Category: News

A few weeks ago, AER: Memories of Old launched on Steam, PS4, and Xbox One after a long, long development cyclethat effectively began as when the founders of Forgotten Key Games were finishing university. It’s a beautiful game with a really pleasant-feeling flight system, and after seeing it at PAX West earlier this year, we were eager to talk to its developers after its release. 

So today on the Gamasutra Twitch channel, we sat down with lead developer and designer Robin Hjelte to stream some of AER’s gameplay and ask how he and his team made the flying feel so good. We knew the answer would involve a lot of design and iteration, but we were surprised to learn how much of it had to do with rooting a game design process in aesthetic goals established in a university thesis. 

You can watch our full conversation with Hjelte up above, but if you’re soaring through the clouds as we speak, here are a few quick takeaways from Hjelte’s development experience. 

Papers please

Many games start with a specifc idea about play and interaction. Maybe it’s from a prototype, maybe it’s a mod from another game. But what’s interesting about the origins of AER is that its first seeds were planted in a university thesis that Hjelte and his colleagues worked on that focused on aesthetics and mood over playfulness. 

According to Hjelte, the papers that he and his coworkers worked with focused building game worlds about Cubism and Minimalism, as well as making a games focused around one core aesthetic. Once production on an AER protoytpe began, the team settled on a flying mechanic to anchor the experience. Even as development continued and changes were made to the project, Hjelte says these core design goals remained steady until it was time to ship. 

Don’t show all your best stuff too soon (or if you do, be prepared)

Like many indie games, AER has been in development for a long time (it was an Indiecade nominee in 2013). When looking back at Forgotten Key’s work marketing the game, Hjelte says there’s one key thing he wish he’d done differently. Early on, after making changes to the game’s direction, he and his colleagues cut a trailer envisioning the game they meant to build. That trailer was covered on Kotaku and Rock Paper Shotgun (which was [and still is] good press for indie developers). 

But in the interim years, as development trundled on, the team realized they’d sort of blown their big, flashy announcement years before they were ready to ship. Even with trips to PAX and a helpful marketing push on Imgur, they found that they didn’t have many new visuals that could attract audiences in a similarly big way. Hjelte went on to clarify that early marketing is still a good idea, and early buzz can be wrangled into a launch community, but advised other indies to maybe save some more powerful visuals in the run-up to shipping their game.

Flight is about feel as much as physics

Before we signed off, we asked Hjelte really quick about what he felt made for good flying in video games. Hjelte chose to emphasize the importance of building a specific feel for flying as opposed to trying to simulate specific physics simulations. Earlier in the stream, he discussed how earlier AER prototypes involved a hang glider that could only propel itself on wind gusts scattered throughout the world. This…wasn’t fun, and a lot of changes to the shapeshifting gameplay seen in AER now came from a decision to make sure players could propel themselves through large open spaces, not just hunt for gusts of wind. 

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

The team behind last year’s episodic off-’em-up Hitman have confirmed they’ve cut a deal with Fox 21 and Hulu to produce a television series based on the game.

This seems like a bit of potential good news for developer IO Interactive, which went independent in June after former parent company Square Enix abruptly decided to sell off the studio.

The split resulted in a round of layoffs and some dickering over IP rights, but IO Interactive walked away with the keys to its Hitman franchise and has continued to produce content updates. The 2016 game recently surpassed 7 million players (though chunks of the game were released for free) and IO has said it’s working on a second game.

According to Deadline, the new TV series will be executive produced by a team that includes “John Wick” writer and creator Derek Kolstad, who is also expected to contribute a pilot script. Of course, this won’t be the first time Hitman’s been licensed to Hollywood: there were two separate films released in 2007 and 2015 that portrayed their own versions of the series’ titular character.

You may not have heard of the game Outcast when it came out, but in 1999, the idea of an open-world game with factions, procedural dialogue, and other unique mechanics would have sounded like something out of a time machine. And yet, there it was! Loud, proud, and dripping with inspiration from French sci-fi comics and films. 

