have begun to emerge on Sunday morning of a shooting that took place at a Madden tournament in Jacksonville Florida. 

According to the Jacksonville Sheriffs’ Office twitter account, one suspect has been found dead at the scene, with multiple fatalities reported. They are urging those near the scene to stay away at this time. 

In a press conference held later in the afternoon, Jacksonville sheriff Mike Williams stated that 3 people were killed, including the suspect. 9 people were transported to the hospital, 7 of them with gunshot rooms. 

Sheriff Williams also identified the suspected shooter as David Katz, a 24 year-old man from Baltimore. Williams also confirmed Katz was attending the event as a competitor. 

This is a developing story, we will update with more confirmed details as they become available. 

You may remember that a few years ago, former BioWare Jennifer Hepler discussed the possibility of a role-playing game that would let players skip past combat so they could experience the story moments more frequently. 

While many players and developers expressed frustration at this idea (and then at the harassment Hepler endured afterward), one developer, Wadjet Eye Games’ Dave Gilbert, began thinking “wait, why doesn’t that game exist?”

It turns out, this is part of the origin story behind Unavowed, a new adventure game from Wadjet Eye Games. Forgoing the combat that fills up may BioWare RPGs, Unavowed instead presents the player both with a character who has a customizable backstory, and a selection of supporting characters that can be swapped out from mission to mission.

To learn more about pushing the envelope in the point-and-click adventure game genre, we reached out to Gilbert for a conversation about the making of Unavowed earlier today on the Gamasutra Twitch channel, which you can now watch in the video above. Watch the conversation if you’re a developer working on managing narrative scope, or you want to know how Gilbert takes inspiration from his home town of New York City when making his games. 

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

In this GDC 2011 talk, Rutgers University’s Nina H. Fefferman explains how an unexpected outbreak of Hakkar’s Corrupted Blood Plague in the early days of World of Warcraft helped Epidemiologists better understand the flow of diseases in society.

Fefferman discusses how the corrupted blood incident began as a coding error, turning into a plague after the virtual disease spread to different parts of World of Warcraft, causing a pandemic to spread throughout the land. 

She also talks about how the accidental plague was studied by epidemiologists years after the event, leading to papers being published about how the virtual world could help study and predict human behavior.

It was an informative 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.

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: Paekakariki, New Zealand (Remote)

Dry Cactus is seeking a skilled and motivated lead game developer to help us grow and reach new audiences.

This is a long-term remote based contract. We are head-quartered in a small town in New Zealand and are mostly a remote team, so you can stay put where you are, or if you wish we can help relocate you to the beautiful coasts of New Zealand.

We are known for our previous work on Poly Bridge, an award-winning physics bridge-building puzzle game.

For this role we are looking for an experienced game developer, someone who has shipped multiple titles and has spent many years working with C# and Unity. You will be required to work on original titles in the physics/puzzle space, so familiarity with 2D/3D physics and mathematics is a big plus. As you will be required to work both independently and within a small remote-based team you will need to have great communication skills and know how to set your own pace but also seek guidance when needed.

We value family time and a healthy work-life balance, can offer a competitive rate/salary and given the work is remote-based you have the flexibility to make your own schedule.

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.

“When you’re fighting AI, you can do whatever the hell you want to feel powerful and amazing and have a grand ol’ time. Against other players, at some level, dying still has to be fun.”

– Senior PvP designer Andrew Weldon shares how the scorch cannon made the jump from PvP to PvE

Destiny 2 is launching a limited-time game mode today through the game’s recent Crucible Labs experimental program. The mode, appropriately called Scorched, arms two teams of competing players exclusively with the firey scorch cannons typically found in the ‘player versus everything’ sandbox side of the game. 

Senior PvP designer Andrew Weldon has shared a series of tweets that dive into how the team at Bungie went about making scorch cannons feel right at home in the new ‘player versus player’ experiment, something he notes required some tweaking to address the differences in how the two different PvP and PvE sides of Destiny 2 define fun.

“[The scorch cannon is] a pretty aggressive weapon, with a fast projective and a fast rhythm between firing and impact. Almost a ‘flam’ for the drummers out there,” writes Weldon. “This is super satisfying against AI (and against other players) but fighting against it in PvP with no tweaks is, at most engagement distance, not dissimilar from firing rocket sniper rifles. Not the best time on the receiving end, and a pretty one-note gameplay experience.”

