General game developing news and updates.
THE KING OF FIGHTERS ’97 GLOBAL MATCH is Now Available on Steam!
KOF ’97 is the final entry in the Orochi Saga, the original storyline of the KOF series, which is still played by enthusiastic fans around the world. KOF ’97 makes a return with new features such as online matchmaking, a new gallery mode, and custom menu BGM settings!
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR is Now Available on Steam!
A true, full-length open-world game for VR has arrived from Bethesda Game Studios. Skyrim VR reimagines the complete epic fantasy masterpiece with an unparalleled sense of scale, depth, and immersion. Skyrim VR also includes all official add-ons.
Add Crusader Kings II to your account for FREE starting now until Saturday at 10AM Pacific*! Once you add the game, it will remain in your account permanently, so don’t miss out on this opportunity to own this great title!
Additionally, save up to 50% on DLC’s and Expansions for Crusader Kings II as part of the Weekend Deal**!
*After Saturday, Crusader Kings II will be available for 75% off for the rest of the weekend.
**Discount offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time
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.
Gathering usage data such as player progress in games is invaluable for teams. Typically, entire teams have been dedicated to building and maintaining data pipelines for collecting and storing tracking data for games. However, with many new serverless tools available, the barriers to building an analytics pipeline for collecting game data have been significantly reduced. Managed tools such as Google’s PubSub, DataFlow, and BigQuery have made it possible for a small team to set up analytics pipelines that can scale to a huge volume of events, while requiring minimal operational overhead. This post describes how to build a lightweight game analytics pipeline on the Google Cloud platform (GCP) that is fully-managed (serverless) and auto scales to meet demand.
I was inspired by Google’s reference architecture for mobile game analytics. The goal of this post is to show that it’s possible for a small team to build and maintain a data pipeline that scales to large event volumes, provides a data lake for data science tasks, provides a query environment for analytics teams, and has extensibility for additional components such as an experiment framework for applications.
The core piece of technology I’m using to implement this data pipeline is Google’s DataFlow, which is now integrated with the Apache Beam library. DataFlow tasks define a graph of operations to perform on a collection of events, which can be streaming data sources. This post presents a DataFlow task implemented in Java that streams tracking events from a PubSub topic to a data lake and to BigQuery. An introduction to DataFlow and it’s concepts is available in Google’s documentation. While DataFlow tasks are portable, since they are now based on Apache Beam, this post focuses on how to use DataFlow in conjunction with additional managed services on GCP to build a simple, serverless, and scalable data pipeline for storing game events.
My lightweight implementation of the GCP Reference Architecture for Analytics.
The data pipeline that performs all of this functionality is relatively simple. The pipeline reads messages from PubSub and then transforms the events for persistence: the BigQuery portion of the pipeline converts messages to TableRow objects and streams directly to BigQuery, while the AVRO portion of the pipeline batches events into discrete windows and then saves the events to Google Storage. The graph of operations is shown in the figure below.
The streaming pipeline deployed to Google Cloud
The first step in building a game data pipeline is setting up the dependencies necessary to compile and deploy the project. I used the following maven dependencies to set up environments for the tracking API that sends events to the pipeline, and the data pipeline that processes events.
<!– Dependencies for the data pipeline ->
<dependency>
<groupId>com.google.cloud.dataflow</groupId>
<artifactId>google-cloud-dataflow-java-sdk-all</artifactId>
<version>2.2.0</version>
</dependency>
I used Eclipse to author and compile the code for this tutorial, since it is open source. However, other IDEs such as IntelliJ provide additional features for deploying and monitoring DataFlow tasks. Before you can deploy jobs to Google Cloud, you’ll need to set up a service account for both PubSub and DataFlow. Setting up these credentials is outside the scope of this post, and more details are available in the Google documentation.
An additional prerequisite for running this data pipeline is setting up a PubSub topic on GCP. I defined a raw-events topic that is used for publishing and consuming messages for the data pipeline. Additional details on creating a PubSub topic are available here.
To deploy this data pipeline, you’ll need to set up a java environment with the maven dependencies listed above, set up a GCP project and enable billing, enable billing on the storage and BigQuery services, and create a PubSub topic for sending and receiving messages. All of these managed services do cost money, but there is a free tier that can be used for prototyping a data pipeline.
Sending events from a game server to a PubSub topic
In order to build a usable data pipeline, it’s useful to build APIs that encapsulate the details of sending game events. The Tracking API class provides this functionality, and can be used to send generated event data to the data pipeline. The code below shows the method signature for sending game events, and shows how to generate sample data.
// send a batch of events
for (int i=0; i<10000; i++) {
// generate event names
String eventType = Math.random() < 0.5 ?
“Session” : (Math.random() < 0.5 ? “Login” : “MatchStart”);
// create attributes to send
HashMap<String, String> attributes = new HashMap<String,String>();
attributes.put(“userID”, “” + (int)(Math.random()*10000));
attributes.put(“deviceType”, Math.random() < 0.5 ?
