Category: News

In this GDC 2018 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.

Johnson explains market fit and how critical it is for the success of modern indie games, providing a postmortem market analysis of Life Goes On and discussing how to evaluate a game’s commercial potential.

He also covers how to keep on top of market trends and what it means to know your target audience, and i’s 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.

“Designers should try to use shapes, symbols, shading, animation, and other visual tricks to make critical parts of the game stand out from one another.” 

– Game Maker’s Toolkit’s Mark Brown on designing for colorblindness. 

Game Maker’s Toolkit’s Mark Brown published a new video to his designing for disability series yesterday, which explores the best practices developers can utilize when making games for players with colorblindness and low vision. 

Part one covers colorblindness by examining Cuphead, where Brown explains how it’s easy to tell the differences between pink punches thrown by enemies as opposed to blue ones. This visual information is crucial for the player because the different colors denote which punch can be blocked, and which one cannot.

Players with colorblindness aren’t able to distinguish cues that rely on colors as one or more of the receptors in their eyes are defective, hindering their ability to see a particular chunk of the color spectrum or making it difficult to tell the difference between some hues.

Brown discusses the three major types of colorblindness, which all affect the perception of different tones, depending on what form a player has. Deuteranopia, which affects green tones, is the most common.

He notes that contrary to what some people may think, colorblindness does not mean seeing in black and white– that’s actually achromatopsia, which is incredibly rare. 

“Developers can check to see if their games are readable by those who are colorblind by checking with colorblind gamers, or using free filter tools to simulate what their game might look like to people with the three major vision deficiencies,” says Brown. 

“A tool like Color Oracle allows you to see static images in a simulated colorblind mode, while the program Sim Dotulism can show you the world through colorblind eyes in real time,” he adds. Game engines like Unity and Unreal also have filters to help as well. 

Once the filters are applied, devs should see if important information like HUD elements, alerts, enemy differences, loot rarity or damage indicators are lost or difficult to distinguish. 

“And so if you’ve run the filter and realized that colorblind gamers won’t be able to see their red laser sight against different backgrounds, or tell the difference between the red team and the green team, what do you do?”

The best solution is to design around the issue and simply avoid relying on color alone when communicating information or distinguishing between two different things. 

“Designers should try to use shapes, symbols, shading, animation, and other visual tricks to make critical parts of the game stand out from one another.”

He lists Recore as a good example, because even though the game has color-coded enemies and weapons developer Armature Studio decided to not just use colors, but also high contrast white arrows on the enemy’s health bar to relay information. Left for blue, up for yellow, and right for red– all corresponding with d-pad direction. 

Brown was just speaking about one of the many ways developers can design for colorblindness and low vision, so be sure to watch the entire video over at Game Maker’s Toolkit.

An assassin, a girl stranded in a dark forest with nothing but a camera, and a heavily armed man ensared in a fetishistic obsession with VHS tapes. These are the three playable characters in the brief lo-fi experience that is Paratopic.

The devs behind it, Doc Burford, Chris Brown and Jess Harvey, refuse to call it a “walking simulator.” Tagging it as a first-person horror game doesn’t do enough justice, either.

In truth, the game relies on its aesthetic and camera cuts to confuse and disturb the player in different ways, while also telling a much bigger story than what players can see from its first-person perspective. Think of the storytelling method at play in Blendo Games’ Thirty Flights of Loving, but as a starting point for something completely unique and obscure.

In Paratopic, while there are three characters, the camera is the main protagonist of the experience. Cuts are abrupt, teleporting the player from one location to another without warning. Until later on in the game, it’s even hard to know which character the player is inhabiting between these narrative jumps.

Using the camera as a character

According to Harvey, who was mainly in charge of programming, the technical aspect is pretty straightforward: cutting to black for a given period of time or using audio bridges (sourced from either a start or target scene) served as a couple of hooks for handling shot changes.

“From a design perspective, a lot of thought and control goes in to each [cut],” she explains. “While they might seem abrupt and sudden, they’re far from random or applied haphazardly.”

 

“While Jess and I enjoy making antagonistic mechanics, it was important to me that we avoided ever doing something that might make a player unable to continue the game.”

“While Jess and I enjoy making antagonistic mechanics, it was important to me that we avoided ever doing something that might make a player unable to continue the game,” says Burford, who did most of the writing and was equally involved in the design choices.

The whole game is loaded at the start, with the exception of about two thirds of audio clips which are loaded in asynchronously. They used a header script, gaining the freedom to treat each one as an individual scene with their own lighting settings, configuration for the character motor, manage scripts and the soundtrack setup. A shot manager took care of controlling transitions, with a drag-and-drop interface for setting up the order of scenes.

“Primarily, we handle things in this manner because of resources. Implementing, testing and managing an asynchronous load while providing instantaneous transitions looked to be a moderately sizeable chunk of scope,” adds Harvey. “In another game this might be necessary, but with our visual stylings lending us a significantly lower than usual memory footprint we got away with skirting over that for the sake of taking the minimum viable product route on our tech.”

Soundtrack and audio design served as a close companion to each transition, presenting a different vibe to subtle mark every scene around the characters (nicknamed Assassin, Smuggler and Birdwatcher). Chris Brown, who worked primarily as the sound designer and composer, says that the game’s transitions succeed because they cut shots off mid-sentence. In Paratopic’s first scene, the player is interrogated by a police officer. As soon as the scene begins to “end” and the person is heading towards his office, the team cut right away to interrupt a natural closing point that someone would expected.

