Category: News

“Do you know how to say ‘winner winner, chicken dinner’ in Chinese? Thanks to the multiplayer game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), the answer now blankets the Chinese internet: 大吉大利，今晚吃鸡 (‘Luck be with you, tonight we are eating chicken.’)”

– Excerpt from the second issue of Magpie Digest, the weekly newsletter of new China-focused outlet Magpie Kingdom.

By now most developers know about the success of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, especially in China, where it’s unofficially playable on Steam.

What devs outside China might not appreciate is how quickly hacking and cloning industries seem to have sprung up around PUBG, even as the dev team works with Chinese publishing partner Tencent to “officially” bring the game to China on both PC and mobile. 

The latest issue of the new China-focused Magpie Kingdom newsletter (launched earlier this month by experts Christina Xu, Pheona Chen, and Tricia Wang) focuses specifically on these issues, and it makes for interesting reading if you’re at all curious about what Chinese fans are saying about the game.

For example, the Magpie team claims there’s now a whole genre of “chicken eating games” operating in China, especially on mobile. They also claim to have found and translated an answer to a question about “why Chinese hacks are so powerful” on Chinese Q&A website Zhihu which suggests games that launch in the region face hackers who work as a holistic industry, rather than alone or in small groups. 

“Compared to other countries’ hackers who work in small teams, Chinese hackers have actually developed a highly efficient industry—there are specific groups of people for every step, including researching, developing, testing, and selling the hacks,” reads the translated post. “Whenever a popular game is updated, these developers can guarantee an updated hack is released within six hours.”

Elsewhere, the Magpie team states that (based on studying posts from Chinese users) that PUBG hacks in China can cost anywhere from $6/day to $900/month USD, and the more costly ones are capable of allowing hacked play while also feeding “clean” (apparently non-hacked) gameplay footage to a livestream.

You can find more details (and some pretty choice GIFs) regarding where PUBG is at in China in the latest issue (#2) of Magpie Digest, which aims to provide a weekly English-language look at modern China. 

Star Wars Battlefront II continues a long game-based tradition of giving players a chance to see the Star Wars films from the perspective of Imperial characters. But given that taking on such a role involves, well, shooting at the good guys, it takes a focused effort to make that kind of story work in the Star Wars universe. 

To get a better sense of the writing process behind Battlefront II, and how it makes a bid for a complex morality inside a triple-A Star Wars game, we invited writer Mitch Dyer onto the Gamasutra Twitch channel to discuss his work. 

We’ve embedded our conversation with Dyer up above for your convenience, but in case you’re powering up your X-Wing as we speak, we’ve highlighted a few takeaways from that chat down below. 

Even in a script-first process, Battlefront II’s writers had to react to other parts of development

According to Dyer, Battlefront II’s campaign mode was slightly unusal in that the writing and narrative design team were afforded much more authority over the game’s direction than other games are. But even with script and story direction taking priority, changes from the art and level design teams drove Dyer and writing partner Walt Williams to react constantly, meaning their work couldn’t be entirely prescriptive. 

In two examples, Dyer first described how simple art tweaks in levels (such as a ship crashing down near the player’s location) could send them back to the drawing board in ways that affected an entire level’s work. In the second instance, a level where Luke Skywalker teams up with an Imperial special operations soldier (an ‘enemy of mine enemy’ situation), had to be tweaked constantly to make sure it didn’t feel like one of these two characters had a natural window to turn on the other. 

Given the amount of time Dyer said had to go into tweaking that level from a narrative perspective, it may be one worth reading closely to study how to create this kind of narrative tension in your game. 

Luke Skywalker isn’t an ordinary game hero

As Heather Alexandria over at Kotaku noted, Skywalker’s presence in Battlefront II is something of a departure from his previous playable appearances. Rather than being laser-focused on a destructive video game objective, he’s calm and meditative, open to conversation with his former enemies. 