“Android” : (Math.random() < 0.5 ? “iOS” : “Web”));
// send the event
tracking.sendEvent(eventType, “V1”, attributes);
}
The tracking API establishes a connection to a PubSub topic, passes game events as a JSON format, and implements a callback for notification of delivery failures. The code used to send events is provided below, and is based on Google’s PubSub example provided here.
// Specify an event to send
String event = {\”eventType\”:\”session\”,\”eventVersion\”:\”1\”}”;
// Convert the event to bytes
ByteString data = ByteString.copyFromUtf8(event.toString());
//schedule a message to be published
PubsubMessage pubsubMessage =
PubsubMessage.newBuilder().setData(data).build();
// publish the message, and add this class as a callback listener
ApiFuture<String> future = publisher.publish(pubsubMessage);
ApiFutures.addCallback(future, this);
The code above enables games to send events to a PubSub topic. The next step is to process this events in a fully-managed environment that can scale as necessary to meet demand.
One of the key functions of a game data pipeline is to make instrumented events available to data science and analytics teams for analysis. The data sources used as endpoints should have low latency and be able to scale up to a massive volume of events. The data pipeline defined in this tutorial shows how to output events to both BigQuery and a data lake that can be used to support a large number of analytics business users.
Streaming event data from PubSub to DataFlow
The first step in this data pipeline is reading events from a PubSub topic and passing ingested messages to the DataFlow process. DataFlow provides a PubSub connector that enables streaming of PubSub messages to other DataFlow components. The code below shows how to instantiate the data pipeline, specify streaming mode, and to consume messages from a specific PubSub topic. The output of this process is a collection of PubSub messages that can be stored for later analysis.
// read game events from PubSub
PCollection<PubsubMessage> events = pipeline
.apply(PubsubIO.readMessages().fromTopic(topic));
The first way we want to store game events is in a columnar format that can be used to build a data lake. While this post doesn’t show how to utilize these files in downstream ETLs, having a data lake is a great way to maintain a copy of your data set in case you need to make changes to your database. The data lake provides a way to backload your data if necessary due to changes in schemas or data ingestion issues. The portion of the data pipeline allocated to this process is shown below.
Batching events to AVRO format and saving to Google Storage
For AVRO, we can’t use a direct streaming approach. We need to group events into batches before we can save to flat files. The way this can be accomplished in DataFlow is by applying a windowing function that groups events into fixed batches. The code below applies transformations that convert the PubSub messages into String objects, group the messages into 5 minute intervals, and output the resulting batches to AVRO files on Google Storage.
// Batch events into 5 minute windows
.apply(“Batch Events”, Window.<String>into(
FixedWindows.of(Duration.standardMinutes(5)))
.triggering(AfterWatermark.pastEndOfWindow())
.discardingFiredPanes()
.withAllowedLateness(Duration.standardMinutes(5)))
// Save the events in ARVO format
.apply(“To AVRO”, AvroIO.write(String.class)
.to(“gs://your_gs_bucket/avro/raw-events.avro”)
.withWindowedWrites()
.withNumShards(8)
.withSuffix(“.avro”));
To summarize, the above code batches game events into 5 minute windows and then exports the events to AVRO files on Google Storage.
The result of this portion of the data pipeline is a collection of AVRO files on google storage that can be used to build a data lake. A new AVRO output is generated every 5 minutes, and downstream ETLs can parse the raw events into processed event-specific table schemas. The image below shows a sample output of AVRO files.
AVRO files saved to Google Storage
In addition to creating a data lake, we want the events to be immediately accessible in a query environment. DataFlow provides a BigQuery connector which serves this functionality, and data streamed to this endpoint is available for analysis after a short duration. This portion of the data pipeline is shown in the figure below.
Streaming events from DataFlow to BigQuery
The data pipeline converts the PubSub messages into TableRow objects, which can be directly inserted into BigQuery. The code below consists of two apply methods: a data transformation and a IO writer. The transform step reads the message payloads from PubSub, parses the message as a JSON object, extracts the eventType and eventVersion attributes, and creates a TableRow object with these attributes in addition to a timestamp and the message payload. The second apply method tells the pipeline to write the records to BigQuery and to append the events to an existing table.
@ProcessElement
public void processElement(ProcessContext c) throws Exception {
String message = new String(c.element().getPayload());
// parse the json message for attributes
JsonObject jsonObject =
new JsonParser().parse(message).getAsJsonObject();
String eventType = jsonObject.get(“eventType”).getAsString();
String eventVersion = jsonObject.
get(“eventVersion”).getAsString();
String serverTime = dateFormat.format(new Date());
// create and output the table row
TableRow record = new TableRow();
record.set(“eventType”, eventType);
record.set(“eventVersion”, eventVersion);
record.set(“serverTime”, serverTime);
record.set(“message”, message);
c.output(record);
}}));
}})
//stream the events to Big Query
.apply(“To BigQuery”,BigQueryIO.writeTableRows()
.to(table)
.withSchema(schema)
.withCreateDisposition(CreateDisposition.CREATE_IF_NEEDED)
.withWriteDisposition(WriteDisposition.WRITE_APPEND));
To summarize the above code, each game event that is consumed from PubSub is converted into a TableRow object with a timestamp and then streamed to BigQuery for storage.
