Category: News

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.

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[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week’s highlights include Phil Spencer’s speech at the DICE Summit, editorials on how the Switch is encouraging people to play games they wouldn’t otherwise, & rare documents on The Oregon Trail’s history.

Having just returned from DICE in Las Vegas – helmed for the first time by my former GDC colleague Meggan Scavio, and excellently, too – still had time to dig out some of the best links of the week. Unfortunately, a lot of the discussion at DICE is off the record, but there were a lot of interesting subjects being discussed – from the role of game streamers to new ways to approach video game preservation.

Still, guessing they will percolate into some of the journalist/YouTuber editorials you’ll see in this column over time, being trends and all!

Until next time,
– Simon, curator.]

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7 games with interesting hacking mechanics all devs should study (Richard Moss / Gamasutra – ARTICLE)
“These days hacking is more topical than ever, and for anyone making a game that even flirts with the implications of the growing interconnectedness and networking capabilities of objects and devices all over the world — and the sometimes-questionable security protocols protecting them — it’s rife for potential as a video game mechanic.”

Conan Exiles’ director talks Early Access development, the future of the survival genre and dong sliders (Joe Donnelly / PC Gamer – ARTICLE)
“Conan Exiles entered Steam’s Early Access initiative at the end of January last year, and has spent the last 12 months working and reworking its sprawling survival world. In December last year, developer Funcom earmarked May 8, 2018 for full release—and with this in mind I caught up with game director Joel Bylos to learn about Exiles’ journey so far, and what it has planned for the future.”

The Animation Pipeline of Overwatch (Jesse Davis / GDC / YouTube – VIDEO)
“In this 2017 GDC talk, Blizzard’s Jesse Davis takes a look at how the Overwatch team built an animation pipeline and workflow around a new game universe, a new team culture, and Blizzard’s tried-and-true values.”

Game industry pushes back against efforts to restore gameplay servers (Kyle Orland / Ars Technica – ARTICLE)
“A group of video game preservationists wants the legal right to replicate “abandoned” servers in order to re-enable defunct online multiplayer gameplay for study. The game industry says those efforts would hurt their business, allow the theft of their copyrighted content, and essentially let researchers “blur the line between preservation and play… Analyzing the arguments on both sides shows how passionate both industry and academia are about the issue, and how mistrust and misunderstanding seem to have infected the debate.”

How small game makers found their community with Bitsy (Adam Dixon / RockPaperShotgun – ARTICLE)
“A year ago Bitsy released on itch.io – a humble game making tool described by its creator as a “little editor for little games or worlds”. Since its release, more than 600 games have been made using the tool by 300 different authors.”

Reading Digital Games As Texts (Matthew Farber / Edutopia – ARTICLE)
“Would screening a Ken Burns documentary for students be considered teaching with educational technology because it was delivered using a DVD player and a projector? Clearly not. In my research, I’ve discovered something similar about some digital games: They’re not edtech tools, per se; instead they fall into the category of mediated experiences, and can be read—like literary fiction or films—as texts.”

The 33-Year Quest for the Perfect Run of ‘Super Mario Bros.’ Is Almost Over (Patrick Klepek / Waypoint – ARTICLE)
““Oh my gosh,” muttered Super Mario Bros. speedrunner Kosmic, as he snaked through a tough section of 8-4, the final stage in the game. “C’mon, man.” Moments later, he jumped over Bowser’s hammers, dropped his controller to the ground, and began to process the enormity of the moment. At four minutes, 56 seconds, and 462 miliseconds, Kosmic had achieved a new world record for speedrunning Super Mario Bros.“

Finding Relief In Overwatch – Chronic Pain And Gaming (Kimberley Wallace / Game Informer – ARTICLE)
“You can never anticipate every curveball life throws at you, and sometimes the perfect video games just appear during your time of need. That’s how it was for me and Overwatch. Blizzard’s first-person shooter became a positive force amid my hardest years.”

Shadow of the Colossus: How Music Tells Its Story (Writing On Games / YouTube – VIDEO)
“Arguably one of the most significant aspects of Shadow of the Colossus’ legacy is its simple but profound story. In this episode of Writing on Games, I want to examine why Kow Otani’s genius soundtrack might be at the centre of it all.”

How Michael Brough’s love of exploring a single game mechanic beget Cinco Paus(Jennifer Allen / Gamasutra – ARTICLE)
“In the course of a recent conversation with Gamasutra, Brough opened up a bit about his approach to game-making and shed some light on why, exactly, he made such interesting design choices while crafting Cinco Paus.” 

The DeanBeat: Microsoft’s Phil Spencer steps up as a diversity leader (Dean Takahashi / Venturebeat – ARTICLE)
“Phil Spencer, executive vice president of gaming at Microsoft, spoke from the heart about diversity and being a leader in building a better culture at the company at the opening of the elite game conference, the DICE Summit, this week in Las Vegas. I was proud to see a leader of the game industry and one of the top people at Microsoft call for the game industry to do a better job embracing inclusiveness.”

The Oregon Trail, MECC, and the Rise Of Computer Learning (The Strong Musem Of Play – SLIDESHOW)
“The… exhibit draws on unique artifacts and rare documentation from the museum’s International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) and its Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation (MECC) Collection to present the history of The Oregon Trail and the pioneers who created it and other groundbreaking educational software. [SIMON’S NOTE: The Strong has an amazing collection of donations around games, so good to see online exhibits in _some_ form…]”

The Nintendo Switch has me playing games I’d otherwise ignore (Andrew Webster / The Verge – ARTICLE)
“A year ago, if you had told me I’d be spending my evenings playing Payday 2 on a tablet, I wouldn’t have believed you. Yet, here I am, plugging away at a heist game that came out five years ago. Such is the power of the Nintendo Switch. [SIMON’S NOTE: Also see ‘The Nintendo Switch Is Great For Playing Games You’re Ashamed Of’]”

Make Peace, Not War | Diplomacy AI in Total War: Attila (AI and Games / YouTube – VIDEO)
“In part four of the Total War series I take a look at improvements made to the Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm as well as the diplomacy AI personalities that reside within Total War: Attila.”

Road to the IGF: Subset Games’ Into the Breach (Joel Couture / Gamasutra – ARTICLE)
“Gamasutra sought out Justin Ma of Subset Games, developers of the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and Excellence in Design-nominated Into the Breach, to learn more about why they chose to make players care about blowing up the city they’re supposed to be saving, giving players the ability to read enemy moves, and what these two things did to make the FTL developer’s new game feel special. [SIMON’S NOTE: Just calling out this game because it’s the next game from the FTL devs & seems INSANELY polished, and comes out this week – don’t sleep on it!]”

Road to GDC: Triple-A Gaming While Blind (Karen Stevens / Rolling Stone – ARTICLE)
“When I joined EA back in 2013 as a Madden NFL graphics developer, every Raiders fan was eager to get their hands on the next game in the franchise. Everyone except my friend who was legally blind. He told me that he couldn’t play Madden NFL anymore.”

The Great Kinect Art Heist (Chris Bratt / Eurogamer – VIDEO)
“In late 2015, one of the world’s most priceless artifacts was stolen. The thieves (or activists, depending on your viewpoint) used Microsoft’s Kinect to swipe it. [SIMON’S NOTE: Don’t miss this one!]”

The Worlds Of Ultima (Jimmy Maher / Digital Antiquarian – ARTICLE)
“In the very early days of Ultima, Richard Garriott made a public promise which would eventually come back to haunt him. Looking for a way to differentiate his CRPG series from its arch-rival, Wizardry, he said that he would never reuse an Ultima engine.”

TouchArcade Game Of The Week: Alto’s Odyssey (Jared Nelson / TouchArcade – ARTICLE)
“[SIMON’S NOTE: and here’s the actual review of Alto’s Odyssey – highlighting cos I want you to know about new/interesting games – the devs “still find room for a few surprises while maintaining the engrossing atmospheric experience of the original.”]”

Interview: Deciphering the whimsical Wattam with Keita Takahashi (JC Fletcher / TinyCartridge – ARTICLE)
““This is not a five-minute game,” Keita Takahashi tells me in the Annapurna Interactive booth at PAX South, as a line stretches out of said booth for demos of Wattam, the whimsical new game Katamari Damacy’s creator is making at Funomena. “You need enough time to understand.””

Sim Society: DARPA, serious simulation, and the model that stopped a flood (Emily Gera / Eurogamer – ARTICLE)
“The science of prediction has a long history of seeking answers to seemingly impossible questions. What will the weather look like next month? Will the stock market dip in the next hour? In 1928, studies were being done by the United States government to find an answer to another hard question, one that might save lives: Can you predict the nature of a river before a flood?”

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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!]

A couple weeks ago, developer Fourattic and publisher Devolver Digital released Crossing Souls, an ’80s-themed adventure game fused with styilized pixel art and loaded with minigames that not only reference ’80s pop culture, but design mechanics familiar to any child playing video games in the same time period. 

After the game came out, we were lucky to speak with lead artist Juanga Jaen about Crossing Souls’ art direction, but today on the Gamasutra Twitch channel, we wanted to move that conversation along to talk about the game’s overall development and design. Thankfully, Fourattic’s Juan Diego & Fernando de luna Romero, who designed and programmed the game, were willing to join us for for that conversation. 

If you have interest in ’80s-themed design, and are curious about how the spread of American culture across the sea affected the lives of game developers in other countries, you should watch the full conversation embedded up above. 

And while you’re at it, be sure to follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel for more developer interviews, editor roundtables, and gameplay commentary. 

The 2018 Game Developer’s Conference will feature an exhibition called Alt.Ctrl.GDC dedicated to games that use alternative control schemes and interactions. Gamasutra will be talking to the developers of each of the games that have been selected for the showcase. You can find all of the interviews here.

Bot Party lets players make beautiful music together through touch and machines, having them make physical connections while holding cute robots to produce songs. Through skin-to-skin contact while holding onto one of these adorable robots, players will be able to make them play music, creating art from contact.

Gamasutra spoke with Phoenix Perry, creative director for Bot Party, to learn about the draw behind making human connections that comes out from playing the game, as well as the natural joy and wonder that the game encourages from its players.

What’s your name, and what was your role on this project?

I am Phoenix Perry and I’m the creative director on this project.

How do you describe your innovative controller to someone who’s completely unfamiliar with it?

This is a game played by holding hands with your friends. You can also move around together to make music.

Bot Party isn an interactive sound experience for humans. The bots have a problem. They have no way to communicate with their friends. Can you help? They need you to touch another human holding a bot. Through you, the bots use the proprietary bot to skin to skin to bot communication protocol (BSSB) to send encoded secret messages to each other. Watch out, bots can be tricky, so start using advanced, secure communication protocols. Hold hands with other players to get the bot sound spectacular started!

What’s your background in making games?

I started making games in 2004. My first game was a point-and-click comic book style adventure about bees and hive collapse. Since then, I worked on a wide range of games including everything from weird art games to advertising games and games for social change. Currently, I run a MA degree program in Independent Games and Playable Experience Design at Goldsmiths, which I created. I also am a founder of Code Liberation Foundation, an organization which supports women and gender non-conforming people to make creative projects and games.

What development tools did you use to build Bot Party?

Our tool chain is straightforward. For game creation, we use Unity. Hardware wise, it’s Arduino Uno, an LSM303 accelerometer, a couple of buttons and LEDs, and some handmade aluminum sensors we routed on a CNC machine. In terms of fabrication, we used a laser cutter to cut the cases. We used Autodesk’s Eagle to fabricate the circuit boards. The visual design was done in Illustrator and Photoshop. The sound system uses a nice open source plug-in called Helm. Initial prototypes were done in Max.

What physical materials did you use to make it?

We used metal, acrylic tape, and plastic for the final cases. For the initial prototypes we used wood, tape, and tinfoil. When I was designing the sensor algorithms, my oscilloscope was a much-used tool.

How much time have you spent working on the game?

Personally, I’ve spent around 550 hours. I would say that by the time we hit GDC it will be closer to 650. On top of that, other team members have contributed to programming audio, game development case fabrication. Most likely, if you add everything up, we’re going to be around 900 to 1000 hours by Alt Ctrl.

How did you come up with the concept?

Bot Party is part of a larger research project that I’ve been working with for a couple of years. My research aims to develop physical games the prioritize non-visually dominated human sensory experiences. Particularly, with Bot Party, I’m interested in encouraging prosocial behavior in my players.

Why was touch such an important part of the game you wished to create? Why create that physical contact between players?

Touch between people releases neurotransmitters in our brains that elevate mood, relieve anxiety, and encourage social bonding. It’s also shown that making music together in groups achieves a similar effect in children. Combining these two kinds of experiences together, it’s possible to create a game experience that focuses on creating delight, happiness, and wonder. Who wouldn’t want to do that? 

What challenges did you face in making human contact such a large part of Bot Party?

I think Bot Party can be overwhelming for people who have phobias of being touched. I am one of these people, and often showing my game requires allowing strangers to touch me for hours on end. In some ways, it’s like extreme aversion therapy. I think many people are hesitant to touch strangers. This kind of fear often leads to a basic mistrust we have of each other. Furthermore, I think it’s very important that players be consenting players. I’ve yet to see anybody be disrespectful while playing, but it could possibly happen. The sweetest players I ever saw were two men who worked out they could play the game by repeatedly kissing each other.

What drew you to make each of the robots so cute? What did that add to the experience?

By making the bots adorable, we make them approachable. You want to pick them because they look sweet. Their softer colors and lighter design are also indicative of the kind of emotions we hope people feel when they interact with them.

How do you think standard interfaces and controllers will change over the next five or ten years?

It’s a very exciting time to be creating in this space. Nintendo’s Labo with the Switch is the first foray into expanded play we have seen in handheld devices. I think other companies are looking to see if that project succeeds or fails. As mixed reality continues to grow, I believe there will be a demand from players to have augmented objects in their games and lives. There’s a potential for creators from the maker movement to merge into the games community and yield a whole new genre of physical games. This is the area I am spending all of my energy developing in, and I believe we will see the market recognize the possible value of this over coming years.

That said, we really need to be pioneering in how we think about play. Repeating the mistakes of mobile and by embracing the full potential of an embodied sensory experience would be shortsighted. Just as Monument Valley did not come out of a traditional games studio, I believe you will see the best work in this discipline emerge from other fields and new creators. Alt Ctrl at the GDC is a bit like some of the VR exhibitions that happened in the early 90’s. These games are prototyping out what is possible and this exhibition as well as other venues like Shake That Button are worth following. Over the next 5 to 10 years, you will see these prototypes become increasingly more adopted.

Torben Ellert is the lead online designer  of the episodic title Hitman (2016) at Io-Interactive. He provided Gamasutra with this in-depth look at Elusive Targets in the game. While most targets can be taken out in myriad ways and at a time of the player’s choosing, these Elusive Targets only appear in the game for a short period of time for a 48 hour window, and players only have one chance to complete the mission.

One of our mandates for the first season was to present Agent 47 as the apex predator, traveling the world, meeting interesting people, and killing them. Part of this mandate was a challenge to the design team: create a moment in time, “a snipe where your one shot matters” – the purest possible experience of being the assassin. Another objective was to create an ongoing pulse of experiences throughout the first season of Hitman, with tense assassination missions at the heart of those experiences. 

This is where the idea of Elusive Targets came from: high-level direction to create an ongoing series of time-limited, intense assassination missions. They would be tough because players would have one chance to get them right, and the whole dynamic around how you play the game should change. 

This was a challenge because previous Hitman games have always allowed the player to replay and rehearse, gradually gaining expertise and aspiring to the perfect hit. This new game mode would run counter to everything we know about Hitman. But before we knew exactly what this new game mode would end up being, we set out to explore what we could do with our game. 

“The biggest narrative challenge was how these Elusive Targets fit into the game’s storyline. Short answer: they don’t.”

We tried a number of things, which lead to the development of Escalation Mode, for example, but everything kept looping back to the core assassin fantasy – of what it meant to be Agent 47. At the heart of that, for me, is getting the call: ”Hello 47, the ICA has a new Contract for your consideration.” But it needed more than that – we wanted the player front and center, to make it feel like each second counted, and that everything hung in the balance. 

So the first thing we decided on was a time limit. A target who was only present for a very short period of time (it was 6 hours to begin with!). And that the target could only die once, and by extension the way you managed to complete the mission would be permanent.

Then we took away the tools that normally guide the player to their target: the red target glow, the mini-map and the icons on the main map. Basically, going back to the core of the first Hitman games (and going against a lot of what we know as modern game designers).

The very first time we played and reviewed the game mode was with Io’s Senior Game Designer Jesper Hylling and Studio Creative Director Christian Elverdam. We printed out a picture of the target, and put it on the table next to Jesper and said: “This is what he looks like – that’s all you know. Go kill him!”

The eyes of a hunted placeholder man

“As we developed the Elusive Targets, we assigned each of them a code name. In this case, we used cocktails. “

Jesper tracked him down, and trailed him to the first set of trespass zones, and then had to go and find a disguise, by which time he’d lost the target. It was rough, but the core of the experience was there. 
After that, we explored save rules and restarts, and time limits. In the first versions, it was one-and-done. So no restarts, no retries, just industrial-grade pressure.

I remember standing in front of one our Friday studio meetings, and playing it live for the entire team. This was the first time most people outside of the Online team had seen it, so I was trying to be suave and smart and snipe the target through a tiny window. Needless to say, I failed, and then had to improvise. Said improvisation involved a saber in the middle of the cocktail party in Paris. It wasn’t pretty, but it got the job done! I’d made a plan, it had failed. I had improvised, and gotten away with murder. I fled the level, with bullets whizzing around my ears, and felt like a boss. 

Now that we had the basic concept, we needed to turn it into a fully-fledged design. 

We began with cocktails (as one does). The final name of anything in a game like Hitman is always up for grabs. So to allow us to refer to specific Elusive Targets as we developed them, we assigned each of them a code name. In this case, we used cocktails. 

The first Elusive Target (White Russian) had no narrative at all. But as we developed the idea, we realized that each Elusive Target needed to be memorable – not just from the tense game mode itself, but also the iconic nature of the targets themselves.  The idea was to make everyone in our community able to say “I remember when I flew to Sapienza to assassinate the Prince”. 

The Cardinal, in the Church Tower, with the Giant Bell

Perhaps the biggest narrative challenge was how these Elusive Targets fit into the game’s storyline. The short answer is that they don’t. We decided we’d have much more freedom if they were “what if” stories that simply happened in the same place. “What if Agent 47 went to Paris to assassinate a media sensation at a private party, during the fashion event of the year?” 

This guy has thrown his last party

This gave us the freedom to create new characters that fit with the spaces and themes that we had already established, without having to explain exactly how they fit with the mission’s normal storyline. 

For example, in “The Sensation”, the target is Jonathan Smythe, a controversial media star who fled underground years ago. The ICA has just learned that he will be attending a private party in Paris (with the blessings of Dalia Magolis) for several hours. There is no time to prepare, and 47 must go in without the usual time to plan. We underline this in the briefings for Elusive Targets which end with Diana saying “The clock is ticking, 47. Good luck!” as opposed to the usual “I’ll leave you to prepare.”

With the narrative framework established, we turned to the larger question: how we would structure the game experience as a whole? How much information should we give players, when should restarts be allowed, would there be a save-game or an auto-save and how would we handle player failure? 

“Playing an Elusive Target in a level you have fully mastered gives you the experience of being the apex predator. No matter what might be in store, you have the tools and experience to handle it.”

One thing that has been constant from our first prototypes was the idea that failure (and success) would be permanent. The result of this simple design decision is striking.

When players begin an Elusive Target, they play the game very differently. Gone is blasé experimentation with fire-alarms or barging into trespass zones in the face of armed guards, confident that there’s a save-game to fall back on. Suddenly they are much more focused, and serious. Every move carefully considered, and every improvisation full of risk. Every guard is a deadly threat, and every civilian a potential witness on the road to that coveted Silent Assassin rating.

In our larger-scale play-tests some players sat stone-faced, attempting to crack the Target by themselves, others conferred in small groups, and still others watched as mistakes were made and painful lessons were learned. 

Obviously, this works because players know the game well.  When a player tries a new location for the first time, they are in at the deep end (this is one of the reasons why we’ve not released an Elusive Target straight into a new level – players should have the opportunity to master it first). And when, a new target arrives, they may not know where he is, but they have all the tools they need to pull it off.

Even so, it became obvious that players needed to be able to restart, at least up until the point where they committed to the elimination. Since each Elusive Target changes the levels (sometimes quite substantially) they needed to have some way to scout and plan, or go back to choose new equipment, if they needed to. This lead to the one substantial change to the original design, which was to explicitly allow players to restart the mission at any time up until they began to eliminate their targets, or complete their objectives. This is the Rubicon moment, where each player must put his cunning plan into motion, knowing that from here on in, there are no restarts. 

Elusive Targets are designed to complement our level mastery progression system, simply because players who reach the highest levels have learned the levels, and their mechanics. They’ve gained an enormous amount of strategic agency, and can start in the right place, preplace equipment and approach their targets with consummate skill.

Much like Agent 47, they can adapt immediately to changing circumstances, regardless of whatever precautions his current target might have taken.  Put shortly, playing an Elusive Target in a fully mastered level gives you that experience of being the apex predator. No matter what might be in store, you have the tools and experience to handle it.

With the narrative frameworks and gameplay structures in place, we needed to actually be able to inject new missions into existing levels. Fortunately, a basic design decision for Hitman, NPCs, geometry and rules – basically everything we need to assemble and deliver an Elusive Target.

[embedded content]

Taking “The Sensation” as an example, we disabled all of the bricks that make use of this back area of the game – specifically everything relating to Novikov’s meeting with Max Decker. This meant that several of the most obvious approaches to the rear area were also removed, keeping players on their toes. Then we took assets from the rest of the level and built up a private party, complete with music, bubbles, nibbles and guests. We also advanced the in-game lighting by about an hour to make it seem like a little later in the evening – obviously long after Victor has already met with Decker.

It’s an ongoing thing – as we build and release Elusive Targets and see them being played, we tweak (and redesign) future ones. Players see us responding to how they played, and we learn a great deal about what constitutes a challenging experience. We’ve experimented with different types of security details, we’ve had targets with big loops, and small ones, targets in the middle of parties, and targets out in the middle of a city. And even identical twins, where you must not harm the wrong person.

Sibling rivalry! One is the target, the other is the client. Aim carefully!

Hitman is a party game. No, seriously. The game’s serious tone with its lethal undertow of grim humor makes for immensely shareable experiences. From the beginning, we knew we would see highly skilled players working together to take out the targets. But it still surprises me how quickly they crack a Silent Assassin play-through, and begin to refine it. But, obviously someone has to go first, and make the mistakes so everyone else can learn from them.

“Some players approach the Elusive Target missions blind, playing them one-and-done, and living with the consequences if things get messy, while others spend hours scouting the levels before the mission is even live.”

What we’ve seen in the community are internal differences amongst players about exactly how Elusive Targets should be played. Some approach them blind, playing them one-and-done, and living with the consequences if things get messy, while others spend hours scouting the levels before the mission is even live, based on what information they’ve gleaned from the briefing videos and the pictures we’ve published. These players often restart as much as they can, only committing to the elimination when they are completely sure they have a plan. 

And as they work together, it creates a sense of united purpose. While everyone is their own version of Agent 47, everyone is united by a common objective, and a common experience.

Our service model really shines here, as we can respond to developing play patterns and feedback on the game experiences we create. The tight scope and our ongoing releases within the season format allow us to adapt the experiences and change the common playing field.

People who took on the first couple of Elusive Targets saw this very clearly. Sergei Larin (the Forger) was almost unprotected, with only a single bodyguard to cover his back. Congressman Anthony L. Troutt had a security detail of two, and a personal assistant. Cardinal Adalrico Candelaria had an entire region of Sapienza locked down for his personal benefit, with security on every possible approach (as you’d expect). 

At the time of writing, we’ve had ten Elusive Targets, and they’ve become part of our history, alongside the Meat King and the other classics of the Hitman franchise. Each player has their own story of how they approached the Cardinal, or the Sensation, or the Wildcard. Of how they waited for the mission to go live, of how they prepared, and how they rejoiced (or railed) at the way it went down. But while every player faced the challenge alone, we all did it together. And for me that’s been the biggest success of the game mode – the way it has created moments in time when we all came together, to take on memorable targets, knowing that it counted. And knowing that we would never see them again 

We’re at the mid-point of the season right now, with several new locations ahead of us, and a lot of Elusive Targets to come, and I’m looking forward to seeing how these go over into Hitman history. 

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go make a Bushwhacker.

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: Mountain View, California​

Game Closure is on the hunt for System Software Engineers to help us build the social games that guide the development of our mobile game engine. We are a 45 ­strong and growing team with offices in Mountain View, California, Oregon and Tokyo. If you want to join us to make great games on our cutting­ edge technology and truly make an impact, then we want to talk to you!

As a System Software Engineer at Game Closure, you will play a pivotal role in creating a platform to revolutionize the mobile game development industry. Our engineers are generally amazing at something and great at everything else. We write cross-­compilers, custom browsers, ARM7 assembly, GPU shaders, Node.js & Python back­ends, JavaScript game APIs and tools, and whatever else it takes. No matter what you work on each day, you will work with the best engineers in the world; we have top talent in every part of our stack.

The Role:

•  Be a key member of a high performing software engineering team.
• Play a critical role in day-­to-­day coding, performance profiling, optimization, and general troubleshooting.
• Collaborate with design, engineering, and production teams to devise optimal engineering solutions to game requirements.
• Architect and code sophisticated client/server systems for mobile gaming.
• Learn from and mentor other engineers on your team.
• Take ownership of your projects to make them the best they can possibly be.
• Provide valuable input on the company’s long-term engineering roadmap and help identify areas of opportunity for improvement.
• Define the cutting edge of social gaming!

Desired Skills:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Experience writing clean, testable, high­-quality code with a special focus on mobile performance.
• Solid familiarity with 3rd party SDKs, analytics, and A/B testing in mobile games.
• Ability to interact with peers in a constructive and productive style.
• Strong Computer Science fundamentals in object­-oriented design, algorithms, and data structures.
• Familiarity with git, svn, or other VCS.
• Good communication skills and the ability to work effectively on shared projects with designers, artists, testers, product managers, and other developers.
• Strong team player with a positive attitude.

Bonus:

• Canvas animation work
• 2+ years of game development experience with multiple shipped titles
• Both Android and iOS game development experience
• Specialized skills in a particular area of game development (for example: UI, Physics, graphics, multiplayer, game logic, etc.)

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.

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Google has launched version 1.0 of its ARCore augmented reality SDK, pushing the tool out of preview and allowing developers to create and publish AR apps to the Google Play Store.

First launched into a preview phase last August, Google’s ARCore uses motion tracking, light estimation tech, and environmental understanding to merge virtual content with real-world environments, all through the lens of a smartphone.

The full release boosts the number of Android devices that support ARCore apps up to 13, though Google is eyeing partnerships with other manufacturers to add more devices to that pool. Currently, only select phones in the Google Pixel, Samsung Galaxy, LGE V30, ASUS Zenfone, and OnePlus families are supported. A full list of those devices and the manufacturers introducing support later this year can be found on Google’s blog. 

Google says that developers that have already used ARCore during its preview phase are now able to publish their creations to the Google Play Store. Additionally, those des will likely notice improvements and additional support hitting the devkit with the 1.0 update, including improved environmental understanding that allows players to place virtual objects on uniquely textured surfaces.

More information on the release can be found on Google’s developer portal. 

This interview is part of our Road to the IGF series. You can find the rest by clicking here.

Into the Breach is a game of tactical mech combat, one where the enemies telegraph their moves, turning each match into a kind of puzzle that needs to be studied and completed. Not only this, but there is an added incentive to keep collateral damage to a minimum. While players may know what an enemy mech is doing based on telegraphing, dodging a hit may result in damage to a structure that is more important than the unit itself, adding extra challenge, and more things to consider, in a fight.

Gamasutra sought out Justin Ma of Subset Games, developers of the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and Excellence in Design-nominated Into the Breach, to learn more about why they chose to make players care about blowing up the city they’re supposed to be saving, giving players the ability to read enemy moves, and what these two things did to make the FTL developer’s new game feel special.

What’s your background in making games?

We both grew up making small games, but Matthew (Davis) and I officially started in the industry at 2K Games Shanghai studio. He was hired as a junior programmer and I was a junior designer, and we mainly worked on sports and Facebook titles. We both moved on after a few years and decided to try developing something on our own. Our first prototype eventually would become FTL.  

How did you come up with the concept?

The game started as vague idea: “mechs vs monsters where collateral damage matters”. From the start, we knew that it would be turned-based in a sci-fi kaiju setting, but nothing else was set in stone. It was only after a year or so of iteration that we figured out the core mechanics.

What development tools were used to build your game?

The game was written in C++ using Visual Studio and Notepad++ for the Lua scripting. All of the pixel art was done using Photoshop, but I’m not sure what our concept artist, Polina Hristova, used for the portraits. We use Google Docs for our documentation and Slack for our chat. The audio and music were done by Power Up Audio and Ben Prunty, respectively, and implemented in game using FMOD.

How much time have you spent working on the game?

We’ve spent almost 4 years on this game. FTL put us in a position where we could try to formulate a better work-life balance and take our time with development.  It was a year or two just working on our own before we went full time and hired additional contractors to fill out the development team.

What drew you to create a tactical mech game after FTL? How did you apply what you learned from FTL to Into the Breach?

We thought Into the Breach’s early versions had the most promise compared to the other prototypes we tried. Both of us find strategy games enjoyable, but I’m not sure what drew us to tactics, specifically. Perhaps it was because it’s a genre which benefits greatly from having a lot of mechanics that interact dynamically. That was one of our favorite parts about working on FTL.

Nearly every design decision with Into the Breach drew heavily from lessons learned from FTL. We prefer games with clear rulesets, and were interested in pursuing something with less randomness than FTL. We wanted to make something where every death felt like your own fault. This lead us to use of telegraphed enemy attacks as a core mechanic.

Friendly fire provides new challenges for players of Into the Breach. What drew you to connect civilian structures to the player’s mechs? What do you feel taking care of buildings adds to the tactical experience?

The inspiration came from various superhero movies and other media where a whole city could be destroyed during the battle and no one seemed to care. We wanted a game where you had to care about the collateral damage. When you have varied goals and priorities rather than just “kill the enemies”, you get interesting choices. Sometimes it may be more be worthwhile to let the buildings be destroyed while other times you may choose to sacrifice a mech to save the city. Just surviving, with minimal damage, until the end of the battle is often more important than eliminating the enemy. Forcing the player to react to a situation and adapt their strategy was one of our highest priorities – we wouldn’t want the player to find a single tactic and never have any incentive to try something else.

The enemies telegraph their movements in Into the Breach. How do you balance this kind of feature so that it is still challenging when an experienced player may be able to read every move?

When every enemy attack is telegraphed and there’s no random chance in your attack options, the game starts to feel like a puzzle. We feel that even an experienced player can still appreciate solving fresh puzzles every time they play the game. On top of that, we’ve attempted to provide a good spread of difficulty options to cater for players of all skill levels.

Balancing the difficulty of the game has been a numbers game. A single additional enemy turns a battle from ‘a fun challenge’ to ‘completely impossible’, so it’s a very delicate balance. Fortunately, the game remains fun even if it’s slightly on the easy side since there’s a lot of room for creativity and it is really satisfying to ‘solve’ battles.

What was key for you to make the tactical combat of Into the Breach appealing? What do you feel are important elements for a tactical game, and how did you incorporate them into your work?

The kind of tactics games that I enjoy the most generally have the same similar features in their design. I like games that encourage creativity and fresh approaches – a single strategy isn’t viable in every situation. To do this, we made sure weapons are dynamic and have a variety of uses. The first artillery attack can damage enemies, but its side effect of pushing adjacent tiles is usually more impactful. Considering the many ways weapons can interact to create original solutions is at the heart of the game.

I also appreciate tactics games that allow for advancement of characters in a variety of ways – though still have restrictions so you can’t have everything (you can’t ‘max out’ all attributes). Every game of Into the Breach results in new upgrade paths that are all viable that you have to choose between.

Finally, it’s important to me that when you fail at a goal, it’s very clear how or why you failed so that you can feel like you can improve. As I’ve mentioned before, we hope the limited reliance on random chance in Into the Breach helps make the player feel in control.

Have you played any of the other IGF finalists? Any games you’ve particularly enjoyed?

I haven’t had as much time to check out games recently, but I have enjoyed the games that I’ve played: Getting Over It, Heat Signature, Tooth and Tail, Hollow Knight, and Battle Chef Brigade, to name a few. Hopefully once Into the Breach launches, I’ll be able to go back and check out everything.

What do you think are the biggest hurdles (and opportunities) for indie devs today?

Nowadays, I feel like the absolute largest challenge for devs is to get their games noticed. I don’t know a single gamer that doesn’t have a large backlog of games they are intending to play at some point. It’s hard to find time to play new games and even harder to convince players to prioritize your game over their backlog. Currently, the only way to have a breakaway success seems to be if your game is enjoyable to watch on streams & videos, and fun enough looking to make you want to buy it after watching. That being said, I’m not sure if that’s something developers should be trying to design around.

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.

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[This piece was originally posted at weatherfactory.biz]

Lottie and I are both open production enthusiasts – I did a talk on it at GDC a couple of years ago, and as a reminder, here’s our roadmap.

So this is a post about the strategy we’ve taken at Weather Factory with making Cultist Simulator available for full release, and how it’s worked out. It does include sales figures! We talk to a lot of other indies and I know people are always hungry for data.  SteamSpy has gone a long way to alleviating this, but it’s never the whole story – especially when a game’s been Kickstarted and there are an uncertain number of keys in the wild.

Cultist Simulator was Kickstarted, and we have also done a couple of slightly unusual things.

The first unusual thing is this. From a post I made back in July 2017:

So when I run the Kickstarter for Cultist Simulator, I’ll offer just one tier: Perpetual Edition.

Perpetual Edition means: you buy the game before full launch, you get access to early builds and any and all DLC and expansions free forever. If I release the game on Steam Early Access or itch.io’s Refinery or GOG’s Games in Development or anywhere else, that’ll also be Perpetual Edition.

As it happened, we’re not releasing CS as Early Access or Games in Development. We’ll go straight to full release on May 31st.

Here are the main reasons devs consider Early Access – at least, the ones I’m aware of.

1. to raise cash
2. for feedback and beta testing
3. for buzz and community building
   (3a) as a service to backers

[(3a) is a special case of (3). You tend to get people mailing you after a Kickstarter to say ‘shit I missed out! can I back?’ You can reply to them all and say, sorry, no, wait for full release, which may upset your nascent community, or you can reply to them and say, yes, PayPal me ten quid, which is insanely manual; or you can just provide some sort of slacker backer option. It just removes some pain to add the slacker backer option.]

The thing is these objectives can clash. If you need cash, you’ll want to be sure the game is as polished as possible. If you want feedback, you’ll want to get it out as early as possible.

If you’re running a business, you don’t turn down money. But we were okay for cash – we’d just had a well-funded Kickstarter. And I really wanted feedback. Cultist Simulator is a deliberately experimental game, and I wanted player responses ASAP.  Plus, we have limited QA resources, and allowing backers to help us squash bugs earlier was a big win.

So I wanted to get the development builds in front of people quickly… and I didn’t need that many participants. We already had nearly 5,000 Kickstarter backers. I knew most backers would be happy to leave the game in the oven for the next eight months,  but at a conservative estimate we’d probably get 400-500 beta testers. That would be plenty, right? For a single-player game, you don’t get 10x better feedback at thousands rather than hundreds of players. You do get a lot more comments and bug reports to process.

But people burn out, and also people become veterans. If 500 people beta-test your game when the first dev build hits, a good many of them will stop playing after the second or third (especially if early builds are buggy – which they will be if you’re going in early). And a lot of others will be very familiar with the game, and will stop seeing it as new people will. You’ll still get useful feedback, but you can’t use them to tune your early game experience, which is the most important five minutes of the game. (This is one of the things I learnt the hard way on Sunless Sea.)

So we wanted a steady trickle of new players. But we only wanted a trickle, not a gush. We wouldn’t get much more useful feedback from Early Access on Steam, and we might screw up our chance of a good launch later.

And of the digital store-fronts, Itch is unmistakably the one where people expect to find experiments. I’d already put the pre-Kickstarter alpha on it. Itch has, anecdotally, something like 2% of the market share of Steam (I’ve heard numbers as high as 5% and low as 1%). So we could soft-launch over in Itch and not many people would notice, but we’d get our trickle of new players.

(Also, did I mention I really like the Itch upload tool? I really like the Itch upload tool.)

So we settled on early purchase / early builds on itch.io.

I had originally planned to leave Perpetual Edition on sale until the day before we hit full launch, but Lottie, when she joined me in December, talked me out of it. A month before launch, we wouldn’t be able to do much with the feedback – it would be hard to change direction – and we’d be busy tidying everything away and strapping in. Sure, we’d lose a month’s revenue, but we’d already agreed the point of the Itch Early Access was not primarily cash. I tentatively agreed.

After that, we got advice from another source [*this is foreshadowing for a followup post*] that if we encouraged people to wishlist the game on Steam rather than buying it now, our chances of charting on Steam in launch week would be that much higher. This made sense. So we agreed we’d make Perpetual Edition unavailable in February, but make it available again in launch week, as an early incentive. In related news, here is the wishlist link for the game. It would be charming for you to use it.

—

A few other things that have happened that might be useful info if you’re also a dev.

First of all, we’ve had some lovely streams of the game: SystemChalk, FuzzyFreaks, Mike Laidlaw (stream deleted; cryface), Jessy Quil, to name but a few. This is nice for buzz and great for feedback. Someone playing your beta product through, talking about their experiences, trying out loud to understand it, while the audience discusses it in text chat? Holy shit, I wish I’d had that when I was building Fallen London. (And to my surprise, it streams pretty well: it’s slow-paced and abstract, but there’s always something just about to happen.)

Secondly, lots of people wanted to be able to play the game on Steam ahead of full release. This surprised us a little – we hadn’t realised how much of a lock Valve has on people’s playing habits, even though nearly all my gaming is in Steam – but it encouraged us to sort the kinks out of Steam deployment ahead of time, so I’m glad we did it. But!