As it turns out, the game’s creators love the world they built so much they decided to give it a polished upgrade for 2017. Today, Outcast: Second Contact launched on Steam, Xbox One, and PS4, and it’s a unique remaster of the original game, preserving its audio and general gameplay while upgrading its visual assets and a few collision detections. 

And on the Gamasutra Twitch channel, we were lucky enough to talk with one of the developers who worked on both the original game and Second Contact: Franck Sauer, who did art direction for the original game. 

You can watch our full conversation with Sauer up above, but in case you’re hopping in a time machine back to 1999, we’ve collected a few interesting highlights for your perusal below. 

Outcast: Second Contact is able to use old code and audio thanks to Unity

If you quickly glance at videos of the original Outcast, then look at the modern game, you may be surprised how much the controls and audio are so similar to the original. That’s because, according to Sauer, it’s a lot of the same old code, tech, and design under the game’s hood. By using a Unity plugin to keep the old game running in the background, Sauer’s colleagues were able to build new assets and a new UI that could be layered over the old game. 

That does mean a few old animations look slightly stilted, but as you can see from our time with the game above, it gives it a unique feel that bridges the decades from 1999 to 2017. 

It’s worth noting that there are other game engines out there that could have performed the same task, but it’s interesting to note that we’ve reached a point in technological development where new engines can help developers restore and republish their older games.

Outcast’s unique look and feel is fueled by old-school tech limitations

Since a lot of Sauer’s original work on Outcast was with the game’s art direction and style, he was able to explain where the game’s look came from, and how everything from the level design to environment choices had to do with the limited tech available at the time. 

For instance, in the case of the “rice paddy field” that defines the game’s first area, Sauer says that the limited ability of the so-called “voxel assets” they were using helped this grassy, staggered area feel possible. Since even making these 3D assets look good was a challenge for the day, Sauer and his colleagues were able to get creative and use them to create environments that suited their design, which in this case, was a staggered rice field. 

In another case, when we commented on the maze-like structure of the area, he pointed out that the map editor developer Appeal had developed at the time required editors to look at the area from the top-down, like a 2D game. This gives the space a far more labyrinthine feel than many open-world games have today. 

Compared to 1999, players are “better educated” about games, which makes marketing them “easier”

As we have noted many times on the Gamasautra Twitch channel, marketing games in 2017 is really hard. But how hard is it compared to 1999? From Sauer’s perspective, it’s a lot “easier” because according to him, the people who buy games are better educated and don’t need to be taught about what a game “is.”

That obviously doesn’t wipe away the modern marketing challenges game developers face, but it’s a reflection that helps see developers how far we’ve come, and dream of a future where modern sales challenges fall away like ones of old. 

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

GameStop has reportedly begun rolling out, then abruptly stopped, the PowerPass game rental program it had planned to officially launch on November 19th.

Devs may remember that the company has been testing similar forms of game rental programs for some time, but Kotaku reports that the soft launch of PowerPass this week hit enough bumps that employees are being told to pull down signs for the program and store them for later.

“We have elected to temporarily pause the roll out of the new PowerPass subscription service, based on a few program limitations we have identified. We feel this is the right thing to do for now to ensure we are able to provide our guests an exceptional service,” a GameStop representative told Kotaku today. 

“For those guests who have already purchased the service, we will allow them to bring the pass, and video game they have checked-out, back to receive a full refund. In addition, we will allow them to pick out any pre-owned game for free.”

The PowerPass program was pitched to the public last month as offering, for a $60 upfront fee, six months of unlimited “rentals” (one at a time) from GameStop’s stock of used games. At the end of the six-month period, a PowerPass customer could choose one game to keep. 

Previously, GameStop ran a special summer promotion at select stores in the U.S. that allowed customers to rent and play used games across a 3 month period for a single $50 fee.