Weldon explains that he looked to how Destiny 2’s PvE and sandbox-side designers had done to make fighting AI enemies this “dance” of reading clearly telegraphed enemy attacks, then moving and reacting to those coming blows to make the scorch cannon-powered player versus player fights have a similar cadence. Slowing down the projectiles themselves captured some to combat loop from the PvE experience and, after playtesting, ensured that players still had, in Weldon’s words, “a moment of ‘oh shiiiit’ to realize what’s about to happen.”

Hitting midair targets now took more effort and target leading, which made dodging more viable. And the airburst strategy became available – the faster projectile would just miss before you could react. Now you could learn to time your detonations aginst airborne targets!

— Andrew Weldon (@kungfusquirrel) August 24, 2018

A musical score is a great way of guiding the player’s emotions. It can offer important clues about the world the player inhabits and indicate the severity of the obstacles being encountered. The 2D action-adventure title Hollow Knight, developed by Team Cherry Games, is an excellent example of this.

In the game, you play as the character Hollow Knight who must explore a ruined kingdom buried beneath the ground. Along the way you’ll collect power-ups, discover new areas, and defeat ancient evils, with your actions underlined by a hugely atmospheric soundtrack by composer Christopher Larkin.

The music for Hollow Knight presented many challenges for Larkin. The most significant being how to create an evocative score with distinguishable leitmotifs. He employed several solutions to achieve this, like using dynamics and varied instrumentation to differentiate tracks from one another, maintaining contact with the development team to ensure the score matched their interpretation of the characters, and taking the time to listen to a variety of influences for new ideas. 

According to Larkin, the initial brief that he received from Team Cherry was to compose a soundtrack demonstrating a sense of “dark elegance using minimal instrumentation”, but that remained “classical and melancholic.” 

The score includes numerous tracks featuring little more than piano and strings, though there are certainly sections where he felt it was possible to add some intense sounds and instrumentation into the mix.

“We definitely started with the soft piano and viola in the opening menu and “Dirtmouth,” but we pull out all the stops for the boss battles.” says Larkin.“That said, the melancholy and a certain sadness is still evident in a lot of these, underneath the crazy runs and shredding.” 

“There are some areas that have very unique instrumentation,” he adds. “We have harp, marimba and other earthy tones for “Greenpath.” We have very Gothic, cold-sounding organ for “Soul Sanctum,” and we use Kalimba, wine glasses and guitar harmonics to give the shiny, crystal sound for Crystal Peak.” In these situations, the visual qualities and the context of the areas have a large impact in the choice of instruments and sounds.”

Some of the tracks required additional musicians and live instruments in order to bring them to life. On “City of Tears,” for example, Larkin employed the talents of soprano singer Amelia Jones to achieve its ethereal quality. While, across the soundtrack, Timothy Cheel’s viola playing contributes a variety of emotions.

Soprano Amelia Jones can be heard on the “City of Tears” track.

“Adding live playing gives the score an element of human touch, and a certain organic sound,” suggests Larkin. “But I think what it really does is give an extra dimension to the musical content. A new interpretation of a melody or idea which I otherwise wouldn’t have done.

He elaborates, “Where I couldn’t get the live performance in, I try to always sculpt my sequenced score to imitate live players. I’m always thinking about how and where the players need to breathe, or change their bow, even if it is the computer playing it back.”

The impact that this has is that it makes each theme feel more individual, as performers can contribute their own nuances to the piece.

While writing the soundtrack, there were several occasions when taking the time to exchange ideas with others helped to improve the finished score. One clear example he notes is with the boss theme Hornet. 

“The team and I would always discuss the layout and the character of each area at length,” says Larkin. “But even then, things didn’t always go right the first time. In the case of Hornet for example, I sent the team a sketch of the track which, while it sounded cool, had quite a heavy bass riff.”

The dev team noted that Hornet’s character is quite sophisticated, elegant and swift despite her deadliness. By better understanding Hornet’s character, how she moves, and how she behaves, Larkin was able to alter the track to better suit the animations and the artwork that the development team had put together.

