Category: News

Terraria: Otherworld has been canned by developer Re-Logic after the studio realized the title wasn’t going to reach its potential in “any sort of reasonable time or fashion.”

Announced back in February 2015, Otherworld was pitched as a Terraria spin-off that would utilize RPG and strategy elements to explore “what might have been” had the original game taken a different path. 

Fast-forward three years and it seems Re-Logic has struggled to realize that vision, and while progress has been made since the spin-off was unveiled, the project remains well behind schedule. 

“Our team has a clear vision for this game, and, in spite of all of our efforts, the current state of the game remains equal parts far from that vision and beyond behind schedule from our initial planning when we shared Otherworld with all of you three years ago,” wrote the studio on the Terraria forums. 

“Progress has absolutely been made during that time — but unfortunately, a very thorough status review of the game versus its intended design showed […] that things were quite a bit further away from the finish line than we had imagined. 

“Taking the massive amount of work that would be remaining to complete along with the extensive time it would take to get that done, and how that would greatly interfere with the pursuit of other projects on behalf of Re-Logic — it becomes clear that this leaves things in a very undesirable state.”

While that means Otherworld will never see the light of day, Re-Logic has promised to learn from the process, and has already highlighted some key mistakes. 

For starters, the studio claims it should never have spoken publicly about the game at such an early stage, suggesting that “error in judgment” created an emotional rollercoaster for fans. It also believes outsourcing development of such a “critical title” was a mistake, and now intends to bring the core development of its more high-profile projects in-house. 

The company will continue to work on the original Terraria while it regroups, and has hinted it could implement some of Otherworld’s more promising features in future titles.

Sega is getting in on the micro-console act with the Mega Drive Mini, a bite-sized reimagining of its classic 16-bit home console not too dissimilar from Nintendo’s shrunk down SNES and NES Classics. 

As reported by Siliconera, the device is still in development, and is expected to launch at some point this year. 

Much like it’s micro-console cousins, the system will serve up a smattering of retro games when connected to a TV, allowing owners to rediscover the classics of yesteryear. 

Other details are thin on the ground, but a couple of posts over on Sega’s Japanese Twitter account give us a clear look at the console, and as you’d expect, it looks exactly like a Mega Drive that’s been through the dryer one too many times.

「メガドライブ」誕生30周年記念！
『メガドライブ ミニ』（仮称）2018年発売決定！

思い出の名作ゲームの数々が、これ1台で楽しめます！#セガフェス #メガドライブ #メガドライブ30周年https://t.co/HWj6NFL96y pic.twitter.com/0C9QH1l5Mr

— セガ公式アカウント (@SEGA_OFFICIAL) April 14, 2018

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 is an excerpt from ‘21 Unexpected Games to Love For The Atari VCS’, available in the current game eBook Storybundle, which covers a number of classic VCS games that, untethered from nostalgia, may still be of interest to a player who didn’t grow up with the system. Riddle of the Sphinx is the product of a developer straining against the system’s extraordinary, almost ridiculous limitations, towards complexity of design and theme.]

Riddle of the Sphinx

1 player, 2 joysticks. 4K in size.

Created by Bob Smith. Published by Imagic in 1982.

Accessibility: 2/5

In a sentence: The Prince of Egypt embarks on an epic journey across the desert, facing thieves, scorpions, thirst and the wrath of Anubis, to appease mighty Ra and save the land, using only the items he finds along the way.

Riddle of the Sphinx is one of the most underrated VCS games I think. You can tell by the introduction text in the manual that this is something more substantive than Star Ship or Street Racer:

Hieroglyphics on an ancient obelisk tell a strange tale:

These are dark times. Death’s long shadow rests across the Valley of the Kings. Anubis, jackal-headed god of the dead, has cast his curse over all of Pharaoh’s kingdom. A plague of scorpions and hordes of thieves lie thick upon the land. O hear the thin whine of despair!

Sing of Pharaoh’s Son, all hail the Prince of Egypt! Deliver us from this curse! Brave the dangers of the desert. Seek the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx. Pay Anubis’ ransom with your treasures, O cunning Prince of Wiles. Reach the Temple of Ra, source of light and life.

Pharaoh’s heir–be wise, be wily–and beware!

