Have you played King of Dragon Pass? It’s a 1999 barbarian tribe management game from developer A Sharp that found a new audience when it was ported to iOS in 2011. That success drove A Sharp (headed up by developer David Dunham) to begin development of a new, similarly-styled RPG called Six Ages, which launched this week on iOS.
Since King of Dragon Pass showed off one of the most unique ways to do systemic narrative in game design, we’re excited that Dunham will be joining us at 3PM EDT on the Gamasutra Twitch channel to discuss the process of making Six Ages. If you’ve got questions about making strategy-driven storytelling experiences, be sure to join us and ask your questions!
And while you’re at it, you can follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel for more developer interviews, editor roundtables, and gameplay commentary.
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.
This article was originally postedon the Joy Machine blog maybe check it out too (it also has a table of contents because this really is poorly organized wordspew)!
I wanted to cover a variety of Steel Hunters updates across the board so this piece is covering a lot of ground on a variety of areas; prepare for a large-cone blast of wordspew.
Completely Wonderful Recent Happenings
To kick off this topical and tonal hurricane of a Steel Hunters update, lets start with the two biggest morale boosts in months:
Steel Hunters and I Are in PC Gamer
I’ve worked with Xalavier on another piece for PC Gamer in the past, but seeing the game in a big area in the spread was just joyous.
I’ve had work on games while I was at Stardock Entertainment and when working briefly on Crowfall… but seeing something I’m directly responsible for like this is just, well, pretty profoundly meaningful to me.
An iOS-Created Slideshow of Steel Hunters’ Progression
During my sprints it can be hard to calm down and get to sleep, so I tend to play with iOS image and video apps.
This time: a simple, mostly-chronological, progression of Steel Hunters from its tech art/vfx sandbox playground two years ago up to a few weeks ago.
It’s goofy, sure, but it’s such a strong reminder that progress (tremendous progress that I couldn’t have ever fully predicted) is being made. Even when it feels like I’m crawling to the “finish line”. As follows:
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I still wish I could have used “Carry On Wayward Son” for the background track.
Joy Machine, Steel Hunters, and the Whole Money Thing
So far, Steel Hunters has been an enormous personal investment (and clearly not financially), but it’s one I’m making because I believe it demonstrates a sort of quality and style of game design that can make for a really great game experience. But, also, because the game entire production is based on:
An efficient programming/design ideology aimed at getting the absolute most out of any given system/feature.
A content workflow that gets the most out of whatever content can be created while, also, minimizing the cost of the content that needs to be created (especially when it comes to mech/behemoths, which could have otherwise been incredibly costly to create).
I actually have the crew at my first post-college gig, Stardock Entertainment, who instilled, well, making as good a game as is possible while minimizing costs.
The requirements for an initial launch are completely viable for a small team to achieve and the game’s architecture is designed to be easily updated (especially without any need for major patches/binary updates) and frequent timed events and content and so on (one of the very few great things I realized when working in mobile games).
So far, I’ve been the only person working on Steel Hunters; and that’s been, to say the very, very least: rough. I’m doing this because I have enough confidence in the quality of the initial publisher demo (which hopefully can be successfully conveyed in the short initial public trailer). And, aside from that, I’ve never had more fun working on a project and been this certain about how great and varied an experience it can be (whether played single-player or, especially, with up to three other players).
I’ve also constantly targeted a level of quality for a “prototype” (probably more akin to a green light demo at this point) that is representative of the game while, at the same time, based on production-ready and quality code and design that it can immediately “hit the ground running” with more people involved. It’d be fairly impossible to make the full game by myself, much less hit the intended play experience without some excellent team members who specialize in areas I can only skate by on.
I specifically wanted to position Steel Hunters as a AA-quality game and aim for as low a budget necessary as possible because I want really want to demonstrate that even a fast-paced third-person shooter (with heavily customizable ways for players to play how they want) can be made without a AAA budget. And all of this would be possible for the list of reasons I mentioned earlier.
I actually had some early (too early) negotiations with some publishers over a year ago that, I think, could have actually become a deal… But I wasn’t psyched with their view of what the game needed (especially given the drastically inflated cost associated with those needs), so I eventually decided to just be patient and spend as much time on whatever I can develop in an attempt to show off a game that resonated with a publisher that really gets the goals we (my COO and I) have.