This comes across in the completed version of the track, as her movements are matched by a more elaborate string accompaniment that implies her speed and grace.

This wasn’t the only input on the soundtrack however. Larkin listened extensively to multiple composers while creating music for the game, including contemporary and classical artists.

“Joe Hisaishi has always been a big influence,” Larkin says. “You can definitely hear that in the piano and strings pieces. Same with James Newton Howard and his beautiful romantic cues from King Kong.” He continues, “Classical music also finds its way into my work, especially Mahler and Rachmaninov in developing long themes, as is evident in the White Palace.”

Referencing a diverse selection of music was extremely important for Larkin. It led him to try out lots of new ideas during the process of recording. The “Mantis Lords” theme is a notable example of this.

It was intended as a deliberate nod to the music of Vivaldi and has a sound unlike anything else on the score. This can be heard by the prominent use of harpsichord and its frantic arrangement. These qualities contribute significantly to the characterization of the Mantis Lords, giving them a particularly threatening and regal presence.

The effect of all these measures is a soundtrack evoking a proper sense of place and character, while also fostering an emotional response from the player. Though the score is clearly linked by its elegiac tone and recurring piano, you never really hear the exact same combination of sounds or a similar intensity from the individual tracks.

It’s because of this that Larkin’s score can be considered a success. By drawing from a wide range of voices and inspirations, and making intelligent use of equipment available to him, he managed to insert a great deal of personality into the score. His leitmotifs add greater detail to the world, and also to facilitate the game’s storytelling.

“I think that’s a story that has repeated itself with many new types of tech that we’ve gotten over the years: Run wild using it initially, learn its limitations, and then pull back to a more measured place.”

-Ion Hazzikostas points out a pattern with World of Warcraft’s development

USgamer has assembled an extensive history of Blizzard’s massively influential MMORPG World of Warcraft, pulling from the memories of current and past Blizzard developers like former chief creative officer Rob Pardo, Battle for Azeroth game director Ion Hazzikostas, principle artist Jimmy Lo, former lead systems designer Greg Street, and technical director Patrick Dawson to tell the story of the still-thriving game.

Be warned, it is quite the lengthy read but the piece itself does manage to capture nearly 20 years of history surrounding the conception, development, and ongoing support of World of Warcraft and, in doing so, provides developers with a first-hand look at how the MMORPG mainstay came to be. 

One interesting excerpt from the piece explores how Blizzard layered game instances to deal with players that would be experiencing different story moments, many of which altered landscapes, in the same area all at once. As technical director Patrick Dawson explains, first getting that tech in place during the Burning Crusade expansion days (roughly a decade ago) was no simple feat, but was essential if Blizzard wanted to maintain a balance between the single-player and massively multiplayer aspects of the game. 

“You can have in one phase there be this tremendous war between the Alliance and the Horde and in another phase it’s this peaceful, tranquil area because maybe the war is over,” Dawson tells USgamer. “If you make it go from one war to another war to another war you’ve now layered three phases worth of very expensive combat on top of each other; that could actually cause server issues.”

Ion Hazzikostas, game director of the most recent expansion Battle for Azeroth, explains that keeping that balance between impactful single-player storytelling and wide-scale online experiences is a line the development team is constantly trying to define throughout the ongoing development of World of Warcraft. 

“We’re always trying to find a line between robust single-player storytelling and a sense that your actions matter in the world,” Hazzikostas tells USgamer. “And there is a coherent narrative, that is the backbone of this world. But also the inherently MMO nature of the experience. We never want to stray too far away from these shared social multiplayer roots.”

While other point-and-click adventure game developers have moved on to greener pastures, Wadjet Eye games has kept its feet firmly planted in the house that pixel-hunting built, releasing Unavowed just last week on Steam. 

If you haven’t had a chance to check out Unavowed yet, it’s a solid entry in the classic PC games genre that not only tells a solid fantasy story, but contains some neat design upgrades that other developers should pay attention to. 

To learn more about making those new features, we’re going to be streaming Unavowed with lead developer Dave Gilbert today at 3PM EDT over on the Gamasutra Twitch channel. Be sure to join us in Twitch chat to ask Gilbert your own questions! 

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