That’s a rare opportunity for game writers, says Dyer, especially since his presence in Battlefront II’s story is partly to inform the moral turn of anti-heroine Iden Versio. As mentioned up top, it’s a tough road to get players to sympathize with a literal Nazi analogue, but Dyer says part of the goal with Versio’s turn was to show how a group of villains functions like a normal group of disagreeing people. The goal he says, was to explore how Inferno Squad works together for a common goal despite fundamental disagreements about The Empire, but find breaking points that make them cut ties with each other when those disagreements are put to the test. 

Does a Star Wars game need its familiar characters to be a Star Wars game?

One contested point around the death of Visceral’s Star Wars game was the fact that, as game director Amy Hennig pitched it, it was going to be a Star Wars game that didn’t let players control any previously existing characters. According to one account, EA execs expressed worry about the fact that a Star Wars game wouldn’t attract players unless they could play their favorite characters (despite the fact that many successful Star Wars games only featured cameos from movie heroes).

Dyer hedged his bets slightly about whether this was a universal truth for Star Wars development, but did explore what that idea meant from a writer’s perspective. In his words, it’s a question about whether this world and these characters exist without the actors that first birthed them. He says it’s possible, and possibly inevitable, since we’ve sadly already begun to lose those people. 

In an age where Star Wars is now a Disney brand, not just a sci-fi franchise, there’s a lot of questions to be asked about what stories can be told while toeing corporate guidelines. Battlefront II ultimately isn’t a great push out into the Star Wars universe, but Dyer’s experience shows how developers can push for opportunities to be original even in licensed work. 

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

At GDC 2017 earlier this year a remarkable array of game makers from around the industry gathered to showcase their innovative, offbeat, or just plain weird and wondrous game prototypes at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop.

The EGW is always a fascinating session, and this year was no exception as panelists brought works that defy conventions and traditions in search of new genres and ideas.

They were, in no particular order, game makers Matt Boch, Jonas Bohatsch, Josef Wiesner, Pauline Marliere, Hamish Todd, John Polson, Isaac Cohen, Josh Lee, Jenn Sandercock, Steven Smith, Mark Laframboise, Tim Garbos, Robin Hunicke, Kasson Crooker, Anita Tung, Bastien Gorissen, Aaron Weingarten, Tobiah Zarlez, Ian Thomson, Guillaume Cerdeira, AP Thomson, Bennett Foddy, Angelo Yazar, and Daniel Benmergui.

Their contributions to this year’s Workshop were remarkable, and if you missed seeing it in person you can now go back and watch all two hours of it completely free via the official GDC Vault YouTube channel!

In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its new YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.

Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC, GDC Europe, and GDC Next already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas

Free-to-play social/casino game studio Huuuge Games confirmed today (via Medium post) that it has raised approximately $50 million from investors in a Series C round of funding.

This may help mobile game devs better understand the state of the industry, as Huuuge’s business seems to revolve around mobile F2P slots (pictured) and video poker games.

It’s also the studio’s biggest fundraising round yet, as it previously raised $4 and $4.6 million, respectively, in a 2015 Series A round and a 2016 Series B round. Most of the funding appears to have come from investors headquartered in South Korea. 

In his Medium post detailing the Series C funding Huuuge chief Anton Gauffin claimed that, while the company grew 900 percent last year and still generated a profit, it needed more funding to ramp up both game development and its marketing efforts. 

Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap developer Lizardcube today revealed (via Twitter) that the game’s internal dev toolset can be accessed by editing a config file in PC builds released through Steam and GOG.

The secret? Apparently you just find the “Editor=false” entry in the game’s Settings.cfg file and switch it to read “true”, then hit F while playing the game.

Having easy access to the tools used to build Wonder Boy both affords fellow devs more insight into how the revamped game works (allowing players to seamlessly swap back and forth between the original and remastered assets while playing) and opens it up to modders looking to put their own spin on The Dragon’s Trap. 

However, the dev team also acknowledged that the tools aren’t always easy to use or even complete; in response to a fan question about whether the studio might reuse the tools to make more classic game revamps, a Lizardcube representative stated that “it’s honestly too much of a mess to be considered a reusable tech for anything, tbh. Maybe next iteration will be.”

Lizardcube cofounder Omar Cornut has a track record of making game dev tools publicly available, having previously released (and since supported) ImGUI, a free GUI library for game devs that was forged in his time working at Media Molecule.