The Public Trailer and Publisher Demo
NOW, all that said, the first trailer is — for real this time — not too far off. Not imminent, but very much in sight. Realistically, I could make a few days’ worth of changes and script a handful of sequences and it’d be pretty solid, but I’ve always wanted the trailer to be solely comprised of unscripted, in-game footage — even if it’s only the highlight reel from the sum total of footage taken. When I initially wanted to release a trailer (a year ago), I realized doing that would be falling into the trap of so many other projects: a trailer that is good but nowhere near representative of the game’s actual current state.
And, really, the trailer is a larger risk because it can’t be as carefully storyboards and scripted to really make the most of its fairly short duration (~1:15m). But, it’d be silly to talk a big game about “how games should be developed and marketed” if I didn’t even follow the same principles myself.
But the trailer has a lot going for it: we integrated a character, of sorts, to convey the intended dry and dark humor I want to infuse the game with while the gameplay itself just shows a lot of mechs and explosions and so forth (to be voiced by a VO actress, Tamara Ryan, whose rough recordings matched the tone and cadence of the character on even an initial dry run). I also was able to get help from one of my favorite bands, The Felix Culpa, to provide the background music for the whole thing. So… I’m optimistic.
The publisher demo is intended to follow on the heels of the trailer. I wanted the two to be simultaneously available, but the prep for the two deliverables is so different that it was just unrealistic
I just cut everything I wrote (which was probably a page and a half or two) because, really, I’ve already talked enough about how intense and rough the development of this project has been. And I’ve learned a lot of great lessons I’d love to relay at some point, but that’s for another post. So, here are the neat things going on:
A Completely Different Take on the Environment
I wasn’t planning on changing the landscape all that much from its second iteration, but one day I wanted to aim for smoother, more sand-swept landscape with less rigid mesas, some small dunes/waves, and smoother, more open spaces. The prior iterations were nowhere near open enough to ever construct a believable space for where a city may have once been.
So as to not labor on the whole process too much in an overview article, here’s what iteration two looked like:
And here’s the lighting-only and end result of the current third/final iteration of the landscape (I didn’t do exact before/afters, so the lighting-only image has meshes from the second-iteration landscape, which I was using for a scale reference):
On the plus side: anyone with World Machine and GeoGlyph 2.0 can check out the two-pass (one of the biggest mistakes in the second iteration) node graph that generated it on the Joy Machine GitHub Repo.
With More Stuff
Here’s a more recent screen shot of the progress on the landscape. Of note is that it’s been a lot of high-level building/mesh layout work to establish the rough feel of each of the map’s disparate areas. You may notice that there’s still a fairly large space that hasn’t been filled out quite yet, but I just figured out what that was going to be a day or two ago:
The current aesthetic for the “AI” buildings (the very out-of-place clean, new, and shiny buildings) is very much a work-in-progress.
The Pieces Are Coming Together
For a more grounded perspective, though, here’s the same camera composition some of you have come to know and love (or at least expect):
Gameplay
I have, much to the detriment of my own stress levels and completely-unfulfilled desired time doing design/vfx work, spent about 90% of my time over the last three months working exclusively on gameplay and backend code. So much C++. So much. But a run-down of the major systems currently in-place and just in need of tweaking to feel and function better:
A custom camera rig and effect stack (effect in this case being game/world effect such as a camera shake or FOV/positioning change).
The custom “physical movement component” that replaces the commonly-used “character movement component” that, if you’ve worked in UE4 or played prototypes/demos/some games, are very familiar with.
This was one of the most difficult development requirements of anything I’ve ever worked on (the second being something that is too large to fit in this list, so will be the next section). There are so many things in the UE4 “Game Framework” which are built around the use of the character (type of pawn) and character movement component that it was a bit of a nightmare to go in and replace them myself. Of all fields in game development: complex collision detection and animation are big blind spots. And the physical movement component combined physics, complex and continuous collision detection and animation all into one mega-funtask.
The most important goal of this task, though, was to make any object using a physical movement component (basically only mechs/behemoths) as fully-integrated into the physical simulations and physics objects in the world as I could possibly make them. If a larger and heavier mech were to run into a lighter mech, the lighter mech would react as you’d expect: it’d be pushed back or its speed would be altered (as opposed to just completely stop upon impact). The component also interacts with physics objects but, more importantly, also applies force/impulse to Blast objects (covered in a bit).
A refactored mech setup that functions better and separates as many of its dependencies on other systems in the game as much as possible. This may not mean much in the actual end playable result, but for development it makes life much, much easier.