It continues from there. I admire the author for their dedication to the flavor of the game. I will endeavor to translate how to play and enjoy the game from their text.

So, Egypt is represented as a long, vertically-scrolling field. You, as the Prince, are near the bottom of the screen, and can walk in all directions. Vertical movement is represented by the screen scrolling. You usually go up, but cango down, which you will have to do if you encounter an impassible barrier.

The Prince has two attributes, wounds and thirst. You can check on their values by flipping the “B&W/Color” switch on the console, one of those cases where a programmer had to make use of the limited means of interaction available on the platform. Having a lot of either quantity is bad. Both slow you down, and getting nine wounds kills the Prince and ends the game.

Unusually for this sort of game, the Prince heals naturally over time, losing wounds. Thirst, while never directly fatal here in pixel Egypt, can eventually slow him down to the point of unplayability, making him an easy target for pixel Egypt’s many dangers. You can remedy it by visiting one of the various Oases in the game. You interact with an Oasis the same way you do with everything else in the game: stand directly beneath it, and then move up. The game’s graphics engine doesn’t display anything other than the Prince on his line of the screen, so if you don’t do it this way it can be hard to know when you’re interacting with something.

The Prince faces many obstacles on his journey. Directly, you have to avoid the thieves and scorpions that infest the desert. (You can tell the thieves because of their sexy black shorts.) Contact with either gives the Prince wounds. The thieves also throw rocks at you, and steal some of your precious possessions if they touch you. You can throw rocks at either to kill them, but your ability to do so diminishes with both wounds and thirst. So it’s one of those games where, if you’re in a bad state you’re likely to get much worse, and must be careful to keep both wounds and thirst as low as feasible. The Prince is bound to encounter some harm, so minimizing it is of a high priority.

The Prince also encounters some other characters out amidst the sands. Traders, who wear red shorts (not as sexy), may either aid or swindle the Prince, depending on how many items he has. The fewer possessions carried, the more likely he’ll get some goodie, while having a lot of things increases the chances he’ll lose something. The Prince starts with a single item and can pick up lots of stuff on his journey, so dealing with traders is something you want to do frequently at the start and rarely near the end. There are also personifications of the gods Isis (easily recognizable by her blue clothing) and jackal-headed Anubis. Isis will often (but not always) heal and refresh the Prince, and give him a treasure if he’s already healthy. Anubis will hit the Prince for three wounds! Bad dog! Throwing rocks at either will disperse their visages, but also cost the Prince what the manual calls “inner strength points,” which is to say, your score.

The game’s three variations affect another kind of obstacle in your way, which are invisible, supernatural walls around some of the temples and sites around pixel Egypt’s landscape. There are temples to Isis, Anubis and Ra, three Pyramids and, of course, the Sphinx itself. Each wants a specific item from you, which will reward you with another item. Which item they want is the same in every game (except in the Sphinx’s case), and hinted at in the manual in the form of cryptic clues from the “Royal Astrologer.”

In Game One, the Prince can just walk by them, but if he gives up just the right item at each he’ll get something else useful in return. (If he gives the wrong item, he gets what the ancients called “bupkis.”) On Game Two, he’ll get stopped by the Sphinx, who must be satisfied with some obscure object you must look for. This subquest ultimately demands that you interact with the three Pyramids found earlier on your journey. In Game Three, in addition to the offering-for-treasure thing, each temple also has its own invisible wall, and you have to give up a different item at each just to move on. What is it with all these pesky gods, can’t they just leave the Pharaoh’s son alone to save the land? As is written, “We have to move on! No cuttin’ corners, we’re on the border now!”*

(* From Translations From the Cryptical Scrolls of the Um-Jammer Lammy, #5.)

The items you find are divided, by the manual, into rough categories, although the game doesn’t really distinguish between them. There’s the mere “items,” and then there’s “treasures,” and “artifacts.” Each thing, item or treasure, has a specific function, although some are only as offerings at some location. Riddle of the Sphinx is interesting for, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, implementing a full inventory system, again managed using a joystick in the “Player Two” port, so remember that you’ll need a second stick to play, or in emulation, be sure to configure some solution to account for the extra functions.