The result of this portion of the data pipeline is that game events will be streamed to BigQuery and will be available for analysis in the output table specified by the DataFlow task. In order to effectively use these events for queries, you’ll need to build additional ETLs for creating processed event tables with schematized records, but you now have a data collection mechanism in place for storing events.
Game event records queried from the raw-events table in BigQuery
With DataFlow you can test the data pipeline locally or deploy to the cloud. If you run the code samples without specifying additional attributes, then the data pipeline will execute on your local machine. In order to deploy to the cloud and take advantage of the auto scaling capabilities of this data pipeline, you need to specify a new runner class as part of your runtime arguments. In order to run the data pipeline, I used the following runtime arguments:
–runner=org.apache.beam.runners.dataflow.DataflowRunner
–jobName=game-analytics
–project=your_project_id
–tempLocation=gs://temp-bucket
Once the job is deployed, you should see a message that the job has been submitted. You can then click on the DataFlow console to see the task:
The steaming data pipeline running on Google Cloud
The runtime configuration specified above will not default to an auto scaling configuration. In order to deploy a job that scales up based on demand, you’ll need to specify additional attributes, such as:
–autoscalingAlgorithm=THROUGHPUT_BASED
–maxNumWorkers=30
Additional details on setting up a DataFlow task to scale to heavy workload conditions are available in this Google article and this post from Spotify. The image below shows how DataFlow can scale up to meet demand as necessary.
An example of Dataflow auto scaling
There is now a variety of tools available that make it possible to set up an analytics pipeline for a game or web application with minimal effort. Using managed resources enables small teams to take advantage of serverless and autoscaling infrastructure to scale up to massive event volumes with minimal infrastructure management. Rather than using a data vendor’s off-the-shelf solution for collecting data, you can record all relevant data for your app.
The goal of this post was to show how a data lake and query environment can be set up using the GCP stack. While the approach presented here isn’t directly portable to other clouds, the Apache Beam library used to implement the core functionality of this data pipeline is portable and similar tools can be leveraged to build scalable data pipelines on other cloud providers.
This architecture is a minimal implementation of an event collection system that is useful for analytics and data science teams. In order to meet the demands of most analytics teams, the raw events will need to be transformed into processed and cooked events in order to meet business needs. This discussion is outside the scope of this post, but the analytics foundation should now be in place for building out a highly effective data platform.
The full source code for this sample pipeline is available on Github. Ben Weber is the lead data scientist at Windfall Data, where our mission is to build the most accurate and comprehensive model of net worth.
Japanese developer Level-5 intends to release all of its upcoming main titles on Switch.
It’s a notable move given the studio’s portfolio contains a raft of big-name franchises like Professor Layton, Ni No Kuni, and Yo-kai Watch.
Level-5 president and CEO Akihiro Hino broke the news in an interview with Nikkei Trendy (translated by Gematsu), suggesting he wants to emulate the company’s 3DS successes on the Switch.
“Basically, in the future our main titles will all be released on Nintendo Switch,” commented Hino. “The idea is that what we have created for 3DS will move over to Switch.”
The studio will be making its Switch debut this month with the Japanese launch of The Snack World: Trejarers, before following up with the Switch release of Inazuma Eleven Ares later this year.
Middle-earth: Shadow of War developer Monolith has decided to completely remove microtranscations from the game.
Explaining the decision in a post on the WB Games website, the studio claims the monetization method compromises “the core promise of the Nemisis System,” which allows players to build personal relationships with allies and enemies through dynamic, ever-evolving encounters.
As it stands, Shadow of War lets players purchase Orcs using real-world cash, letting them circumvent the system altogether, but that’s about to change.
“While purchasing Orcs in the Market is more immediate and provides additional player options, we have come to realize that providing this choice risked undermining the heart of our game, the Nemesis System,” reads the post.
“It allows you to miss out on the awesome player stories you would have otherwise created, and it compromises those same stories even if you don’t buy anything.
“Simply being aware that they are available for purchase reduces the immersion in the world and takes away from the challenge of building your personal army and your fortresses. In order to fully restore the core promise of the Nemesis System, we’ll be permanently removing Gold, War Chests and the Market from Shadow of War.”
Gold will no longer be purchasable as of May 8, giving those clamoring to spend around a month to trade their real-world dollars for in-game cash.
The in-game market will stay open until July 17, at which point it’ll be closed for good. Any remaining gold will then be converted into Gold Loot Chests.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR is Now Available on Steam!
A true, full-length open-world game for VR has arrived from Bethesda Game Studios. Skyrim VR reimagines the complete epic fantasy masterpiece with an unparalleled sense of scale, depth, and immersion. Skyrim VR also includes all official add-ons.
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.
After 4 long years, I’m almost graduating with a Bachelors of Game Design degree from Sheridan College in Ontario, Canada.
Go me!
Over the last 4 years I’ve been to MIGS, had my writing published here and there on the internet and even been to GDC twice which is impressive to me since I knew next to nothing about game development when I started all this.
It’s been a long journey, but I thought the best way I could commemorate the event would be to reflect on my past 4 years in this program; what I wish I knew, what I learned and a little bit of philosophy on post-secondary schooling in general.
Be aware not all of this will be about Game Design programs (or post-secondary education, even!) and can apply to many different fields as well. Additionally, this is all just my personal opinion and everything below can be taken with a grain of salt!
Before spending 4 years on Game Design, I spent 1 in a general arts program. My time in general arts mostly taught me I didn’t really want to do art for a living – I like it as a hobby, not as work. That helped usher me into Game Design.
But it wasn’t until a year in Game Design did it kick in just how much more work college was than high school; in part because I was in an actual degree program now, but also because I was now doing something that I started to feel like I actually wanted to do with my life. The difference between high school and college to me was that college felt a billion times more relevant to my future. Not to mention that I was paying thousands of dollars for my education I needed to make it really count.
For my first year in Game Design I struggled with programming, not really understanding what I was doing and riding off the help of others. One day I had a group assignment where I couldn’t contribute anything and I realized how poorly prepared I was – and I didn’t want to keep that up for 3 more years!
Over the summer I was working full time, but I dedicated every weekend to programming my own little side projects which helped me build up my skills to where I felt confident enough in a group setting. I don’t remember doing anything aside from coding, working fast food and rollerblading that whole summer.
Before I knew it, I was coding almost every group project I was in for the next two years, mostly because no one else wanted to.
It was a good kick in the butt and the point where I realized this was the chance I had been waiting for my whole life – the chance to finally do something with my life and dedicate myself to something.
I’m not saying everyone will have an “a-HA!” moment, but try to remember that college is long, hard and you’re in it for the long haul. The industry is competitive – don’t hope to just sail through like I did and hope everything will work itself out in the end.
The single most frustrating thing about school was watching my classmates – people who I knew to be very skilled, hardworking and capable – put things off again and again until the last minute and then panic and crunch when their work wasn’t finished a few hours before the deadline.
This happened for almost every single assignment.
Early on I noticed I have pretty intense mental health troubles when I didn’t have something to work on. By necessity I always keep busy and try to get work in as early as possible since it makes me feel more comfortable about the homework process. A bonus was it gave me time to take breaks, work on portfolio pieces and I don’t have to crunch!
Unfortunately, humans have dumb biases which make them think procrastination is preferential to getting things over with early. Time management is one of the more important skills you can wrangle in your time at school – learn it early and apply it hard and you can save yourself a world of stress!
Lately I feel like I need to practice this more, but it helped me immensely.
In our third year we were required to find a co-op placement. While our school helped us do this, studios in the Toronto area weren’t exactly hiring at the time, so the onus was on us to do look for opportunities as well. On the suggestion of my professors, I started building my portfolio a year before our school gave us a class to help with it – just in case.
I had heard the year above us had trouble with finding placements, so I really wanted to get a jump on it while I still had time. Just like my previous coding misadventure, I spent the following summer developing my portfolio and media presence. On the advice of my professor Andrew Carvalho I started using Twitter (even though I didn’t much care for it) and started my awkward first foray into the world of networking.
Twitter was immensely helpful for me to get informed with the local game development scene since I knew almost no developers in my area. I started sharing the work I did regularly and kept tabs on what the folks around me were up to which helped me find chances to interact with local developers in person and strike up a conversation with then online before meeting them in person. This was extra helpful for me since I’m much more confident online than I am IRL!
I also started networking at events months before I really needed to find a co-op, which I think was important for me because it gave me time to build up my network online and practice networking skills before I was in a place of really having to rely on them. It definitely took me a few months to get used to the idea of handing a business card to someone after talking to them. All too often I see students in a similar position, just starting to learn the networking process when they realize they’re in need of opportunities and not beforehand, which has the unintended side effect of coming across as very awkward.
It was only after going to events for eight months did I meet someone who was looking for a designer and landed my first contract job – just by being in the right place at the right time. A lot of opportunities are based entirely on luck and sometimes networking is more about giving yourself more opportunities to be in the right place at the right time than it is about going around probing people for work.
This is a big one too.
Through my schooling I’ve heard a handful of people from my own program and otherwise complain about post-secondary schooling. Things to the effect of “Why am I doing [insert really boring assignment here]? It’s a waste of my time!”
I won’t deny that there’s always going to be work that feels like it doesn’t apply to your skillset or feels like a waste. A lot of the time even if the work doesn’t feel worthwhile it can be if you’re willing to look at it that way: group assignments will always teach you how to work with people better, developing game will always give you new problems to solve, heck, even taking a physics class helped me brush up on my math skills which had been lying dormant for months on end.
But the biggest complaint I’ve heard from people is “I don’t need school to teach me [code, art, etc], I could learn all this online!”.
It’s true and on some level I agree, every hard skill I’ve learned in classes I’ve seen online in some form or another. I could take a masterclass online and learn art, or read an article on design to teach myself principles, or skim Unity’s forums to learn how to develop something.