The refactor also makes AI mechs, remote human-controlled mechs, and the local player’s mech share all the common functionality that can possibly be shared. This sounds like it should be simple and obvious — and maybe it was — but the mech and mech part architecture was one of the first things I iterated on continuously from the get-go to be as solid as possible. And it was, it just wasn’t done considering how its logic should be split up for all its necessary use-cases.
Complete support across all of Steel Hunters project features for JSON-based config data (locally or from a server) that the game will automatically reload on-the-fly whenever it detects a change to an active file.
I can’t even begin to convey how much faster this made camera setup and weapon/projectile design. It’s fantastic.
Support for NVIDIA’s Blast: As far as I’m aware, Blast has yet to be really used in many projects, but it is absolutely wonderful. I’ve gotten to the point where I can start designing meshes explicitly for Blast and the results are, I mean, astounding. A basic example is that if you were to shoot out the legs of a table, it would, of course, eventually topple. Blast adds a “stress factor” into the mix, however, so if you were to only shoot out one table leg and the table was made to look cheaply-built (or whatever), you can make it buckle under the stress of its instability with even a small bump (or a gust of wind which, because I’m a complete nerd, also physically affects certain objects in the world).
Unfortunately, since Blast isn’t widely-used yet, the content workflow is somewhat complicated due to a lack of examples/documentation. That said, like with other GameWorks tech that I’m using, NVIDIA’s developers on each respective tech have been astoundingly supportive. I’m currently working with the lead developer on Blast (at least from the Unreal Engine 4 integrate-side) and an NV tech artist to improve my understanding of the best workflow.
Also: I’m planning on some particularly large-scale world features (meshes, not landscape — that’s static) to be Blast-based. And… Well. I’m beyond excited for how rad that should be.
Then there’s, of course, a variety of engine-side rendering and shading adjustments, improvements to my core material “shaders”, iterations on post-processing effects and atmospherics, and more that I’ll go into another time.
… Except to say that I added support for Multi-Channel Signed Distance Fields for UI elements to make them as clear and smooth for any screen resolution as I possibly can. I can make a 32×32 reticle (which may take up, say, 150–200px of screen space at 1080p) look good whether playing at very low resolutions or at obscenely high resolution. I’ll release my plugin for this once it’s cleaned up a bit.
I was hoping to postpone work on the core game simulation backend until after the demo/trailer because it’s a huge part of the project and as non-trivial a system I’ve ever had to design, much less develop, in my… career, I think? But, because luck isn’t a thing that exists sometimes, that had to receive first-pass support now. Literally: now. I’m wrapping up the first-pass implementation today.
The whole goal of the game simulation was to be able to easily integrate independent systems/functionality into any type of object in the game so that the object can handle it as it needs to while the actual implementation of the systems (which can be trivial or can be quite complex) it handles never need to care one iota about how an object may handle them. I was always assuming this would be some kind of event system, but the more I looked through my own design notes and documentation, the traditional concept of an event (more specifically the Unreal Engine 4 concept of an event) didn’t quite fit with what I had in mind: a, let’s say “occurrence” for now, would be activated in the world that needed to be handled by any object which supports that occurrence. But each occurrence, not intended to have knowledge of any of the specific objects that would respond to it, would need to be handled by anything that fell within its “influence range” (which can be unbounded). Aside from the challenge that presented, there was the performance implication that a locationally-relevant occurrence could have on a world filled with any number of objects that may or may not support it.
The first thing I did once I realized all of this was try to find a working terminology for the entire simulation architecture that would clearly separate it from the word “event” — otherwise there’s just room for a whole bunch of confusion throughout development (in practice or purely in conversation). This led to:
A search for general development terminology lists.
Then software engineering terminology lists.
Then: various units of measurement. And this one yielded one AMAZING RESULT. Some key examples:
Micromort — “A micromort is a unit of risk measuring a one-in-a-million probability of death (from micro- and mortality).”
Banana Equivalent Dose — “The banana equivalent dose, defined as the additional dose a person will absorb from eating one banana, expresses the severity of exposure to radiation, such as resulting from nuclear weapons or medical procedures, in terms that would make sense to most people.”
As I was searching through all of this, I was talking to my BFF Josh Sutphin(who explicitly said to note that it’s currently undergoing work to make it “not absolute shit”) about what kind of setup I was thinking of. And I said:
I’m thinking of the whole thing as, like, a droplet of water falling into a pond and the ripple effect it causes.
About an hour, I discovered that “Metaphor-Based Metaheuristics” were a thing. As I was looking through the list, I found the “Intelligent Water Drops Algorithm”. A very rough interpretation of the summary and its corresponding paper, while not anywhere near being exactly what I was thinking of, was close enough for me to absolutely dig it. So, my simulation is:
A single “simulation core” that only one very high-level game object has access to. But the simulation core has some publicly-available static methods for interacting with the simulation, of course.
