General game developing news and updates.
The Red Strings Club is Now Available on Steam and is 15% off!*
The Red Strings Club is a cyberpunk narrative experience about fate and happiness featuring the extensive use of pottery, bartending and impersonating people on the phone to take down a corporate conspiracy.
*Offer ends January 30 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.
[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 what editors think of Nintendo’s Labo accessory for the Switch, a masterful look at the making of Sierra’s incendiary Police Quest IV, and lots more.
Phew, barely snuck this newsletter out under the wire, what with the GDC 2018 press tour, a bunch of BIG announcements coming out next week around Japanese speakers for the show, our ‘state of the game dev industry survey’, plus preparing for Descenders’ Steam Early Access release, and just, well, real non-work life as well! But there’s a ton of good links clustered in here – go after them, my faithful bloodhounds!
– Simon, curator.]
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Painting nuclear horizons while gibbing Ghouls – meet Fallout 4 VR’s roaming artist (Kirk McKean / PCGamesN – ARTICLE)
“Liz Edwards is running for her life. She ventured too far, searching for the most picturesque horizon in Fallout 4’s Commonwealth, then turned a corner and there it was: a Yao guai – this salivating, mutated black bear, towering over her in virtual reality. So she did the only thing she could do and deposited herself straight into the irradiated sea.”
Tone Control 18: Nina Freeman (Steve Gaynor / Idle Thumbs – PODCAST)
“Despite a variety of exciting sonic interruptions, Steve and Nina soldier on to talk through her work a s Nuovo Award-winning indie game designer of titles like how do you Do It?, Cibele, and Lost Memories Dot Net, and her experience becoming a level designer on Tacoma at Fullbright.”
At The Overwatch League’s Opening Night, I Witnessed The Strange, Thrilling Future Of Sports (Andrew Webster / The Verge – ARTICLE)
“Blizzard has an ambitious plan to turn a video game into the next big spectator sport. With the developer’s recently launched Overwatch League, a global pro circuit with a dozen teams spanning the globe, the company is betting that the structure of a traditional sports league like the NBA or NFL is exactly what it needs to thrust the burgeoning world of e-sports into the mainstream.”
The Rise and Fall of EA Sports Big, as Told by the Creator of SSX (Piotr Bajda / Eurogamer – ARTICLE)
“From defying the laws of physics as a freestyle skier, to inventing an Olympic sport and creating EA Sports Big, a brand that would stick in the collective memory of a whole generation of gamers, nobody else can boast the same unbelievable career trajectory as Steven Rechtschaffner.”
Mini Metro: When Less is More (GDC / YouTube – VIDEO)
“In this 2017 GDC session, Mini Metro developer Jamie Churchman takes a look at the successes and failures of visual design in Mini Metro, and examines how user interface and visual design decisions play a role in creating a rewarding experience for the player.”
Awesome Games Done Quick 2018: Our Favorite Moments (Ozzie Meija / Shacknews – ARTICLE)
“Awesome Games Done Quick 2018 has concluded. The charity speedrunning event has raised over $2.2 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation… There were many memorable moments from throughout the week and to help say goodbye to Games Done Quick for another six months, Shacknews is taking a look back at some of our favorite moments from the event.”
The 10-year making of Iconoclasts (Austin Wood / PC Gamer – ARTICLE)
“Joakim ‘Konjak’ Sandberg is not very health-conscious. For the past seven years, he’s been developing Iconoclasts full-time completely on his own. It’s been a heady mix of design, delays and, occasionally, depression, but Sandberg’s masterwork will finally release on Tuesday, January 23.”
Nintendo Labo: Overpriced or innovative? (Editors / Engadget – ARTICLE)
“Weird Nintendo is often the best Nintendo, or so it is said. After all, two of its biggest successes (the Wii and the Switch) are far from ordinary consoles. Now, with a year of huge Switch sales behind it, Nintendo is getting even weirder with Labo — cardboard accessories that kids can build themselves and use to immerse themselves in a game’s world. [SIMON’S NOTE: There were a billion ‘hot takes’ on the Labo – here’s just one of them!]”