However, the most valuable skills I’ve learned from school have been soft ones – working with people day in and day out, learning effective ways to communicate problems to other people, practicing taking and giving feedback in a kind and respectful manner, listening to and parsing feedback.
A lot of the time it’s even just the structure of schooling that gives you what you need – you develop a routine of learning and content fed directly to you in a distraction-free environment which most people likely aren’t able to replicate outside of school. You would have to be a very specific self-motivated personality type to put yourself through a learning regime as effective as school can be – meanwhile some people have trouble even getting out of bed in the morning.
There are shadow benefits to schooling as well: if you’re fortunate enough to live in a country which offers student loans (like me) there’s a financial stability you likely wouldn’t have elsewhere. I can learn while having a roof over my head and food to eat, which I’m incredibly grateful for.
Some students I’ve spoken to viewed it as a chance to see more of the world they would have seen in their home country. A degree alone can qualify people for employment overseas which self-guided learning probably can’t do. I’ve even spoken to someone in the past who came to the country to escape a politically unstable and dangerous home country – the education was more of a side-benefit to their own safety and sanity. They worried for their family at home but were glad to be somewhere they could feel safe.
That’s why it breaks my heart to hear students complain about post-secondary education and tell people they “don’t need school”. It’s important to remember that while some of us don’t need school, other people need it more than anything in the world.
I consider myself – a white male with government-provided student loans – incredibly privileged to be able to attend a postsecondary school for five years of my adult life studying a field I love. I don’t deny for a second that my ability to do the things listed in this article and the opportunities I’ve received are directly related to this.
Being able to learn as I have for the last few years is not something I intend to take for-granted either because, as mentioned above, lots of people would love to do what I’m doing too.
In November of 2016 a local student showcase called Eat Play Mingle (organized by the awesome Meagan Budgell) was held at George Brown College, another local post-secondary institution in the area. A friend and I signed up to demo our game there for the evening alongside other local Toronto developers.
At one point in the night there was a series of micro-talks by local devs called “Bonus Stage” where people would give a little talk on a topic of their choice. I watched a few of them (including some great ones from folks at 13AM Games) and they were a couple speakers short. I hated public speaking, but on a total impulse I decided to volunteer and improvised a (very nervous and excited) talk on Emergent Roleplay in Guild Wars 2 since it seemed like a great chance to express my passion on the subject. I actually enjoyed it and felt like I could use my experience to help others learn something for once!
From that point on I started trying to sharing my knowledge and experiences wherever I could; I wrote advocacy articles and blog posts (just like this one!), gave talks at multiple conventions and offered advice for other devs and students who were curious about getting into development. Over the last couple years I’ve ended up talking at over a dozen or so more Bonus Stages and was absolutely overjoyed when I saw my fellow students follow suit.
I try to use my position of privilege to give back to the game development community however I can, because I know there are tons of people out there who deserve this knowledge more than me. If I can be a conduit to pass it on to others, then so be it!
If you’re in a position to share your knowledge and help other developers try and do what you can where you can. Not only will you feel better for doing it, you’ll help make strong connections and help others grow in the process.
Woah, that got pretty heavy.
Obviously, there’s only so much I can fit into this blog. I didn’t even mention how I think school systems should model themselves as services and not businesses, or how students should be aware if they’re being exploited and not be afraid to use their voices to defend their rights where they can.
Ultimately, I’m of the opinion there’s good to be had in a Game Design education and equal parts bad. Just remember that at the end of the day, no amount of schooling or hard work is worth your well-being. Always remember to care for yourself as much as you possibly can.
If you’re a student and want to connect and chat about school or advice or game development or anything else under the sun you can always find me on Twitter with my DMs open.
Thanks for reading!
There’s no inventory in One Hour One Life. And yet this online survival game features grand total of 463 craftable objects.
At least, that’s how many there are on the day this is being written. Developer Jason Rohrer is aiming to add another 9,500 over the next two years.
No inventory and a culture-spanning number of objects: these two facts seem entirely incompatible and yet they’re deeply related, resulting from Rohrer attempting to reconcile the realities of being a lone developer with his ambition to create a game that features a crafting system on the scale of human civilization.
One Hour One Life is a multiplayer survival game in which players live a lifetime over the course of one hour, if they don’t starve first. They’re born as helpless babies which, for the first few years (minutes) of their lives, must be fed by other players who have lived to adult age.
Once they’re old enough they can start contributing to communal life, farming carrots, tending fires, feeding babies, and steadily building up a sustainable village, if everyone manages to work together.
“The user interface, part of it is me figuring out as a solo developer, how to make a game that’s as big as all the content that’s in the real world, right?” Rohrer says. “All the things people made, all the doohickies you have in your house that thousands of people around the world have collaborated to make. That means the game has to have 10,000 things in it eventually. How do I have people craft those things, how can I design and implement it?”
“The user interface, part of it is me figuring out as a solo developer, how to make a game that’s as big as all the content that’s in the real world, right?”
His answer was a carefully simplified crafting system that’s based on combining one object with another to make a third object. Aiming to produce 100 objects a week, he has stripped down their creation to the bare minimum. He draws each one, creates a sound, if necessary, by recording his own voice, and plugs it into his editor in order to draw relationships between them and other objects. No programming is required.