(i) it makes messaging surprisingly tricky. We’ve gone from

‘you can buy Perpetual Edition on itch now, or wishlist it on Steam and get the full game at launch’

to

‘you can buy Perpetual Edition on Itch now for free lifetime DLC, or wishlist it on Steam and get the full game at launch, but actually if you buy Perpetual Edition now you can also play it on Steam, and yes if you buy it now you will still get free lifetime DLC, but also you can get free lifetime DLC in launch week. On Steam.’

…I mean we generally just say ‘buy on Itch if you want preview builds, wait until May if you want the full game’. But it’s led to a few confused conversations. This is what happens when you adapt your strategy on the fly.

(ii) fun fact! You can upload Steam keys to Itch, but  by default they’re only available to people who’ve purchased the  game for money on Itch. If someone redeems an Itch key you give them because they Kickstarted the game, you’ll need to send them the Steam key manually. We had to do some extra work to sort this out. Be warned.

Data is valuable. Honing your ability to use that data is super valuable. Always do projections, now matter how ugly or informal. Comparing what you guessed against what you achieved will make you that much better at guesstimating the future next time.

I did top-down and bottom-up, aka ‘hand-wavy’ and ‘based on wrong numbers’, informal estimates for itch sales:

• Top-down was: From talking to similar-sized devs and remembering the pre-order numbers on Humble for Sunless Sea, reckon I can manage a half dozen purchases a day. Call it five. 5×30 is 150 a month.
• Bottom-up was: I got 4,788 backers in 30 days for the KS.  I was working hard to get the word out, and I’ll be working much less hard now. Plus, where Steam is a metropolis, and Kickstarter is a district capital, itch is a pleasant country town. So… say 5% per month of the original total for not banging the the drum and getting press, and for tapping out my core fans (who I bloody love. Thank you.) That takes us down to 240 a month. Cut that by 3/4 for itch being out of the way. That takes us to 60 a month.
•  

We have played fast and loose with maths this far, so we now casually average the two estimates together to get 105 a month.

October, November, December, January, February, 5 months, maybe 300 sales lowball, 750 highball, 525 most likely.

How close is that?

621 purchases. (And 3,367 downloads? Those extra downloads are Kickstarter backers.  More about that in a moment.)

I’m posting this on 20th Feb, 8 days before the end of that 5-month period. So this is noticeably better than I expected, but in the ballpark. It is a running joke round these parts that my estimates tend to be remarkably close to 80% of the final total (this goes right back to the Sunless Sea kickstarter I blogged about when I was still at Failbetter), and the longer that keeps up, the better. I would much rather always err on the side of pessimism.

Why was it higher than I expected? I think some of my initial numbers were a little optimistic, but then we had a bunch of good things the last couple of months. We got interest from streamers; we got a feature in PC Gamer and an award nomination; we got a video feature in Eurogamer. This is better than we thought we’d do in terms of publicity at this point. We also saw some spikes every time we reminded people that Perpetual Edition was not being sold after February – time limited offers do that. Nothing dramatic,  but enough to show up in the figures.

One thing that I cheerfully averaged out in my original estimates: how much difference would it make when people could actually play builds? It did make a difference, but less than you might think. The game was on sale for pre-order from October, and we put the first dev build out in December. We went from three-four downloads a day to six-eight downloads a day, with an exciting sales spike on build release day of 11 whole purchases!!! The numbers started creeping up as people actually started playing the game.

Anyway, I’m very happy. 621 sales isn’t going to break any records, and 9000 USD doesn’t come close to paying our costs for five months, but the Kickstarter has us covered for that. The feedback and the buzz we’ve gained have been invaluable, and we’re in a much better place for actual launch.

These are the lessons I think we can draw from this.

(1)  I’ve seen people worry about Kickstarted games doing worse because their backers have already bought the game. I am strongly of the opinion that the reverse is true. If you are an indie, then unless you are incredibly successful, there are always far, far more people who have never heard of your game than there are people who have heard of it. Our problem, as indies, is to get noticed in the first place. Hundreds or thousands of backers who will help get the word out, who will talk about your game on social media, who will show up as ‘now playing’ on Steam – this is a big deal. If people are playing your game, other people will buy it. I’ll say that again: at our level, there are always far, far more people who have never heard of your game than there are people who have heard of it. It’s also another good reason, if you needed one, to keep talking to your backers.

(2) Always estimate sales, however vague the numbers and however uncomfortable it makes you feel. We do mentoring for other indies and we often have to push people into actually guesstimating their figures. But the more you do, the better you get at it, and really blunt-edged estimates can be surprisingly accurate because so many of the unknowns cancel out.

(3) We’ve usually been on the itch top sellers page, popping in and out of the top 10. We went as high as #7 at one point, we’re generally sort of #14ish. So if you are planning to put your game on itch, this is the sort of business you might see as a moderate top-seller. (Don’t draw too many conclusions about the top 5. The top of a chart tends to do dramatically better.)

[EDIT: the day after I posted this, we jumped up to #4. We sold 24 copies that day, though about 50 on each of the two previous days. Er, okay? Maybe itch works on a 3-day moving average. I’ll tweet Leaf Corcoran and ask.]

(4) This is pretty encouraging for full launch. My casual top-down prediction would be that, if itch is 3% of Steam, this will amount to about 20K sales, which would put us firmly in the black for the year and make me very happy. There is more competition on Steam, but we really haven’t started our marketing push yet; itch is more forgiving of weird games, but the game isn’t actually finished yet. The big unknown variable is that we have a publisher now (yes, that foreshadowing I mentioned above – more soon) and I don’t yet know how much their assistance will help.

(5) Make sure you know why you’re going into alpha, or Early Access, or paid beta, or any other pre-launch sales-y activity. Most importantly, pick whether you’re looking for cash, or feedback: choose a star to steer by, and stick with it.