The World’s Top-Selling Video Game Has a Cheating Problem (Lulu Yilun Chen, Yuji Nakamura, and Sam Kim / Bloomberg Technology – ARTICLE)
“Tencent Holdings Ltd. is going after the cheaters and hackers that infest PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds as it prepares to bring the world’s top-selling game to China. Ahead of its official debut this year, the biggest gaming company on the planet has enlisted Chinese police to root out the underground rings that make and sell cheat software.”
How to keep a charity gaming marathon going for 160 hours straight (Kyle Orland / Ars Technica – ARTICLE)
“While the production looks relatively simple from the viewer’s side of the Twitch stream… a lot of work goes on behind the scenes to keep the games running and the donations flowing smoothly for an entire week. To see what things were like from the other side, I headed down to Herndon, Virginia, earlier this week to see some of the work that goes into making the Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) marathon into the well-oiled machine that it is.”
Super Mario Odyssey – It’s No Masterpiece (Joseph Anderson / YouTube – VIDEO)
“This video took forever. Nier Automata was meant to be next but after playing Odyssey I decided I had enough to say about it that I should go for that next. The video was meant to be 45 minutes. You saw how that turned out. [SIMON’S NOTE: Two hours (!) to make a controversial statement – but interesting nonetheless.]”
The cost of games (Raph Koster / Gamasutra Blogs – ARTICLE)
“As many pointed out, getting hard data on game costs is difficult. When I did my talk “Moore’s Wall” in 2005, I did some basic research using mostly publicly available data on costs, and extrapolated out an exponential curve for game costs, and warned that the trendlines looked somewhat inescapable to me. But much has changed, not least of which is the advent of at least two whole new business models in the intervening time.”
Crunch: The Video Game Industry’s Notorious Labor Problem (David Milner / Game Informer – ARTICLE)
“From the 2010 Christmas holidays until May 2011, Krzysztof Nosek, the multiplayer programming lead on Call of Juarez: The Cartel, was working himself into the ground. Due to some “unlucky business negotiations” with publisher Ubisoft, Techland hadn’t been given enough time to finish the game.”
Life is Strange: Nightmares (Critique Quest / YouTube – VIDEO)
“Hello everyone, feel free to head on over to my channel if you’d like to see my latest Spotlight video, where I talk a bit about the nightmare sequence in DONTNOD_Ent’s #LifeisStrange finale, Polarised!”
What do owners of the Patriots, Rams, Grizzlies and Flyers have in common? A big bet on eSports. (Noah Smith / Washington Post – ARTICLE)
“The setting was consistent with a big league pro football, basketball, baseball, soccer or hockey event, but the competition here was a team-based video game, and the new league is the latest development bringing competitive gaming, familiarly known as eSports, closer to the mainstream.”
AdventureX | Brian Moriarty about his Lecture in and the End of The Witness | I Saw What I Did There (Brian Moriarty / AdventureX / YouTube – VIDEO)
“Brian Moriarty (Wishbringer, Trinity, Loom) recounts the strange, convoluted and often hilarious story of how an unabridged video of his 2002 Game Developer’s Conference lecture ‘The Secret of Psalm 46’ became the ultimate Easter egg in Jonathan Blow’s acclaimed puzzle-adventure game The Witness (2016). [SIMON’S NOTE: LTTP, and I missed a Brian Moriarty talk ABOUT a Brian Moriarty talk – please don’t make the same mistake I did!]”
The secret to The Signal From Tölva’s punchy combat (Samuel Horti / PC Gamer – ARTICLE)
“The Signal From Tölva’s pace is slow, but its gunplay is anything but. Chris called it “fizzing” in his review and he was spot on: its bright lights and sci-fi sound effects make its weapons come alive, and after each battle you want to head immediately to the next waypoint in search of another set of enemies to blast apart.”
How Sierra and a Disgraced Cop Made the Most Reactionary Game of the 90s (Duncan Fyfe / Waypoint – ARTICLE)
“When Ken Williams, the chief executive of Sierra On-Line, brought the company’s newest game designer to the office, some staff stayed home. Better to get in trouble with management than meet the man accused of fostering a culture of police brutality on a city-wide scale. [SIMON’S NOTE: don’t miss this article. Seriously.]”