Mapping the P2 controller to an unused analog stick is a good solution. On the P2 stick, left and right change the item in hand. Only the currently held item (highlighted by a black cursor) has any effect on the game world, but sometimes an item must also be used to get its benefits, done by pressing the P2 button. Among the “items,” there’s the leaf, which heals all your wounds one time, the jug, that cures any thirst you have once, the shield, which while carried protects you from a few hits from rocks, and the staff, which seems to do nothing at all (and is hard to find; you’ll have to be sneaky, in a Super Mario Bros. kind of way, to find it, hint hint).

There are treasures that duplicate all these effects, but don’t run out, which is probably why they’re better than plain old items. Figuring out the functions of all the objects is part of the fun of the game, so I won’t spoil any more. Look to the manual for hints, and I link to a FAQ later that tells you what everything does, if you don’t get any thrill out of figuring things out for yourself.

On Action-Adventure Games

We’ve seen one foundational model of the action-adventure so far, the ground-breaking Adventure. We now have another. It’s useful to see how they are different.

Adventure is a game largely about what you have and where you put it. Your intrepid dot doesn’t have any statistics, which are usually considered to be part of what it means to be a role-playing game of the D&D stripe.

If your dot gets eaten, he’s been ate. There’s no “death by degrees” record of hit points lost. Dragon attacks are pass/fail. If you get bit by one, you know it. In Riddle of the Sphinx, it still takes three whole touches by the God of Death before the Prince kicks his royal bucket.

The difference here is a narrative one. You might consider an adventure game (whether of the action variety or not) to be a story in which the player has a role. Adventure’s story is of an intrepid dot seeking a chalice. It’s an epic quest, in its way, but we don’t get to know much about the dot through the playing of the game. Character is proven through overcoming setbacks. About the only real setbacks the dot can suffer is getting eaten, and even then, a flip of a switch eliminates that problem.

RotS’ story is of the Prince of Egypt trying to prove his worth. Nothing can kill him outright, but he can be hurt. When wounded or thirsty, the Prince cannot move as fast or throw rocks as far. His story, that is to say, has a shape. In one game he might blaze through the quest easily, finding the items he needs in the most fortuitous circumstance; that Prince is lucky, or maybe not really well-tested by his trials.

In another game, he might get hurt a lot or suffer lots of thirst, but timely finding of oases or use of items saves him. That Prince is hard-working, or clever. Another Prince might fail his quest; he was not enough for the trials he faced, but maybe that wasn’t his fault? Which of these things this Prince is are determined by the events of the game. The randomness is what makes each Prince distinct. The shape of the story gets us invested in the Prince’s journey. And ultimately the Prince’s success of failure is the player’s, experienced vicariously. A far cry from Pong, if you ask me.

Links

AtariAge – Manual — Particularly interesting; the person who wrote the instructions really got into the theme. The whole manual is written in character. This is also where the riddles are written.

Also of interest is this FAQ by KRoper on GameFAQs, which explains what all the items do, plus the solutions to the riddles (which aren’t hugely difficult anyway, just artificial difficulty).

Also try…

You gotta try Dragonstomper, covered later in this book!

Since its release back in February, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine has been a fascinating discussion point for developers, as game industry professionals of all backgrounds discuss everything from the games’ political content to its all-too-familiar struggles in the Steam marketplace. 

With those conversations in the back of our mind, we reached out to Dim Bulb Games founder Johnnemann Nordhagen with the hope of getting some more insight on the struggles behind development, and the unique influences that drove Nordhagen’s creative process. 

If you’d like to listen to our hitchhiking, far-roaming adventure up and down the American East Coast, you can watch the full video embedded up above, or if you’re hoping to ride the rails sometime today, you can just read these highlights down below. 

Navigating political influences

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, while being about all kinds of folklore, has a specific setting with a specific set of background events in mind. The Bonus Army, miner’s strikes, and other events that drove the rise of populism in America are referenced, but as part of a narrative that circles back to specific characters not necessarily living only a political existence. 

