Category: News

This week Twitch rolled out a beta version of its Bounty Board program, which aims to cut out third-party marketing agencies by directly connecting Twitch streamers with companies who will pay them to stream.

Notably, this program brings the business of sponsored game streams (and the responsibility of clearly disclosing said sponsorships in accordance with FTC guidelines) further in-house at Twitch. 

It’s also presumably good for Twitch’s bottom line, since the platform will act as an intermediary between companies which want to pay people to stream their games and the streamers themselves. It’s not clear how much (if any) cut Twitch might take from each bounty transaction; when contacted by Gamasutra, a Twitch representative stated that ” since this is a beta test in a very limited run, it’s too early to comment on what a final program might look like, but it will adhere to our transparency policies as it pertains to sponsored content.”

Currently, the invite-only, U.S. Twitch Partner-only beta is limited to ‘Bounties’ for one-hour game streams (rather than say, painting or social eating streams), and some of the bounties have been posted by Twitch itself as it puts the system through its paces. 

Streamers can access the Board and sign up for bounties through the Twitch interface; bounties currently come with a set of requirements (including “don’t disparage the brand” and “put #Sponsored in your stream title”), a due date, and the promise of a key for the game in question within 72 hours of signing up.

The company says it plans to spend a few months beta-testing the Bounty Board with a staggered rollout of invites; further details about the program can be found on Twitch’s website.

During the VRLA event in Los Angeles today Vulcan Inc. debuted the Holodome, a “shared immersive reality platform” that appears to be a dome-like installation groups of people can enter to be ensconced in a 360-degree audiovisual experience.

The big thing here, for game devs, is that the folks at Vulcan (not to be confused with the Vulkan graphics API) are also offering up a Holodome SDK that’s basically a Unity plug-in which the companys claims “translates typical game design elements for the Holodome.”

“For example, it abstracts dome specific conversions and calibration to help the game developer focus on their interaction and design,” reads a press release hyping up the Holodome. It goes on to note that the Holodome SDK includes things like controller APIs so folks inside the ‘Dome can interact with what they’re seeing, and support for displaying raycasts of those input devices so players can get visual feedback on what they’re doing.

If you’re curious to see what this thing looks like, the folks at Vulcan (which, incidentally, is a private company with a bunch of diverse interests that was started by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen back in the ’80s) plan to set up a “preview” Holodome at Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture tomorrow, with a “creators edition” going up in Los Angeles next month.

They’re also on the prowl for people who can make Holodome experiences, and devs who are interested in getting in touch can do so via the Holodome website.

One of the elements that sets Avalanche’s open-world action game Just Cause 3 apart is its emphasis on the “stunt positions” protagonist Rico Rodriguez takes by leaping onto the roofs, sides, or struts of almost every vehicle in the game, from sedan cars to jumbo jets to attack helicopters.

At GDC 2018, Avalanche Studios’ Brian Venisky showcased the decisions and solutions made to solve key issues and serve the needs for creating animation content for the high-flying game, then walked through how the studio set up the pipeline to ensure that content worked properly in Just Cause 3. 

It was a fascinating and deeply technical talk into a subject that Avalanche is intimately familiar with, so if you’re at all curious about the animation systems of Just Cause 3 or rigging and animation in general, make sure to  watch Venisky’s talk (completely free!) over 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: Long Beach, California

Zwift is a digital destination for fitness enthusiasts that’s redefining indoor exercise. We took the boring indoor routine and game-ified it, by developing an at-home training experience that connects cyclists and runners with each other around the world. We’re on a mission to make more people, more active, more often.

Launched from the sunny beaches of Long Beach, CA with offices in NYC, London, and Rio de Janeiro, the Zwift community is active in 195 countries (yup – more countries than the United Nations) and growing. We’re endlessly positive, relentlessly inventive, and always looking to improve… wanna join?

Who we’re seeking:

Zwift is looking for generalist 3D Game Artist who will enjoy working on a variety of art tasks:  3D world sculpting, road placement, prop & set piece building/texturing /placement, creating jerseys, bicycles and components based on the real-world designs (supplied by our partners) and our own original designs.