Years after predicted “death,” game consoles are doing better than ever (Kyle Orland / Ars Technica – ARTICLE)
“It’s hard to remember now, but we’re only four or five years out from widespread and confident predictions that the game console market was effectively dead or dying. In 2012, Wired cited mobile disruption and “the whole box-model mentality” in declaring the death of the console.”
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s dungeon design | Boss Keys (Game Maker’s Toolkit / YouTube – VIDEO)
“19 months, 16 games, 13 videos, and 130 dungeons later, and we finally finish our breakdown of the dungeons in the Zelda series, by looking at 2017’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.”
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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!]
Audio in games often isn’t given its due, but at Gamasutra (and GDC), we do our best to check in with our microphone-wielding friends to see what’s going on in their world. Today, to discuss his upcoming GDC 2018 session, Hexany Audio director Richard Ludlow dropped by the Gamasutra Twitch channel to discuss some of his work on Arena of Valor and other games that may sound familiar.
Since Ludlow’s work crosses the spectrum from dialogue to music, we were interested to talk about his career in game audio and learn about the latest developments impacting the industry.
It was an enlightening conversation, which you can view in full up above. Be sure to watch for insights into how procedural audio generation might impact audio designers work and how Ludlow navigates getting new jobs for his company in a competitive environment.
For more developer interviews, editorial roundtables and gameplay commentary, be sure to follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel.
Is crunch time still unconscionable even when it’s self-imposed? You have to wonder when you hear about one 28-year-old Seattleite’s grueling four-year quest to make the ultimate farming sim.
“On average, I probably worked on it 10 hours a day every day of the week during development,” says Eric Barone. “Now that the game is out, I’m probably spending more like 15 hours a day on it.”
He’s talking about his one-man labor of love Stardew Valley, which began as an homage to the classic franchise Harvest Moon. Eventually, Barone dreamed of creating the ultimate apotheosis of Harvest Moon–a game that was equally soothing and idyllic, but vaster and more ambitious than anything Natsume ever dreamed of.
“My experiences playing Harvest Moon are priceless and have had a deep impact on me, and I wanted my own game to have that kind of power,” says Barone. “However, I know that to make a great game you can’t just create ‘art’… the game needs to be fun.”
The first step was admitting that the game he idolized could be improved upon. “The gameplay in Harvest Moon was usually fun, but I felt like no title in the series ever brought it all together in a perfect way,” says Barone. “My idea with Stardew Valley was to address the problems I had with Harvest Moon, as well as create more ‘purpose’ with tried-and-true gameplay elements such as crafting and quests.”
Players eventually discover a deep crafting system, as well as dungeons and mines beyond the sprawling farmland and the well-populated town. Bored picking vegetables? Go slay some monsters or forge something from precious metal.
Eric Barone says he spent approximately 70 hours per week hammering on Stardew Valley for the last 4 years. Now that it’s out, he’s spending far more time responding to player comments. [via PC Gamer]
“I think I’m stuck in the past. But it’s a past where game worlds were creative and magical”
It’s an ambitious project, especially since Barone was only 24 at the time he announced it on Steam Greenlight. “I’ve always been obsessed with creating stuff,” he says, “For as long as I can remember, I spent my spare time doodling, making music, writing… basically all the different aspects of making a game. I just didn’t know at the time that I would find a way to combine all those things to bring a cohesive vision to life.”
He created every bit of the game’s art and graphics and code, and it has a lovely retro aesthetic that suggests…well, it suggests a creator who immersed himself in a 20-year-old franchise for most of his twenties. “At some point, I got older and lost touch with the games ‘scene;'” he says.
There’s no time to keep up with everything happening when you’re pouring 70 hours a week into your raison detre. “In many ways, I think I’m stuck in the past,” adds Barone. “But it’s a past where game worlds were creative and magical… a celebration of that special, overwhelming feeling of wonder that we experience as children.”