Games, for valid reasons, are frequently quick to shy away from discussion of real-world politics, but Nordhagen says the events of the era made that difficult to do (the game opens with Sting’s character calling America’s great big story a “lie,” and setting the player out to make a new one). To help keep his large team of writers focused, Nordhagen says his process involved researching specific events and character background elements, so that writers like Austin Walker and Gamasutra veteran Leigh Alexander could mix the colorful personalities they were spinning up with a sense that they’d survived something real, and that informed who they are. 

Reviewers, Steam reviewers, and streamers are all getting different experiences

In his postmortem, Nordhagen briefly noted that game review scores didn’t meet his expectations because he hadn’t had time to properly evaluate the later parts of the game, and wasn’t aware of how grindy it can feel when playing on typical review deadlines. 

But he’s also paid attention to the fact that Steam Reviews for the game (frequently where developers meet their harshest critics), have been “very positive.” It’s a testament to the different ways reviewers, players, and as Nordhagen notes, streamers, experience games, and it’s something that would impact some of his design choices if he had the ability to start over again. 

For other developers, learning how to “make games for streamers” has been something we’ve seen discussed, but the experience streamers get, and tell their audiences about, is going to be slightly different then the ones those audiences will have when they get the game. It’s both a word of warning and slight optimism about how your game can perform even if it reviews poorly. 

Even when your game is meant to be finished in one playthrough, the players want you to stick around

Like many other narrative games, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is generally meant to be played through only once, maybe twice. But Nordhagen has learned since launching the game that despite that, the games’ audience has been asking for features in a fashion similar to what you might see in a live or Early Access game. Whether it’s an in-game manual or other quality-of-life improvements, Nordhagen says he’s basically going to be working on Where the Water Tastes Like Wine for a while, even though it’s ostensibly “done.”

Though Nordhagen himself hemmed and hawed about saying he’d recommend any other indie dev take up the banner of doing a single-player narrative experience, it’s worth noting how even that audience is interested in having the developer stick around, not just picking up stakes and moving out west, chasing more fertile soil. 

For more developer interviews, editor roundtables, and gameplay commentary, be sure to follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel. 

“In English, we don’t have a solid, common equivalent of maō or daimaō. But you can’t just ignore the words when translating, so you have to come up with something. There are at least five main approaches to the problem.”

– Clyde Mandelin, writing about the process of translating tricky words in games.

Longtime translator and author Clyde “Tomato” Mandelin has kicked off a neat new series of articles on his Legends of Localization blog which aims to show folks how localizers tackle the task of translating words into a language that has no clear equivalent.

Mandelin’s perspective is informed by the fact that he’s spent well over a decade localizing Japanese films and games, including the Mother 3 fan translation for which he’s arguably best known. His first post focuses on the terms maō and daimaō, which he says are common in Japanese games but not easily translatable into English.

“It’s difficult to explain with a single word in English, but a maō is basically a term for a supreme supernatural being that’s usually super-evil. It’s a generic term that’s extremely common in Japanese fantasy settings,” write Mandelin. “In short, if you’re playing a game that’s cliché enough to have a chosen knight or a hero of light, there’s great chance there’s a maō too – and it’s probably the final boss.”

He then walks through five different approaches a translator might take, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each. It’s an intriguing read, and he follows it up with a fun look at how various games (everything from Actraiser to The Legend of Zelda to Zener Works’ PlayStation 2 classic Okage: Shadow King) have handled it through the years.

“The Zelda series is full of maō references. It’s also a good example of how inconsistent those references can be in translation,” writes Mandelin. “First, in the original Zelda (1987) game, Ganon is called a daimaō in Japanese. The instruction manual localizers went with “Prince of Darkness” while the actual game developers went with “Prince Darkness”….in A Link to the Past (1992), Ganondorf is now just a basic maō in Japanese and “the evil King of Darkness” in English.”

There’s lots more great examples in the full blog post, which is well worth a read.

In this 2018 GDC session, Naoto Ohshima and Hirokazu Yasuhara, two of the designers behind the original Sonic the Hedgehog, discuss their perspectives on the creation of the classic game franchise.

Oshima and Yasuhara go into detail about the game’s original design process and art direction, as well as providing some insight into their experiences creating the character of Sonic and the strategies they considered for going up against rival companies. 

Those interested in the history of a classic game like Sonic the Hedgehog can now watch the talk completely free via 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.