The “simulation droplet” which is, essentially, the contents of a what I previously referred to as “occurrences”.
A “simulation bucket” which holds a list of all pending droplets for the duration of their lifetime and hands references of them out to any object within the droplet’s influence area that support any given droplet type.
These buckets are created and placed throughout the world to cover as much ground as possible to limit the search area for objects whenever it’s holding active droplets.
Currently, there are just a handful of these buckets because I don’t want this first-pass to be a larger time commitment than it already is, but I have a rough generalized adaptive quad-tree implementation that I will likely integration into the simulation core for bucket distribution that adjusts the quantity of buckets based on the density of players (and therefore actions/droplets) in given areas.
This is possibly the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever come up with, but having implemented 95% of it by now, its practical use is perfect. So that’s neat.
I probably won’t do any more Steel Hunters-specific articles until after the trailer/demo are ready, but this was long overdue.
I’m currently working on Part Three of my two-part series (part one, part two) which is solely as much advice, anecdotes, recommendations, and some more touchy-feely stuff like how to do deal with our weird games industry if you’re someone with a kind of mental illness that I have some familiarity with. So hopefully it’s easy to see why it is taking so long to write.
I’m also working on a very rough overview of C++ programming in Unreal Engine 4 to serve as interim resource for developers working on games and finding the lack of documentation on pretty critical subjects problematic or not fully understanding why C++ in UE4 is the way it is, my best-practices recommendations, a bunch of tips/tricks/snippets/utilities that I’ve developed to make my life easier, as well as a software/extensions (or just the configuration of commonly-used extensions and even Visual Studio itself for best-use with UE4).
I can’t even begin to give a rough idea of when I’ll publish those other than: some day. The whole Steel Hunter thing in addition to contracting that I need to do to, like, live is starting to be a substantial high-wire act to maintain. But I’ll get there!
The Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale continues! For the next nine days, take advantage of huge savings throughout our store on over ten thousand games. You can also help unlock free games by playing our Summer Saliens Game.
Today’s Featured Deals include:
Slay the Spire – 37% off Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands – 67% off Metal Gear Solid Franchise – Up to 80% off Mafia III – 65% off Elite Dangerous – 55% off Okami HD – 30% off Hellblad Senua’s Sacrifice – 33% off Rocket League – 50% off and many more
Along with the sale is the Summer Saliens Game. Team up with other Saliens to fight The Duldrumz on different planets and free the abducted games. Gain XP as you battle, level up, unlock new abilities, and win cosmetic items to deck out your Salien. Plus, get Summer Sale Trading Cards just for playing.
Choose to battle on a planet that piques your interest and you’ll automatically be entered for a chance to win one of its rewards when it’s conquered. The longer your Salien spends on a planet the higher your chances of winning! The groups with the most tiles when a planet is taken will get to plant their flag as conquerors, undoubtedly gaining Saliverse-wide fame in the process.
The Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale will run until 10 AM Pacific, July 5th. Complete information can be found HERE.
Welcome to the Weekender, your weekly look at the best new games, sales, and updates. It’s a big week with one of my most-anticipated games of the year hitting the App Store along with a couple tabletop to digital conversions. Oh, and a healthy dose of discounted games. Have a great weekend.
King of Dragon Pass is an iOS classic. With elements of RPG, tribal management, turn-based tactics, and interactive fiction it plays like a really in-depth choose-your-own-adventure book. You operate at both a colony level, managing your tribe and its interactions with the world, and an individual level as the chieftain where you make decisions that have a big impact on the story. A sequel to this classic has been in the works for four years and this week we get to play it.
Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind is the spiritual successor to King of Dragon Pass and returns us to the rich fantasy world of Glorantha. Rather than playing as the Viking-inspired Orlanthi we take the reins of riders of the steppe, clearly meant to evoke the Mongols, and must steer them through a great migration and settling of a new home. Gameplay hasn’t changed much from King of Dragon Pass which makes sense: it wasn’t exactly broken. You still consult your circle of advisors and make important decisions season after season. You still worship a diverse and interesting pantheon of gods and seek their blessings and magic. You must navigate through diplomacy and war with other tribes, as well as domestic and economic concerns closer to home.
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The story is interesting, the choices are meaningful, and the artwork is once again top-notch. You should definitely read Matt’s 4-star review of the game if you haven’t already, but I’m happy to add my recommendation. It’s an easy pick for fans of the original and most RPG aficionados.