What you’ll do:

• Designing & building props large and small, including set pieces
• High and low poly modeling, UV layouts and texturing
• Photoshop texture painting
• Generating normal maps
• Object placement using our proprietary tools
• World Sculpting, Road layout

 What we’re looking for:

• 2-5 years’ experience working on 3D video games on PC, mobile or console
• A portfolio demonstrating ability in stylized game art which is similar to our product
• Experience in Maya and Photoshop
• Good eye for form, color, design and composition
• Technical problem-solving abilities

 Bonus Requirements –

• Drawing and painting – Good grounding in traditional media, or Photoshop painting
• Character rigging and Animation
• Interest in cycling/running fitness is a huge plus

Top reasons we think you’ll love it here:

• Great Employee Fitness Program… earn a bike!
• Amazing office location in downtown Long Beach with spectacular views
• Competitive Benefits (including Medical, Dental, and Vision)
• Awesome team of talented individuals that love what they do
• Did we mention that we ride bikes and run at work?

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.

A report released by Newzoo breaks down where the firm believes the global game industry will fall revenue-wise by the end of 2018, noting that it expects mobile to account for 51 percent of the predicted $137.9 billion earned by games this year. 

This isn’t the first time mobile has brought in more revenue than consoles or PC by a longshot, but this is the first time the platform makes up over half of game revenue on a worldwide scale.

And while Newzoo’s numbers are just projections based on the current state of the game industry, the information in the company’s report can offer developers a straightforward look at how the industry is changing through the years.

Looking at revenue generated by mobile, PC, and console games, Newzoo is predicting a year-over-year increase of 13.3 percent from 2017’s numbers, with digital game revenue accounting for 91 percent of that overall, or $125.3 billion.

Mobile games, meanwhile, are expected to see at least a 25.5 year-over-year increase, generating $70.3 billion and accounting for just over half of the global market for the first time. By 2021, Newzoo expects mobile games to be a $100 billion market on their own and generate 59 percent of the overall worldwide video game market.

The full report on Newzoo has a fair amount of other predictions that game developers will likely find interesting. One particular section breaks down what game revenue looks like when broken down by region. Of that $137.9 billion expected to pour in this year, Newzoo believes $37.9 billion of it will come from China, while $30.4 billion is expected from the United States. 

Even so, the Asia-Pacific region is expected to make up a whopping 52 percent (or $71.4 billion) of global game spending this year, a 16.8 percent increase from 2017’s numbers. A closer look at this data can be found on Newzoo. 

“Our goal was to create a game that, first and foremost, feels sci-fi. Not just because it is set on another planet, but because it captures the tone, spirit, and optimism of the classics of the genre,” says Boian Spasov, lead designer of Surviving Mars, a game of colonizing the red planet. 

“Humanity has dreamed about colonizing Mars for quite a while and we did our best to capture the essence of this dream and to recreate it in our game. After all, Mars might be our next logical giant leap towards taming the final frontier.”

Designing a game about building a fine city is all well and good in Surviving Mars, but the game’s sci-fi setting means have to be concerned with more things than just their build order or whether they’re bringing in enough funds for the next thing they want to create. By creating a city builder set on a world hostile to human life, Spasov and the team at Haemimont Games had to add elements of danger and survival for players to navigate, creating a city builder with some challenging, different issues for players to deal with.

Survival doesn’t just mean ensuring everyone has food and water, though. With individualized colonists with various strengths and problems, keeping everyone happy is another element key to keeping a colony alive, giving players a very delicate balancing act in surviving their time on this planet.

A lethal home

“People come to a genre with certain expectations, both as developers and as players.” says Spasov. “When we started working, it immediately became obvious that we are not making a typical city-builder. Surviving Mars was initially our internal working title, but survival ended up being so fundamental for the game, that it became the official name.”

“Surviving Mars was initially our internal working title, but survival ended up being so fundamental for the game, that it became the official name.”

Mars, to the developers, seemed like a logical step in our space-faring future, but it’s not one that will come easy. As such, while creating the fiction of it within Surviving Mars, all of the things that would make the planet inhospitable right now became major concerns they wanted to convey in the game. 

“We wanted to focus on the real problems that a potential Mars colonization will face. Although there are certain fantastic elements in the mysteries, the core experience focuses on securing the necessities like oxygen, water, power and shelter. After these basic are secured, the focus shifts to building a self-sufficient and functional, perhaps utopian, society in the hostile alien environment,” says Spasov.

In short, having the right buildings to create a self-sustaining city were not the only things the developers thought should be major concerns. Keeping the people of a given settlement alive also needs to be a major concern at first, building from there onto different levels of problems as they moved along, then juggling all of them at the same time.

In the beginning, players must work to build up the materials and structures they need to sustain life in Surviving Mars, which means creating an infrastructure that would support life when it arrived. Using drones, players build an initial settlement which will draw enough water, air, food, and materials to keep things going before people get there. However, players also need to ensure these supplies will not be cut off in any way during a playthrough of the game. The challenge then becomes not just setting up the supply lines for these necessary elements, but also sustaining them at any cost.

A given settlement can fall apart should any one thing be cut off for even a short amount of time. A few dozen colonists can die in a short period should the air supply be affected by something as simple as a broken pipe. This might seem a little unfair in most city-builders – a single error causing complete destruction, especially an error the player has little control of – but Surviving Mars’ frontier themes makes that slightly more tolerable, if only from the angle of the game’s fiction.

“The frontier theme helped us very much to naturally merge these two elements. When you are constructing a human settlement on Mars, disasters and trouble are not just randomly thrown in, they are to be expected,” says Spasov.

Players in this setting expect monstrous consequences from something that would be merely annoying on Earth. A broken pipe would be a hindrance on a hospitable planet, but Surviving Mars’ inhospitable environment creates an expectation in the player that such a break will be disastrous — unless they have multiple backups and contingency plans in place. 

This element did provide some stress for the development team. “Merging the inherently creative aspect of the city builders with some inherently destructive survival threats was an interesting challenge,” says Spasov. “It was also a tough balancing act – how much challenge is too much and how much is not enough?” 

Finding the right balance of challenge in a game where things can go randomly wrong in disastrous ways can feel like it runs counter to the slow, methodical play inherent in the city-builder genre, but this is just another way of forcing the player to consider other aspects of the game in their planning. In utilizing Mars as the backdrop, Spasov sets the player up to expect danger from sources as simple as air and water supplies, and adjust their planning to accommodate those things. The consequences of failure, while worrying for the development team, push players to consider their plans in a new light, looking at city-building in a different way through the lens of the hostile planet.

With lethal inhabitants

In keeping with Spasov’s thoughts on what players would need to consider while realistically inhabiting a hostile world, there was also some consideration given to what the people inhabiting that world would need as well. A colony is not just a system of life-support systems, after all, but a place where people must emotionally thrive as well if it is to survive.

Surviving Mars’ colonists feature various backgrounds and personalities, requiring players use the right people in the right places to keep the machines and facilities running, but also having to set up certain facilities to keep them happy as well. If the colonists start to get annoyed or have no means to relax in the manner of their choosing, they start to lose effectiveness, or will develop quirks that can make life difficult in the colony. Like a broken pipe, a single broken person can also create disaster in an otherwise-functional city.

This not only added further challenge to the game and more to consider while thinking on survival, but it also gave its characters a personality that would make each city feel like a unique place.

“Besides additional mechanical depth, I think they grant a lot of personality and soul to the game. A generic random colonist is much less interesting than the colony’s sexy alcoholic nerd,” says Spasov. “After all, the goal of any game is to engage the players, and personalized colonists tend to be much more interesting than generic ones.”

This personality bleeds into the game world as well. Rather than have a single utopian city with facilities for all, players must consider the unique needs of their people when creating their city. They have to look at what most of them want and build to cater to that, imposing a need to interact with the city’s peoples with the way things are constructed. In this way, each city would be different on each playthrough, creating a shifting goal for what would help players survive in a given run at the game.

This personality aspect, while making a city feel vibrant and unique, would also impose new rules on each run through the game, tasking players with working towards new goals each time. This is compounded by the tech discovery system, which gives players new discoveries in unpredictable ways.

“We are very happy with the way the randomized tech tree turned out. It works very well both thematically – futuristic science should be anything but predictable; and mechanically – makes every playthrough unique and creates a different experience when replaying,”  says Spasov. “Getting certain key technologies early or late may change the course of your game and discovering a breakthrough technology that is unavailable otherwise is bound to make a session particularly memorable. It’s all about replayability – we want to surprise the players and freshen up their experience every time they return to the red planet.”

Players can’t rely on any single discovery for safety while playing through Surviving Mars. Like true survival, elements can be fickle, appearing or not due to simple, rotten luck.

Like the unexpected accidents and unpredictable people, unreliable science means that players have to plan for many different potential problems without coming up with a single, perfect method for making the perfect colony. The player always needs to be on their toes, looking out for the next problem and trying to anticipate it.

The shift from surviving to thriving is therefore intended to always be a challenging, difficult move, as it requires players to juggle the various needs of their colony and its people. They need to constantly keep an eye on their base physical needs and how they would be stored and cared for in a hostile environment, but also keep their people happy to prevent them from ruining everything in their own unexpected ways.

By blending unstable personalities with uncertain and hostile environments, Spasov and his team seem to have created a survival loop that demands constant vigilance from Surviving Mars players, in ways that feel true to the dream of colonizing Mars.

Obsidian’s Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords holds a strange place in the Star Wars video game canon.

KOTOR II was critically acclaimed on its 2004 release, with weird and morally ambiguous characters who felt more at home in a Fallout game than the George Lucas-verse. But it didn’t receive the same universal praise as its predecessor.

Firm deadlines led to many bugs, and complaints that the story felt “unfinished.” Its plot wrapped up very quickly and ended on a mysterious cliffhanger; modders later discovered entire storylines that were included on the disc but had not been implemented. Most players assumed that KOTOR II would remain an unpolished gem unless Obsidian was able to revisit it and fill in some of the gaps.

Then on July 22nd, all of that changed. Publisher Aspyr Media, responsible for porting games to non-Windows platforms including OSX, Linux, iOS and Android, updated KOTOR II on Steam for the first time in 10 years, and with it came a crucial patch note: support for Steam Workshop mods, and with that, The Sith Lords Restored content mod.

Now any KOTOR II player can install this fabled mod with a simple button push, and play the storylines that were previously abandoned. The work of one dedicated modder community has fleshed out a flawed masterpiece, and their work is sure to bring newfound attention to this game. (It’s already drawing praise from KOTOR II’s lead narrative designer, Chris Avellone.)

“I don’t feel like I ever ‘own’ a game I work on. It’s something to be shared, improved upon, and whenever possible, seen from a new perspective that gives the title new life. – Chris Avellone”

The mod includes numerous bug fixes, new areas, and dialogue options that flesh out the story in the main game. It was actually in development since before 2009, when it was first released in open beta by modder Zbigniew Staniewicz, aka Zbyl, with his modding partner Darth Stoney.

Staniewicz was a big fan of the KOTOR series, and wanted to play the cut content  as soon as he heard about it. “I also thought ‘finishing up’ the game would make me super famous, but I may have overestimated the size and reach of the KOTOR community,” he jokes.

Staniewicz and Stoney’s first versions of The Sith Lords Restored, built on the back of research and work done by other modders, added what they believed to be part of a known list of cut content found on the disc. “It turned out our list didn’t include even half of the trivial stuff left out of the game,” he says. “It was always exciting and at times surprising to realize how much more there was buried in there.”

Staniewicz was joined by modder Hassat Hunter as development on The Sith Lords Restored continued. Hunter started out in the mod community bug testing and teaching himself the dialogue editing tools for KOTOR before signing on to work on The Sith Lords Restored.

Hunter’s passion for fixing KOTOR II’s bugs grew into a desire to dig out all the unknown story content and present a “true” version of KOTOR II to the players.

“We didn’t just want people to experience the cut content, we wanted to give people the KOTOR 2 that should have been,” Hunter says. “I don’t think anyone expected to still work on it five years later, or that eventually we’d take up a greater scope, albeit in steps.”

Doing this kind of restorative mod work isn’t just a process of cleaning up bugs and extracting unused models though. As Staniewicz and Hunter describe their process, it becomes clear that they wound up doing plenty of design work too, building on Obsidian’s work from a decade prior.