Thus, when Rohrer wanted to add the ability for walls to be broken into rubble, he simply drew a pile of rubble, scanned it, recorded himself making appropriate ‘krrbbbghhfff’ sound with his mouth, and plugged it into his editor so that ‘mining pick’ plus ’wall’ equals ‘rubble’.
What’s interesting about this system, which is extremely wide and very shallow, is the way it enables cultures to form in the game. Anxious to survive, players naturally form communities, passing on their knowledge of how their village runs to a new generation, knowing that at the end of their 60-minute life they’ll respawn as a baby near an adult player somewhere else in the world, dependent on them for food.
While this behavior largely emerges from One Hour One Life’s survival design, the way in which communities form is informed by subtler cues. One of the most important is the way the game makes crafting visible. When a player is carrying and using objects, everyone can see what they’re doing. ”You lay out your ingredients on the ground and combine them, and you don’t have to explain it,” says Rohrer. “All someone has to do is watch you and they’ll learn what you’re doing.” He contrasts his approach with that of Minecraft, which presents its crafting menu as a grid which is invisible to other players and requires remembering precise configurations of resources.
“It also feels to me more aesthetically like what it feels like to make something,” Rohrer continues. “I lay out the ingredients on the counter or I lay out my tools when I’m making a trellis for my tomato plants, and I’m carrying one tool at a time. I don’t have this huge armful of them. Dealing with clutter is something I really wanted in the game.”
The size of the crafting list also imposed the need to make each recipe memorable. But Rohrer argues that his system is naturally memorable because it’s inherently step-by-step, with the player combining one object with another, and then another. He has put a lot of thought into making these steps logical, so to make a fire, the player starts with combining an ember leaf with tinder to make smouldering tinder, and then waits a few seconds until it turns to burning tinder before combining it with kindling to make a fire.
“I’ve broken interactivity into this very coarse simulation of what it’s like to use one thing on another thing,” Rohrer says, explaining that it enables many ways of making similar things, such as the game’s 18 different flavours of pie and the fundamental differences between what it takes to make a sealskin coat to a rabbit fur coat.
“Clubbing a seal is very different to snaring a rabbit,” he says. “That deep and multifaceted interactivity is possible when you simplify crafting down. If you think about Minecraft’s crafting grids they’re hard to remember, and Don’t Starve shows you a menu but it’s kind of arbitrary. It takes three stones plus two wood to make a hatchet and I always have to check the list again, even though I’ve been playing for hours. There’s something about step-by-step crafting that’s easy to remember.”
Still, Rohrer implemented an official wiki for One Hour One Life, which lists all its crafting recipes. “I don’t necessarily want-want-want there to be a wiki but at the same time I know it’s going to happen,” he says, recognising that players will need guidance on the game’s peculiarities. “I don’t see it as antithetical to what the game is about because once you know how to do something you don’t forget it, and knowledge is spreading inside the game.”
The way knowledge spreads is fascinating, partly down to the crafting system’s visual nature, partly to One Hour One Life’s chat system, and partly down to the challenges Rohrer has designed into the game. Players can simply watch a village’s customs and copy them, but they’re also able to send messages to each other. The amount a player can say depends on how old they are. Newborns can say only one letter (“F” is the established form for indicating hunger), while elderly characters can type out entire sentences.
“Some of the more successful villages are very organized,” says Rohrer. “As soon as you’re born they take you to a corner where there’s a fire and all these other babies. One woman is in charge of nursing them and there’s another elderly player there who’s in charge of teaching the babies the rules of the village. She asks, ’Do you know the three tenets of life in the village?’ There’s this system of only eating picked carrots, never from the field because the farmer is charge of that, and you’d be assigned a task when you’re of age. They pass down the mantle of responsibilities.”
“It’s much more interesting if there’s a hard failure, it’s a very dramatic turning point for the community if the well ‘done gone dry!’ That’s interesting, and if there isn’t a good way to recover from it players have to come together and have a culture around well usage.”
While they’re enabled by text and the game’s visual nature, these cultures are shaped by wrinkles Rohrer has placed in the game’s design to govern its survival systems and present challenges to sustaining civilization. Early on, he figured that the game couldn’t have limited food resources, since he couldn’t know how many players would be coming into any given area. But he soon saw playtesters relying entirely on the infinite berry bushes he’d added to prevent starvation, and never developing farming systems. Why bother when you have an easy source of food? So he limited many resources, such as milkweed plants, which die off if they’re harvested outside of their fruiting season, and wells, which are exhausted when they’re emptied.
“A lot of people ask to be able to repair or refill the well, but that’s not interesting to me,” Rohrer says. “It’s one weird trick you can use to recover from catastrophe and it becomes busywork. It’s much more interesting if there’s a hard failure, it’s a very dramatic turning point for the community if the well” – he puts on a hillbilly accent – “done gone dry! That’s interesting, and if there isn’t a good way to recover from it players have to come together and have a culture around well usage.”
He began noticing players starting to come up with ways of managing their wells, having someone keep track of them or using rocks to record how much had been extracted. The same went for an exploit players used to grow infinite carrots, and which led to a village surviving for 22 generations, which was the then longest-surviving. So he changed it, having carrots deplete soil fertility and introducing ways of restoring it.
“I want mistakes to accumulate over time to the point where the village can’t keep going. If you let a few too many carrots go to seed, which burns up fertile soil, you get too many seeds and run out of soil to seed them into and the village is on this road to ruin, eventually. I know it’s possible to have a village live forever, but it’s really hard and that’s what makes it interesting.”
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.
[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry ‘watcher’ Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend.
This week’s highlights include musings on guns in games, a postmortem of Where The Water Tastes Like Wine, & a profile of a top retro YouTuber, among others.
Other news from this week? The indie publisher No More Robots – which I help out with for japes – announced the second game it’s publishing, Not Tonight. It’s, uh, a post-Brexit pub/club bouncer simulator (?!). Will be super interesting to see how it’s received when it comes out on Steam this summer.
Oh, and unrelated but hilarious – is PC Building Simulator the most meta video game of 2018 so far? (It’s doing pretty well!)
Until next time,
– Simon, curator.]
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The history of violence buried deep in Far Cry 5’s landscape (Gareth Damian Martin / Eurogamer – ARTICLE)
“The implication is obvious, these are not our homes, our landscapes, our places, but those that belong to a wide variety of others. Far Cry has stretched this otherness to include not just generalised African revolutionaries and tattooed Islanders but even humanity’s own prehistoric ancestors.”
Jason Rohrer: One Hour One Life (Hoomans – PODCAST & TEXT TRANSCRIPT)
“Jason Rohrer is an independent artist and developer using videogames as his artistic medium. His early creation “Passage”, an experimental game where the protagonist can focus on either accumulating wealth or enjoying companionship until death, is part of the New York’s MoMA permanent collection.”
Valve has 1,700 CPUs working non-stop to bust CS:GO cheaters (Evan Lahti / PC Gamer – ARTICLE)
“This approach has been so effective that Valve is now using deep learning on “a bunch of problems,” from anti-fraud to aspects of Dota 2, and Valve is actively looking for other studios to work with on implementing their deep learning anti-cheat solution in other games on Steam.”
It could be the biggest change to movies since sound. If anyone will pay for it.(Steven Zeitchik / Washington Post – ARTICLE)
“By bringing the piece to the mall, “Zoo” producer Dreamscape Immersive — it counts Steven Spielberg among its investors — hopes it has cracked a major challenge bedeviling the emerging form of entertainment known as cinematic VR. [SIMON’S NOTE: good mainstream piece on the challenges of getting VR more popular.]”
The Rise of Nintendo’s Original Gaming Master (Great Big Story / YouTube – VIDEO)
“As they moved away from the arcade and into the home, Nintendo searched for a spokesperson, one that could represent the company’s passion for gaming and that could speak directly to the U.S. consumer. They chose Howard Phillips, an employee working in the Nintendo warehouse. Little did he know that he was soon to become a gaming legend.”
Real Guns, Virtual Guns, And Me (Kirk Hamilton / Kotaku – ARTICLE)
“Sometimes I imagine my brain is a collection of baskets that contain everything I know. There’s a basket for the English language, and a basket for music stuff. There’s one for Lord of the Rings lore, and another for Bloodborne monsters. Right alongside those is a worn but sizable basket that contains all my accumulated knowledge of guns.”
Why Dandara‘s devs drew inspiration from Brazilian culture (Joel Couture / Gamasutra – ARTICLE)
“Long Hat House’s Dandara, released last month, is a platforming Metroidvania of unique movements and a touch of Brazilian history. Inspired by (and starring an interpretation of) the Brazilian historical folk hero Dandara, players battle across an interconnected world in order to free an oppressed people.”
#DevQuest – Episode 1: The Hard Way (Windows Developer / YouTube – VIDEO)
“The four-part series begins in Amsterdam as Adriaan de Jongh (Hidden Folks) prepares to travel the globe and find out what drives indie developers to make their games, their way. First stop: Prague. Adriaan meets up with Amanita Design—makers of Samorost 3 and Machinarium—and learns about the dedication and detail that goes into their unique style. [SIMON’S NOTE: all 4 videos in this Microsoft-commissioned series are up on YouTube already!]”
Bernie De Koven, Influential Game Designer and Scholar of Fun, Dies at 76 (Cameron Kunzelman / Waypoint – ARTICLE)
“In The Well-Played Game, DeKoven’s most famous work, he tracks a difference between “fun” and “games.” Fun, DeKoven argues, is accessible all the time. Anything you do can be a conduit through which you access fun, and we’ve all played a giant trick on ourselves in the attempt to silo fun off into its own quadrant of the world.”
The Nintendo King & The Midlife Crisis (Justin Heckert / Wired – ARTICLE)
“IT WAS DECEMBER in San Diego, the palm trees strung with tinsel in Ocean Beach. Pat Contri shuffled barefoot on the floor of his game room, black hair wet from the shower and curling above his eyes. He was in front of a wall of nearly 1,000 games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, the greatest console ever released.”
Darksiders: The Documentary (Gameumentary / YouTube – VIDEO)
“Gameumentary is proud to present our feature length documentary on the Darksiders franchise. We cover the story of Darksiders I, II the closure of Vigil Games and plenty more! [SIMON’S NOTE: this is impressively detailed, and feature-length to boot!]”
Adapt or Die: The 15-Year History of ‘Ratchet & Clank’ (Giancarlo Valdes / Rolling Stone – ARTICLE)
“Insomniac Games experience director Brian Allgeier and long-time writer TJ Fixman took the stage at the Game Developers Conference this week to discuss how they’ve been able to keep the franchise relevant for so long. [SIMON’S NOTE: this GDC talk is now up for free on GDC Vault along with large chunks of the rest of the show.]”
GDC Wrap-up Part 1: Notes on Indie Publishing (Spring 2018) (Adam Saltsman – ARTICLE)
“Anyways, the entire industry continues to change rapidly, especially on the platforms and publishing side of things, where we’re in a particularly chameleonic state at the moment. Which is why I’ve timestamped the actual title of this post. Consider this a sell-by date on this big carton of advice milk. [SIMON’S NOTE: this is suuuuper good.]”
Why aren’t more black kids going pro in esports? (Latoya Peterson / The Undefeated – ARTICLE)
“But within the esports juggernaut, there is a pronounced and growing racial gap in the player pools. African-American representation on the major teams and in the highest-profile events is abysmal. There are high-profile players of color, such as Zaqueri “Aphromoo” Black and Dominique “SonicFox” McLean, but why are there so few other black players making it to the top of the various leagues?”
Tourette Quest 2.0 (Lars Doucet / Gamasutra Blogs – ARTICLE)
“Years ago, the first version of Tourette Quest got an insane amount of media coverage relative to the tiny amount of work I put into it — and that scared the heck out of me. I knew people were being drawn in mostly for the concept, but the substance wasn’t delivering. And even worse, the messages people were drawing from it were not what I was trying to get across. I was failing to communicate. This time, I think I’ve done a better job.”
Ready Up: Competitive Team Fortress 2 (Geel 9 / YouTube – VIDEO)
“Ready Up: Competitive Team Fortress 2 is a film about the competitive Team Fortress 2 esports scene, a scene that has thrived continuously on the community’s support. From pro players and viewers, to casters and producers, as well programmers and designers, the film explores a look into the creation of competitive 6v6 over the past 10 years. [SIMON’S NOTE: another feature-length niche documentary, wow.]”
Ready Critic One (Laura Miller / Slate – ARTICLE)
“Over any given weekend, I get a lot done. I chop down scores of trees, mine dozens of boulders, and build fire pits and wooden chests with my bare hands. I construct townhouses and copper refineries and weaving mills. I visit taverns run by my many friends and save some of them from certain death.”
The Renegade Game Designer Who Aims to Challenge the Industry’s Attitudes Toward Sex (Merritt K / MEL – ARTICLE)
“Yang’s work is interesting because it’s both beautiful and complex as well as frequently at the center of the industry’s confused and tortured relationship with sex. (It’s much, much, much more comfortable with violence; after all, the quintessential modern video game is a first-person shooter.)”
Nier: Automata‘s Director: ‘I Might Be Broken In Some Way’ (Jason Schreier / Kotaku – ARTICLE)
“Without his mask, Yoko Taro looks like anyone else at the Game Developers Conference. He has a thin grey beard and wears a black hoodie with short, flowing sleeves that wouldn’t seem out of place at Hogwarts. His head is shaved, and his face is round, but otherwise he doesn’t resemble the giant Nier mask that has become his trademark over the past few years.”
How we used Discord to build a dream community for our game Descenders (Mike Rose / Discord Blog – ARTICLE)
“We dig the decision to bring the in-game factions inside of Discord. It’s an awesome way to keep people engaged and connected with the community. We’re also stoked and surprised by how players helped flip negative reviews to positive after launch. [SIMON’S NOTE: I hang out in the Descenders Discord a lot, and it really is good-natured!]”
Art Design Deep Dive: Crossing Souls’ striking ’80s-infused pixel art (Juan Gabriel Jaén and Daniel Benitez / Gamasutra – ARTICLE)
“Hello everyone! here we are, the art department of Fourattic to talk about Crossing Souls and the art decisions we made to accomplish its unique look. In Crossing Souls, we clearly wanted to represent an ’80s aesthetics as accurate as possible, addressing both the traditional cartoons and the pixel art style in a single project.”
Where The Water Tastes Like Wine Postmortem (Johnnemann Nordhagen / Medium – ARTICLE)
“I’ll approach this in classic Game Developer Magazine (RIP) format, starting with the things I think went well, and then the, uhh, other side, but I’m also going to talk a little bit about the reception and success of the game. [SIMON’S NOTE: that sales story – unpleasant but ‘the new normal’ for many less commercial indies.]”
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[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at tinyletter.com/vgdeepcuts – we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra & an advisor to indie publisher No More Robots, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]