Card Quest – Card Combat Game (iOS Universal and Android) – Full review coming soon!
Dungeon crawler style, roguelike gameplay, an undead menace, and card-based combat…Card Quest has the elements of a good tactical game. You pick a character, customize your deck, and go battle the bad guys. The game was ported from Steam where it has a ‘very positive’ rating. I wasn’t able to play it, but it looks pretty promising and might be worth a look for those deck-building roguelike fans out there.
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Quarto (iPhone (?) and Android) – Full review coming soon!
Quartro is a pretty simple abstract board game where one’s opponents dictate their pieces, and therefore choices. You’re given a piece and must play it on the game board. The ultimate goal is the same as, you know, Connect Four, though there are four different piece characteristics (color, shape, size, and hollow or solid) which adds another dimension to the strategy. The digital presentation of the game is attractive and the game plays fast, making it ideal for quick games here and there. There’s a decent amount of strategy and the AI isn’t bad. Quatro is mostly a solo game against the AI, but there is a pass-and-play option for use by co-located humans. You can take on specific challenges to spice up the single-player experience, which is a cool way to introduce techniques and build expertise in the game.
Istanbul either won or was nominated for a bunch of board gaming awards back in 2014 when it came out. Now, like many stand-out tabletop favorites, it gets the digital treatment. Istanbul: Digital Edition was converted by Acram Digital, the folks behind Eight-Minute Empire and Steam: Rails to Riches. The game plays the same as the physical version and sets up you the player as a sales team—one merchant and four assistants—in a busy roughly Medieval Istanbul bazaar. The goal is to collect a certain number of rubies earned through making wise sales choices. You can play a solo game versus the AI or online with others. The online game offers both real-time and asynchronous options.
A quick and clever puzzle game, Hexologic offers loads of challenging and fun levels for anybody that doesn’t mind a little simple addition. Hexologic puts a little spin on sudoku rules. Each level has several groups of hexes running horizontally, vertically, or diagonally each with an associated number. You must assign a value of 1 to 3 to empty hexes within these groups in order to sum up to the number. It’s just the right amount of tactical thinking for a relaxing game-play experience and I’d recommend it to puzzle fans.
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New Pre-Orders
Pre-ordering seems to be a thing now, at least on iOS. There’s two games this week we think you’ll want to take note of…
Long awaited Sim City-like city building sensation Pocket City is now available to pre-order, and we finally have an expected release date! The game that’s set to “re-imagine classic city building simulation gameplay” is due to release on July 31st, and you can pre-order for $4.99 on iOS.
The sequel to classic strategy game Battleheart is finally within our sights, although a few months later than we originally thought. You can pre-order for $3.99 and the game is expected to release on July 12th.
Kicking off our sales today is one of the best games of 2017 and one of the better solitaire-style mobile games period. Miracle Merchant is the perfect game for short play sessions and is on sale for just a buck (although it’s free with IAPs on Android, if you’re wondering).
Flip tiles to match and remove color groupings in the challenging puzzle game Dissembler. It came out earlier this year and is on sale in the App Store for the first time for just a dollar.
It’s the best cat-based RPG ever made. Ok, and also of the better games of 2017 in its own right. It’s normally $5 and isn’t on sale often, if you’re an RPG fan and looking for a game to play now’s the time.
Get your smash on and play a pissed off dwarf in Runic Rampage, an action RPG full of combos. It’s not as fun as Cat Quest, but gets the job done if you’re looking for more from the genre.
Firaxis’ 4X behemoth is a great port of the classic turn-based strategy game, and Aspyr have done a great job bringing it up to speed with its PC counter-part. If you’ve never been happy with the pricing structure, the ‘Full Game’ unlock is now at its cheapest ever price since launch.
Seen anything else you like? Played any of the above? Let us know in the comments!
The video game industry is constantly chasing the hottest and most lucrative trends. From military shooters to virtual reality, there is always a new concept asserting its dominance – this is as true for consoles and PC as it is mobile, although our app stores have yet to shake from the over-arching grip of Free-to-Play.
It’s hard to ignore the battle royale genre’s hold on the wider gaming scene as massive franchises attempt to be the next multiplayer hit. The mobile market is also chasing this latest craze: a boon of battle royale games that range in quality and name recognition have cropped up over the past few months. But despite the massive popularity of this genre, one has to wonder if this is just a fad or is this multiplayer-focused experience destined to become a mobile staple?