Doing this kind of restorative mod work isn’t just a process of cleaning up bugs and extracting unused models.

“For example in the very first closed beta of [the mod], you could finish the HK assassin droid factory without firing a single shot,” says Hunter. “That just didn’t fit the story of the HK droids though, not to mention that it was extremely boring. The factory went through a lot of transitions, but I think the current version works very well.”

Much of the restored content reflects the core of what made KOTOR II so unusual as a Star Wars game. HK-47, a murderous assassin droid from the first KOTOR, began his life as a fan-favorite character in the context of a more traditional hero’s story (or villain’s story depending on the player’s choice), but like many other plot points from the first KOTOR  he and other characters evolved under the moral lenses Obsidian took to the Star Wars universe. KOTOR II spends a large amount of its cut and uncut content examining how droids shape the world of Star Wars, and how the way most species treat them leaves them in a perfect position to perform acts of villainy or heroism overlooked by most.

KOTOR II’s lead narrative designer, Chris Avellone, has loosely kept up with modder’s progress over the years, with the HK Droid Factory being one of the biggest pieces of content he’s glad players can experience. “While we had HK-50 and HK-51 droids in the game, I always…intended the player and even HK-47 itself to feel offended by their presence,” he says

“This was intended to make the final confrontation with them all the sweeter when HK-47 gets to turn the tables on its upstart “successors” by using their programming that they inherited from him as a weakness,” he adds. “There’s a ‘panicked’ sequence in the excised content where the HK-50s figure this out, and I always meant it as a scene to make the player grin.”

Elsewhere, Kreia’s cut lines reinforce her as a character who possesses traits of both the Jedi and the Sith, constantly judging the player no matter which side of the Force they give in to, and the Sith are shown more to be a complicated, nuanced political group rather than an embodiment of raw evil. All of these ideas are far removed from their film incarnations, and are not even the kind of storytelling that Disney has endorsed in its video game tie-ins realesed after the Lucasfilm acquisition.

Hunter says that Aspyr approached them a month before it planned to push out KOTOR II on Steam (mostly to open up ports for Mac and Linux), but wasn’t able at first to properly say why they were interested in talking to the KOTOR II modders.

When they learned of Aspyr’s plans though, Hunter and Stanwiecz dove in to patch the mod to be Steam Workshop ready.

“They pretty much laid down for us what we had to do to make [the mod] work for the Steam Workshop so everything could go as smooth as possible at release,” says Hunter. “And now hopefully we can get rid of all the remaining bugs and annoyances still in this version, and be in the unique position to fix things we couldn’t as modders. I can’t say that we or anyone else expected this to happen at this time or date, so that was a pretty nice surprise.”

For its part, Aspyr Media’s primary goal was to include Steam Workshop among a large batch of featured updates, including controller support, Steam Achievements, and playability on Linux and other platforms. Product manager Michael Blair explains that they knew the mod would be a huge feature to have on launch, which was why they reached out to Staniewicz and Hunter to get them on board. 

“In order for our QA team to test ‘live’ content from months of working on this update, we moved our Steam branches from beta to live 2 days before launch,” Blair says. “During that time, we allowed the mod team access and instructions on how to get their mod up in the Workshop, and ensured it remained hidden from public view. Our team then tested it before we hit ‘go’ on the launch.'”

Obsidian’s only involvement in the game’s update seems to be unofficial. Hunter says Obsidian lead programmer Adam Brennecke voices a character on the planet M4-78EP, but that connection came from chatting with him during a Pillars of Eternity (Obsidian’s latest RPG) promotional stream, not any official endorsement.

Regardless, Hunter and Staniewicz both are floored by the positive feedback that they’ve received for their work, and are glad more players can make their mod a core part of playing KOTOR II. For his part, Avellone remains thrilled by the collaborative spirit of the modders pulling his old work out of the shadows.

“I love it, and I have much respect for the Total Restoration mod and any modders willing to experiment with gameplay and narrative aspects to our titles,” he says.

“I don’t feel like I ever ‘own’ a game I work on, it’s something to be shared, improved upon, and whenever possible, seen from a new perspective that gives the title new life.”