His passion project was released on February 26th, and it’s already a massive hit. It’s received excellent reviews and over 300,000 sales (according to SteamSpy). Part of this might be credited to his attentiveness to his fan community. He sought feedback on the game concept via Steam Greenlight, then refused to do an Early Access campaign or accept money till it was feature complete.
“You should be free to work yourself to the bone, but not to force someone else to do that for you”
All the while, he kept fans informed of how he was progressing via Reddit and Twitter. Now that the game is out, he has ratcheted up his dedication, attempting to patch away every flaw that players have discovered. And he promises expansions and updates galore.
Barone has amassed so much goodwill that even people pirating his game are posting on the torrents about how the fully intend to buy it someday. Other fans responded by buying extra copies to give to anyone who can’t afford the game, or was planning on pirating it.
“My strategy with the community is simple: no strategy at all!” says Barone. “I think that, as an indie developer, you should just be yourself and be a real human. I try to act online like I do in real life: treat everyone with respect, and be as honest and straightforward as possible.”
The only dark cloud hanging over this pastoral paradise are misgivings about just how much time Barone spends on the game. In this post-EA Spouse world, it’s hard not to wince when you hear about someone has condemned himself to years of perpetual crunch. What drives him to do that?
“It’s both passion and discipline,” says Barone. “I think it’s a lot easier to stay driven when you’re doing your own project, knowing that there are no limits to how far you can go.”
“I’m choosing to do this much work because I want to be an indie game developer and see my project come to fruition,” he adds. “While those developers at EA were, in effect, forced to work against their will. I don’t think it’s right. You should be free to work yourself to the bone, but not to force someone else to do that for you.”
There were times during development that I didn’t feel like working, that I even wanted to quit entirely,” he concedes.
“Looking back, I think the development was characterized by phases of insane productivity followed by phases where I hardly worked at all,” says Barone. “I’m not sure if there was any technique to it or if it was just a quirk of my brain chemistry. I did always have a ridiculous amount of faith in myself and in the game, and yet I knew that I was still a nobody and the only way I could change that was to work super hard.”
“It does help if you can absolutely convince yourself that you’re destined for greatness,” says Barone. “It’s not even an ego thing–it’s just a way to prevent doubt and insecurity from hindering you.”
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: Agoura Hills, California
Visual Concepts is one of the world’s top game development studios with a flat, entrepreneurial, and non-corporate work environment. We have a proven track record having shipped over 100 multi-SKU titles to great critical acclaim.
Our studios in Agoura Hills, CA and Novato, CA are committed to gaming and technical innovation and offer top candidates the opportunity to learn and grow with some of the smartest and most creative minds in the industry.
We are looking for an experienced engineer to push the boundaries of graphics for our games. You will analyze existing algorithms and features, then optimize them and invent creative ways of allowing us to do more with the same hardware constraints. You will architect new graphics features. You’ll build tools that meet production demands and ensure efficiency and creative opportunity for all members of the development team.
Requirements:
Interested? Apply now.
Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.
Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.
Looking for a new job? Get started here. Are you a recruiter looking for talent? Post jobs here.
Facebook has signed an agreement that secures it exclusive broadcasting rights to both the CS:GO Pro League and ESL One eSports events. The social media site replaces YouTube as the sole stream provider for the upcoming competitions.
Be it original content or live streaming video, Facebook has doubled its efforts in recent years to grow its social media site as a major video platform and its growth is something developers may want to pay attention to.
The ESL cites this effort as one of the reasons it opted to partner with Facebook this time around and notes that the arrangement has the benefit of making live events accessible to a large number of eSports fans with little friction thanks to the company’s Facebook Watch platform.
Those benefits, the ESL says, extend further to recently implemented social video experiences that let viewers form private stream chats with online friends or form virtual viewing parties through Facebook’s built-in messenger chat.
“For years ESL has used Facebook to nurture its global community while broadening the audience for eSports competition to millions of fans worldwide,” said Facebook Games Partnerships global director Leo Olebe in a statement “Having two of ESL’s most adored properties for [Counter-Strike: Global Offensive] and Dota 2 streaming exclusively on Facebook is the next step in our efforts to delight the passionate eSports community on Facebook.”