King of the Fort
The current king of this genre is Epic Games’ smash hit, Fortnite. What separates this one from other BR games is a unique building mechanic that allows players to rapidly assemble cover, structures, and traps. This elevates firefights and allows for a player’s creativity to shine through. Unlike other titles such as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), Fortnite thrives on its speed and accessibility, something that causes the mobile port to suffer more compared to the PC/console iteration.
This isn’t to say that the mobile version of Fortnite is unplayable or even bad – it’s actually quite fun – but this iteration is absent a sense of momentum. Since playing on a phone lacks the fluidity of a controller or keyboard, many engagements are supremely awkward. Instead of seeing who can quickly construct cover and outmanoeuvre their opponents, players often just use the environment to block incoming bullets. Even with the auto-build function, it takes a lot of practice to learn how to quickly produce anything outside of a basic wall or ramp.
What you’re left with is an odd version of Fortnite that closely resembles the PC version but lacks the kinetic energy that helped it climb to the top of the charts in the first place. Shooting others is still satisfying and the large arsenal of weapons always keep battles feeling fresh. There is still a plethora of unique gadgets that shake up combat and Epic has done a great job with keeping the mobile version updated with the latest changes. However, due to the limitations of playing on a phone or tablet, Fortnite simply cannot deliver the same quality gameplay on a mobile device.
Player Unknown
In contrast, PUBG’s mobile version fairs far better due to the title’s core pacing and mechanics. Gameplay in this title has always been much slower (A legacy of its heritage as an ArmA mod, perhaps -ED), with most matches encouraging methodical approaches to gunfights. Taking your time to line up the perfect shot or reposition into cover is par for the course. This allows PUBG‘s mobile design to flourish since these principles work perfectly with this version’s condensed control scheme.
Even though both mobile versions of these hit multiplayer titles have issues, they prove that the battle royale genre is perfect for this platform. Like the best mobile titles, both games offer quick, entertaining sessions that still possess challenge. There are no time gates or any of the usual cynical trappings of mobile free-to-play. The formula of forcing 100 players into a shrinking safe area still crafts memorable moments that very few mobile titles can replicate.
Regardless of what sacrifices these titles have had to make during their transition, the core foundation is still solid. These are complete games and it’s remarkable how little was lost during their transition to mobile. Because of this, players can continue to grow and flesh out their understanding of the mechanics. For people like myself who are coming from PC, it’s great to take my previous experiences and apply them in-game.
Royale with Cheese
This transition from PC to mobile is a double-edged sword. While bringing Fortnite to phones offers a ton of positives, it’s important to remember that this title was not designed for handheld devices. There’s a lot to keep track of, which can severely hinder the controls. The UIs for PUBG and Fortnite are quite cluttered due to the myriad of mechanics that users need to keep track of.
Mundane tasks such as sprinting, crouching, or jumping are relegated to button prompts or specific commands. This not only floods the screen with icons but can create an awkward experience for those with bigger fingers. Nothing is more disheartening than having your perfect sniper position given away because you accidentally grazed the fire button. Yes, it’s possible to customize the screen, but that only mitigates the poor UI instead of fixing it.
But battle royale games never-the-less posses a very compelling gameplay loop that’s easy to learn, but hard to master: drop into a location, scramble for loot, and try to claw your way to the top Being able to pick up Fortnite or PUBG and play a quick round on the go is what will give this genre its’ sustainability. There are no bases to manage or mechanics one has to worry about when the game is closed. Even when this latest craze has died down on PC, I predict the mobile versions will continue to thrive.
Take on the American motorsports scene as you explore and dominate the land, air, and sea across the entire USA. With a wide variety of cars, bikes, boats, and planes, compete in a wide range of driving disciplines.
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, the Video Game Awards’ ‘Best Action Game of 2017’ winner, comes to Nintendo Switch this Summer. Fight through post-nuclear Manhattan, occupied Roswell, New Mexico, and the embattled bayous and boulevards of New Orleans as you liberate the American people from the Nazis.
As BJ Blazkowicz, experience an unforgettable action-packed story brought to life by extraordinary characters. Reunite with your friends and fellow freedom fighters as you take on the evil Frau Engel and her Nazi army. Wage the second American Revolution your way – at home or on the go. And, for the perfect blend of immersion and accuracy, utilize the Nintendo Switch’s unique motion controls to stop the Nazi threat.
Features
Fight through post-nuclear Manhattan, occupied Roswell, New Mexico, and the embattled bayous and boulevards of New Orleans as you liberate the American people from the Nazis.
Experience an unforgettable action-packed story brought to life by extraordinary characters. Reunite with your friends and fellow freedom fighters as you take on the evil Frau Engel and her Nazi army.
Full motion aiming support for Joy-Cons and Pro Controllers allows players the option to fine-tune their shots with the flick of a wrist.
Crash is back! The Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy is now available
Play Crash Bandicoot™ anywhere!
Crash™ is enhanced, entranced and ready-to-dance with the N. Sane Trilogy game collection. Spin, jump, wump and repeat as you take on the epic challenges and adventures through the three games that started it all: Crash Bandicoot™, Crash Bandicoot™ 2: Cortex Strikes Back and Crash Bandicoot™ 3: Warped. Relive all your favorite Crash moments in their fully-remastered graphical glory.
Newsbrief: Pokemon Go developer Niantic has acquired the computer vision and machine learning company Matrix Mill for an undisclosed sum.
Niantic boss John Hanke detailed the acquisition and how the company’s technology will be applied to Niantic’s AR games in a blog post, noting that Niantic is “committed to investing aggressively” in R&D both now and in the future.
Matrix Mill now marks the third acquisition Niantic has made in the last half a year, following its earlier acquisitions of Escher Reality and Evertoon.
“The Matrix Mill team has come up with novel ideas that push the boundaries of what machines can process, thinking around occlusions, and seeing the world closer to the way human eyes can,” explained Hanke. “As a result of this hard work, AR experiences can feel more natural to the eye, which is a goal we have squarely in our sights.”
Polyarc’s virtual reality puzzler Moss has been turning heads for all the right reasons.
For starters, its a game centered around an adorable swashbuckling mouse (how can’t you fall in love with that?), and it also happens to be a rich, engrossing virtual reality experience that avoids familiar pitfalls such as finicky controls and sickness-inducing scenes.
The acclaimed title won over critics by deftly combining 1st and 3rd person gameplay to create a unique puzzle platforming experience that’s more engrossing than a game about a buccaneering marsupial has any right to be.
While it’s been pulling in the plaudits for a number of reasons, particular praise has been heaped upon the title’s clever use of three-dimensional sound alongside a captivating score, which both serve to drive the game’s narrative and imbue proceedings with a palpable sense of scale.
Intrigued by how the Polyarc team achieved such a feat, we caught up with the studio’s audio director Stephen Hodde and the game’s composer Jason Graves to find out how they breathed life into the virtual world Moss calls home.
Gamasutra: Did you have any expectations about how VR composition and audio would work before you started, and how did they stack up to the real thing?
Stephen Hodde: I had an expectation that VR development was going to be vastly different from conventional games. And it is, to a degree, but it’s an additional layer of consideration, not a fundamental re-ordering of priorities. Whereas non-VR game audio is a mix between interactive and film conventions, VR sometimes requires audio to work more like hearing does in the real world.
I’m curious to how the shift to VR affected your creative process? Did it force you to rethink or tweak your general approach?
Stephen Hodde: Maybe it was just switching to a new medium, but there were fewer assumptions and foregone conclusions about “the right way to do things,” if that’s even real. I surveyed a handful of VR developers that I respect and there were a wide range of opinions regarding best practices, with no apparent consensus. So I adopted a mindset that I don’t know what the “right way” is, and that predisposed me to thinking about problems with the game’s needs and player experience over convention. I suppose this is not a uniquely VR state of mind.
Jason Graves: For me, Moss is actually the fourth VR game I’ve worked on. The first one in particular, Farlands, had a binaural mix for the entire score. That is, the music was composed and implemented into the game to sound 3D and spatial – coming from a set of points inside the VR world.
For this particular game, the fact that it was in VR didn’t have a whole lot of influence on the music. We all agreed from the beginning the music needed to have a more traditional role and not call too much attention to itself. The audio director, Stephen Hodde, and I worked hard to integrate the music as seamlessly as possible. We wanted it to feel like it was part of the story.
Moss isn’t a conventional VR effort in that it blends third and first-person gameplay. Was that something you had to consider when working on the score and audio?
Stephen Hodde: Absolutely. This blend manifested in the choice of perspective and scale of the sounds. I found that the more I shifted the sound to reflect how Quill might experience it, the more I understood the stakes of the narrative and wanted to keep her safe from danger. Practically, this moved the scale of all sounds larger relative to their geometric size and they took on an emotional tone that reflected Quill’s emotional state along the journey.
Jason Graves: Most definitely. I loved the whole 1st/3rd player combination for Moss. That decision was made primarily so the player could feel a connection to Quill, Moss’ tiny mouse protagonist. It was important that she saw you as a character in the game and the music needed to emphasize that emotional connection.
“I adopted a mindset that I don’t know what the ‘right way’ is, and that predisposed me to thinking about problems with the game’s needs and player experience over convention.”
What was the biggest VR-related technical challenge you encountered during development?
Stephen Hodde: There is a lot of promising technology for audio that is designed to mimic hearing. Binaural rendering is perhaps the most widely talked about technology. It performs processing on sound to model how the head changes sound when it passes over your face and into your ear canal, which the brain interprets and produces more exact directionality. You’ve probably heard now of head-related transfer functions (HRTF) on a per-object basis, and some binaural technologies emulate Interaural Time Difference (ITD) or time of arrival delay between ears. Oculus, Sony, and Valve are all doing some truly amazing things in this arena.
The challenge comes when attempting to use this technology as an effect, sparingly, and as transparently as possible. It’s not always easy using this technology side-by-side with more traditional methods of spatialization, from a user experience perspective.
Moss is not a game that requires a lot of pinpoint accuracy when judging the origin location of a sound. However, it does require a lot of emotional, full, bright sound for its transportive effect. The processing required to make sounds more accurate (i.e. HRTF) and the pursuit of transparency are ideals totally at odds with each other. If there is some amount of real-time binaural processing to the audio signal that occurs, sometimes an essential quality of the sound is lost. So there’s a tension and a choice for each sound; how directional should it be versus how open and free of intervention. In this way, some of the old-fashioned spatialization methods are actually preferable to newer technology.
What did you set out to achieve when you started out, and how did you know when you’d finally got there? Did the score/audio evolve much throughout the process?
Stephen Hodde: The goal was to support the story, so we started out with a simple emotional arc that mapped to each section of the gameplay. In some instances the music helped inform emotional tone of the game, and so the team at Polyarc was listening to Jason’s work and responding to it by changing game content. There was a lot of effort to provide Jason with as much context as possible: screenshots, video captures, scripts, world building documents, concept art, and so on.
We talked a lot at the beginning about balancing feelings of intimacy, that it’s simultaneously small and large feeling, and what that might sound like from an orchestration perspective. And then Jason just went with it. He’s such a pro and sort of a magic antenna of creativity, that he nailed it every time. If something didn’t fit like a glove, it could always be moved around to someplace else. In the end we used 100% of the music he wrote.
“Finally getting there” was about monitoring our own reactions and getting feedback from the studio and players. For me this is mostly instinct-driven.
Jason Graves: My musical goal was the same as the developer’s goal — to make a game that would create an emotional bond between the player and Quill. The music was slightly different in the beginning but in general the scope and sound of the score remained the same.
“It’s really fun to feel like you’re on the front lines of a new medium, and it can be accompanied by a sense that there’s no clear way forward, which can be liberating.”
What tools and tech did you rely on? Did you have to bring some new toys into the studio to support your efforts in VR?
Stephen Hodde: We used Unreal Engine 4 and Wwise, along with Sony’s spatialization technology on PSVR. The mix you hear is predominantly 3rd order ambisonic.
One of my favorite sounds was Quill’s heartbeat when she’s injured, which I captured using a fetal doppler monitor. That classic sonogram heartbeat sound is an inherently empathy-and protection-inducing sound.
Jason Graves: The score for Moss was implemented in a traditionally interactive way so there was nothing new in terms of technology composing for VR. But I was able to dust off some of my favorite instruments! Many of them I’ve had for some time, thinking someday I would get the chance to use them on a project. Ukulele, hammered dulcimer and Celtic harp all came out to play for the first time, along with my accordion, acoustic guitar and percussive toys. I had the idea to use instruments that were small in size and sound to relate to Quill, especially since you experience how tiny she is in VR — she really is mouse-sized compared to you!
When it comes to audio specifically, are there any distinct pros and cons to working within the realm of VR? And do you have any advice for other budding soundsmiths who might be looking to dip their toes into the virtual reality waters?
Stephen Hodde: Don’t let VR intimidate you. The tools have come a long way and working in Unreal Engine is quite fun and easy. Your skills will absolutely translate over. Think of it like a new game, so approach it as you would any new project and ask what it needs. It’s really fun to feel like you’re on the front lines of a new medium, and it can be accompanied by a sense that there’s no clear way forward, which can be liberating. You’re not tied down to the choices of other games.
