General game developing news and updates.
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London, 1918. You are newly-turned Vampyr Dr. Jonathan Reid. As a doctor, you must find a cure to save the city’s flu-ravaged citizens. As a Vampyr, you are cursed to feed on those you vowed to heal.
*Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time
Save 25% on Vampyr as part of this week’s Weekend Deal*!
London, 1918. You are newly-turned Vampyr Dr. Jonathan Reid. As a doctor, you must find a cure to save the city’s flu-ravaged citizens. As a Vampyr, you are cursed to feed on those you vowed to heal.
*Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time
Next week, twin stick shooter/tower defense/horde mode game Sleep Tight will land on Steam and the Nintendo Switch. It’s a little game with surprisingly nuanced design decisions going on under the hood, so we were pleased today to invite Maxx Burman, one of the game’s co-creators, onto the Gamasutra Twitch channel to discuss the game’s design and development.
For your convenience, we’ve archived that conversation for full viewing in the video up above. If you’re curious about the life of indie devs who are starting their launches on Steam and the Nintendo Switch, or if you want to know how developers are starting to think about integrating Mixer into their games, you should take a look!
And while you’re at it, be sure to follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel for more developer interviews and editor roundtables.
In this GDC 2013 session, Blizzard Entertainment’s Erin Catto explores how to solve collision problems in game programming.
Catto discusses how games would be far less compelling without the realistic physics simulation that engages the player’s intuition and stimulates their motion awareness.
He goes on to explain how physics has become a staple of modern gaming as developers try to re-create and re-interpret the world around them through physics engines, discussing collision detection with a focus on rigid body physics and real-time simulation in games.
It was an informative talk that’s still 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.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds developer PUBG Corp. has apologized for an in-game helmet depicting the Japanese rising sun flag found in the mobile version of the battle royale game after Korean and Chinese players deemed the design to be offensive.
The cosmetic item featured the Japanese rising sun flag, which is reference to the country’s imperial army and its World War 2-era military aggression.
To a Western audience the design may not seem insensitive, but in Asian countries it carries connotations of far-right ideology and ultra-nationalism.
It has since been removed from the mobile game, and players who purchased the item pack have been issued refunds and told the item included “a previously undetected bug”.
In addition to finding rising sun imagery in PlayerUnknown’s Battleground mobile, the bot ‘Unit 731’ was also discovered, which is a reference to a division of the Japanese army that developed chemical weapons and conducted human experiments on Chinese and Korean prisoners of war. This name has also been removed from the game.
PUBG Corp. (whose parent company is the Seoul-based Bluehole) issued an apology for the helmet via The Korean Times, stating: “We apologize for causing concerns over a pilot mask item. We will conduct an overall re-examination of our image production process to prevent such a recurrence. We will enhance procedures to scrutinize game items before their release and hold the person in charge responsible.”
Hello Games’ stellar exploration game No Man’s Sky is a unique project, one that relies heavily on innovative use of procedural generation tech.
At GDC 2017, No Man’s Sky sound designer Paul Weir broke down how the game also makes use of an innovative vocal modeling synthesizer plugin and a custom-built generative music system to ensure the game’s soundtrack is varied and reactive to player action.
It was a fascinating talk that shed light on how No Man’s Sky‘s vocal tract synthesis plugin VocAlien was prototyped and built, as well as how the game’s procedural audio pipeline was laid out.
Weir also demonstrated how No Man’s Sky heavily relies on the use of a custom generative music system which is deeply embedded within the game logic, discussed the creative implications, and laid out how the band 65 Days of Static were able to both compose a traditional album and create generative soundscapes without compromising their sound.
It was an interesting presentation that you can now watch for free over on the official GDC YouTube channel!
In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its new 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, GDC Europe, and GDC Next 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: Dunedin, New Zealand
Systems, game mechanics and level design
Skills/Requirements
About the studio
Dunedin, New Zealand-based RocketWerkz began in 2015. The independent game development studio was founded by Dean ‘Rocket’ Hall and employs staff from all levels of industry experience across multiple projects. In 2016 internet giant Tencent invested in the Studio. The focus of the studio is as a creative factory – developing PC games, new genres and cooperative multiplayer experiences.
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.
Bandai Namco has announced today the establishment of its new development group Bandai Namco Amusement Lab Inc., which will focus primarily on developing and operating VR, AR, and MR experiences for Bandai Namco arcade and entertainment facilities.
It seems the company decided to open up this new subsidiary to bring VR in arcades to the next level, as it will also take care of management operations, software and hardware development, and network development for such experiences.
The new group will officially be established on October 1 2018, and will be physically based in Bandai Namco Studios headquarters in Tokyo.
“He was asking stuff like ‘How high can the players get?’. I was like, ‘Dude, imagine you have a hero that can just fly all the time, let’s start there.”
– Blizzard’s Geoff Goodman recalls a conversation with another designer early into the development of Overwatch
Overwatch doesn’t shy away from introducing characters with a variety of movement ranges, but giving players the ability to fly, grapple, and slingshot themselves around a map brings up its own batch of level design challenges.
In an interview with VG 24/7, Overwatch lead designer Geoff Goodman looks back to early conversations he had with the team about designing future-proof levels and explores how excessively mobile new characters like Wrecking Ball influence the design of new maps.
Goodman recalls one specific chat he had with lead level designer Aaron Keller when Overwatch was in development, warning him not to “cheat too much” and avoid placing objects in a way that would look odd from different angles.
“Everyone is going to be able to get literally everywhere. The bigger issue was containment, to make sure you can’t fly out of the map too far,” Goodman explains. “That was way early because I knew we were going to get into this area where people can go basically anywhere, and pretty quickly we actually ended up making Pharah, which is pretty close to being able to free-fly. I kind of proved a point with her.”
Goodman touches on how this philosophy has changed as new characters and maps are developed in the full interview over on VG 24/7.
Next week, twin stick shooter Sleep Tight lands on Steam and the Nintendo Switch, mixing the fantasy of being a kid playing with Nerf Guns with a subtly refined progression system with tower defense mechanics and logic.
It’s a game that caught our attention at PAX East earlier this year, and we’re excited to be streaming the game with lead developer Maxx Burman today at 3PM EDT. If you’ve got questions about making and selling twin-stick arcade-style games, you should drop by and ask your questions in Twitch chat!
While you’re at it, be sure to follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel for more developer interviews and editor roundtables.