According to the ESA’s annual assessment, the U.S. game industry once again saw a year-over-year increase in revenue, with this year’s numbers coming in at $36 billion in revenue between hardware, peripherals, software, in-game purchases, and subscriptions.
By the ESA’s count, that makes for an 18 percent increase over the $30.4 billion reported in 2016. Those numbers were based on the NPD Group’s annual year-end reporting and supplemented with App Store and Google Play data from the mobile analytics firm App Annie.
Keep in mind however that the NPD’s reporting on game and downloadable content sales, particularly digital, isn’t an exact measurement. The report notes that its numbers don’t include digital sales for Switch and 3DS games, or PC digital sales from Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Sony, Battle.net, Origin, or Uplay.
Game developers should be aware that data gaps like that have led to amended reports in the past, but, with that in mind, the NPD’s overall reports still offer a useful glimpse at larger trends in the game industry as a whole.
Looking at just the NPD Group’s record of game industry sales for 2017, video game hardware brought in a total of $4.7 billion in 2017, a 28 percent increase from the $3.6 billion sold in 2016. That same report clocked a 6 percent increase year-over-year in physical and digital games sold on consoles and handhelds, though these numbers exclude digital sales on Nintendo platforms.
PC games, however, saw a 20 percent decrease in game sales between 2016 and 2017 on the platforms tracked by the NPD Group. By the NPD’s count, PC game software saw $275 million in sales this year, down from the $342 million reported in 2016.
Across all platforms, the NPD says that Call of Duty: WWII saw the most money brought in from both physical and digital sales in 2017 though, as mentioned above, not all platforms or storefronts provided digital sale information to the group. Following that, NBA 2K18 falls in second place with Destiny 2 coming in third overall.
Looking at just December and, again, ranked by dollars in sales, Call of Duty: WWII was the highest selling game when comparing sales on all major platforms. Additionally, the game topped the charts for both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One individually. Meanwhile, the Xbox console exclusive PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds saw the next most sales on the Xbox One while the runner-up on PlayStation 4 looks to be Star Wars: Battlefront II.
This year at GDC 2018, audio director Richard Ludlow will be presenting a practical session meant to help audio engineers of all backgrounds in game development. It’s a session dedicated to asset management, a topic that may not spark a massive amount of excitement, but it’s a part of game development that every department has to wrangle with, not just game audio.
At Gamasutra, our interest in this session extends beyond asset management however, and into the work of speaker Richard Ludlow, an audio director who’s worked with Ubisoft, The Odd Gentlemen, and Tencent. We (shamefully) don’t spend a lot of time discussing game audio on this fine website, so today at 6PM EST on the Gamasutra Twitch channel, we’ll be chatting with Ludlow about his work and discussing the finer points of game sound.
If you’ve got key audio questions, whether they’re career-related or tech-related, you should join us! And while you’re at it, be sure to follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel for more developer interviews, editor roundtables and gameplay commentary.
Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas
The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
This blog post was originally published on the Sacred Fire dev blog.
We’ve received a great question in the comments section of our last year’s Kickstarter. The commenter was rewatching Sacred Fire trailers and had an intriguing idea: wouldn’t it be more fun if we hid the success probabilities of choices? It sounded like an interesting idea so we wrote a blog post about it.
Sacred Fire is an upcoming narrative psychological RPG about romance, loyalty and revenge. It’s inspired by ancient Caledonia and the struggle of local people against the mighty Roman empire. If you’d like to see how probabilities work in Sacred Fire, you can watch our developers commentary at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfkfqNqSmNc.
[embedded content]
First, here’s a summary of the original question:
I see that with each action in the Sacred Fire trailer, there are percentages of success. I think it would be really interesting to play without knowing what chance of success your actions have.
When players have several options how to act, they usually have one that they like the most. However, when they see the chances of success, they might be discouraged and end up doing something else.
I caught myself doing this several times when playing games like Torment. After that I sometimes had a feeling that I don’t play the game, that I am merely doing what the game suggests I should do.