“We effectively put that space on ‘pause’ and run off somewhere else, then we return to it much later on,” says Chris. “In situations where we do this, I tried to pick up the audio as neatly as possible from where it left off.”

In the diner scene, using the Assassin, the synths move slowly to provide a baseline for the rest of the music within the same space. “When we cut the player perspective to Smuggler, we also crosscut the audio tracks at the same timecode. This new piece has the same base elements as the first, but now has a slightly more aggressive warble and much more movement,” Chris explains. “The discordant elements especially are supposed to sell the thinly veiled omnipresent threat which runs throughout Smuggler’s story, also conveyed elsewhere with drones in the bass range.”

Creating a ‘refracted reality’

Another strong element in Paratopic is present in its most disturbing moments. In the mentioned diner scene (which starts at roughly 4:40 in the embedded Let’s Play video above), the player establishes a dialogue with a person whose face seems to glitch. To make it even worse, the camera takes the player closer to the face, until it becomes the only thing you see on screen. At the end, the angle ends up being fixed at his chin, following every movement.

“We had a number of camera mounts that we jump to, with the final one attached to the NPC’s armature. For the shifting face, the armature has an additional bone that controls the UV offset of the face material,” says Harvey. “Within the creative process, I think it came in a day or two before we locked everything down to just QA.”

In one of its many iterations, the scene had the player strong-armed into smuggling the tapes during a weird poker game. The character owed the man money and he would give the player a second chance through this card contest. By inevitably losing the mini-game, they would end up owing an even greater amount, being forced to do the job.

“In the end, we ran out of time and had to go somewhere simpler, which begged the thought of ‘what if the card game did happen, but we don’t play it because we’re viewing this through a sort of… refractive lens of memory?’” Harvey continues. “This streamlined down to just a refractive reality and thus we arrived at the ‘glitchy’ effect.”

When Burford first conceived the game, it was composed as separate, unrelated vignettes filled with moments that wouldn’. This included talking to a giant cowboy who could no longer move in the middle of the night, for example.

As the development progressed, Burford backed off from the technical side to focus on the presentation, finding the right balance to showcase that the scenes had a linear order to them. The writing process consisted on creating bits of dialogue that would indicate to the player when these events took place. For instance, there’s a line about being an outdoorswoman that is meant to reference the game’s final scene, something that might not be apparent until doing a second playthrough.

“We wanted the player to feel a certain way. So a lot of it was just going ‘okay, how do these scenes contrast with each other?’ or thinking about the build up,” adds Burford “I really loved Jess’ idea to make the player wait forever in the elevator room, then immediately teleport upstairs.”

The team worked to ensure that all these fractured vignettes would come together to make something that felt holistic and integrated, even if it doesn’t look that way at first glance. But even with its off-kilter atmosphere and aesthetic, Harvey admits the team always intended to keep Paratopic in a very traditional narrative arc.

“Yes, we stretch the definition of that about as far as it can go before breaking,” she admits. “But it is still anchored in an exploration of formal structure.”

In the end, it’s the ways in which the team tried to stretch what a first-person game can be — through camera cuts, character swaps, and unsettlingly mobile face textures — that make Paratopic something worth looking at if you’re at all interested in game design.

In this GDC 2018 talk, developers JC Lau, Leah Hoyer, Elaine Chase, Mary Olson and Kelly Snyder discuss their unique perspectives, struggles, and available tools as they work to improve diversity in games.

Games are a unique medium with power to unite. They create a common ground for people from diverse ethnicities, cultures, genders, and political views to connect with one another in an experience they all enjoy.

However, the percentage of women and people of color remains shockingly low, and there is much to be done within gaming companies themselves as well as within gaming culture to shift this status quo.

The talk dives into how the video games industry has struggled to develop and retain a workforce that reflects the people playing their games, and what work can be done to improve diversity in games. 

It’s 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.

Last Friday, developer PanicBarn released the Brexit-themed doorperson game Not Tonight, a well-timed launch that coincides with a six month mark before Brexit is meant to take place. 

Though Not Tonight has caught attention by diving for a hot-button issue, the game also owes its success to creative director Tim Constant’s fascination with “workplace simulation” games, and a fervent discord community that’s built an eccentric role-playing scenario on the online platform. 

These were some of the lessons we learned during our chat with Constant today on the Gamasutra Twitch channel, which you can now watch in its entirety up above. Be sure to watch the video if you’re curious about building strong foundations for a thematically-charged game. 

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

Disclaimer: Not Tonight is published by No More Robots, a company founded by former Gamasutra editor Mike Rose and advised by current Gamasutra publisher Simon Carless. 

Facebook announced today that it is foregoing its 30 percent share of Instant Games in-app revenue on the Android platform.

In-app purchases became available on Android devices back in May, which allowed developers to build games and integrate ads with an initial rev/share model of 70 percent going to devs and 30 percent going back to Facebook.

However on Android devices, developers also had to share 30 percent of their revenue with Google. In the end, Google took 30 percent of the total, with Facebook taking 30 percent of what was left. That left developers only 49 percent of the total revenue on games they had made.

As explained in a post to the Instant Games Developer Facebook page, the company is removing its revenue share so developers only have to pay Google on Android.

As for the revenue share, Facebook will apply a new model retroactively, allowing developers to run user-acquisition campaigns beginning August 1.

For web versions of Instant Games that are accessed on Facebook.com, Facebook will still collect a 30 percent share on in-app purchases. In the user-acquisition campaigns, developers will pay Facebook for the advertisements, ensuring Facebook can still generate revenue from its platform.