Sure, turning the percentages off would definitely lead to making some bad decisions, some that are doomed to fail, but that way the story is entirely in the player’s hands. We would be the ones making the decisions. And if we fail, at least we fail doing something we believed.
There are many factors involved: UI design, game rules, and the actual writing:
For example, in Sacred Fire especially early in the game, when you haven’t built up your inner strength and influence in the society, you struggle to speak up. If you fail, no one knows but you, right? No one notices.
The game lets you try as many times as you like. You just get more frustrated (Anger increases) or scared (Fear increases) with every try, based on your personality and the circumstances: what’s at stake in the situation. And your emotions change the odds, anger will help you speak up, fear won’t.
There is something satisfying about having a choice you know is hard and likely to fail and still staying true to yourself and passing it.
Especially if it costs you something rare or limited: your willpower points or a few seconds of your time. And once you do this, it strengthens your inner power in-game, so you are rewarded for taking the less likely choice.
That being said, playing to your strong sides builds positive memories and confidence, so the game doesn’t reward you just for hard choices. But too much confidence strengthens both your pride and aversion others feel toward you and you will have to deal with new interesting challenges.
This way, the player gradually un-learns to play by probability and learns from experience with the game. You are free to choose and you know the game will reward and test you and make the consequences interesting. This way you are free to role-play.
Furthermore, in Sacred Fire it’s you who determines what your character is most likely to do in a given situation. So, it’s not the game telling you what to do. The game is reacting to your character creation, tracks your choices and provides consistency to your role-playing through probability.
It may happen that you won’t need the probability to be displayed and it might be enough to indicate something is a risky choice, out of your character, out of your skill set. But it’s too early to say what our final design decision will be.
Also, if you really like a choice and it has low chances of success, in Sacred Fire you just have to pay for it with your limited willpower resource, which means you really believe in this choice.
In reality in most situations you pretty much know what your chances are, because probability is nothing else than how many times you have to try before you get it right.
Or in other words, we know from experience that we have tried ten times to reason right off the bat with a neighbor when they complained about noise and it never worked. So we know that our chances to work this out are better if we let them vent first.
As far as physical action goes, the same principles apply. For example, Andrej, our creative director, has played recreational soccer all his life. He doesn’t think he’s special and still in a match in the heat of the battle he can make split seconds decisions based on the thousands of experiences he had trying something and failing or trying something and succeeding.
That’s just how our brains and muscle memory work, how an activity becomes second nature to us after time. We know at what distance and angle our shot is likely to score, and when it’s better to pass the ball.
We imagine an ancient warrior in Caledonia has spent much more time shooting bow, than a modern man playing soccer. And other players (or warriors) know the odds too, so if you score from an impossible angle or hit a fast-moving target with your arrow, it’s going to create respect and renown for you.
This way in Sacred Fire you are motivated by winning to take the easy shot and you are motivated by prestige to take the hard one. It’s all about who you want to become as a character. It’s about understanding a little bit better, through role-playing, who you, the real you, are.
What does it take to design an interesting, compelling character? Explore the challenge at this year’s Game Developers Conference, where you’ll have a chance to get tips from the creators of Moss — and its cute mouse protagonist.
In a very special Design track talk on “How Quill Defined Polyarc’s VR Character Design Process” Polyarc’s own Brendan Walker will dig into the nuts and bolts of crafting believable and engaging VR characters and environments in your game.
See, when Polyarc set out to make its first VR game they built their world from diorama-sized puzzles you interacted with in 3rd person while respecting real world scale. This naturally lead to the creation of a mouse as a main character that the player would use to traverse the puzzles.
According to Walker, Playarc hoped to make that moues protagonist (Quill!) appealing to the player, but did not expect the amount of emotional attachment players expressed during playtesting. This led Polyarc to double down on player interactions within as many places as they could while building out their puzzles.
Thus, this talk will outline all the things they learned along the way in creating compelling 3rd person character interactions in VR as well as the autonomous things your player’s character can do to make them more believable.
And of course, we have plenty more GDC 2018 announcements to make in the coming months. For more information about GDC 2018 visit the show’s official website, and subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.
Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas
