Category: News

The long-running board game company Fantasy Flight Games has opened a new studio to focus on developing games of a more digital nature. 

The new studio, Fantasy Flight Interactive, is set to be headed up by former Human Head CEO Tim Gerritsen and will take on the tasks of both adapting the board game publisher’s existing games as video games and creating entirely new games based on Fantasy Flight’s existing properties.

While Fantasy Flight Games will continue to dabble in board games with a digital element, the studio notes that its new interactive branch will focus on purely digital projects for Steam and potentially other platforms down the line. 

The crossover between video game and board game design is one of the topics covered in a Gamasutra interview with Fantasy Flight Games earlier this year. During that live-streamed chat, three members of the X-Wing Miniatures development team shared their experience crafting the mechanics for the tabletop game and talked about how those same principles can apply to video game development. 

That same outlook is what Fantasy Flight explains it is bringing to its interactive branch, for both board game-inspired and original game projects based on its catalog of existing brands.

“We’re incredibly excited to be bringing Fantasy Flight Games’ best game properties to life as amazing video game experiences,” said Gerritsen in a press release. “Fantasy Flight Interactive is made up of developers who love both tabletop games and video games and we are striving to create games that capture the best aspects of both media to entertain our fans.”

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The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

My title on Hand of Fate was “Creative Director,” and my title on “Hand of Fate 2,” says “Gamerunner.” Why? Before I dig in to that, lets take a brief sideways trip into current affairs.

The news came through a couple of days ago that EA had closed down Visceral (a wholly owned subsidiary) and with it the project in development helmed by Amy Hennig. That’s Amy Hennig, writer and creative director of Uncharted, creator of one of the defining franchises when it comes to videogame storytelling. That’s Amy Hennig, who has already firmly written her own place in the history books. That’s Amy Hennig, BAFTA winner, WGA Award Winner, Game Developers Choice award Game of the Year creator.

That’s Amy Hennig, who couldn’t get a game made inside EA.

The honest truth is, there are almost no creatives who can get a AAA game made inside a big publisher. There are a lot of reasons for that, but they mainly come down to a common cause — games, as a business, has no respect for creatives. The number of game directors who have autonomy when it comes to the decisions on their projects in the AAA space you can count on one hand. And three of those fingers are called “Hideo Kojima.”

Compare and contrast that with the role of a director in film or television. Sure, they have to work inside budgets, and they have to (with the aid of producers) get buy-in on their project in order to get a budget to work with. Once that’s done however, they have an enormous amount of freedom to make the damn thing. This never happens inside major publishers. Even the strongest willed of AAA Creative Directors (and I’ve had the good fortune to work with some great ones) has to deal with layers of executive bullshit every day they come to work. They have an endless series of VP’s trying to make political hay out of the work they’re doing.

I have watched a nearly endless series of incredibly talented senior creatives build amazing things — and then get crushed by the system inside large publishers. I’ve seen them travel from place to place, from executive interference to quarterly strategy shift, and along the way watched their games get cancelled before they get a chance to live. I’ve seen people spend a decade without shipping a game, moving from studio to studio in the hope things will be different somewhere else. I’ve seen studios bought for the original work they’ve developed, and then get turned into cookie-cutter producers of derivative work before being shuttered.

There is a place where that isn’t true, however. Most indie studios are creator lead and creator driven. They’re also largely self-funded or bootstrapped. Nonetheless, the wave of indie autuers is starting to have an influence on the way larger projects are managed. As an example of this cross pollination Teddy Dief has gone from indie success (Hyperlight Drifter) through to a Creative Director role at Square Enix. Yet, the question as to whether he can have the impact there that he had on a smaller scale team is still open.

Reagrdless, most indies are lead by someone with a vision and the ability to get the job done to make it a reality. The auteur lives on in the indie space.

On the other hand, I’ve had “Creative Director” on my business cards for 8 or so years now. It’s never been a title that sits comfortably, but it’s been a reasonably good way to communicate with the outside world some of the work I do. As a company founder, there’s always other things that need doing however, that fall outside of that purview. More importantly, as our design team has grown we’ve been conciously evolving towards a model that puts collaboration front and center, ahead of “Direction.”[2] As a mid-size indie studio, we’re very different to a small team of people chasing a vision. We have a lot of other considerations, not least of which is our burn rate.

So my responsibilities aren’t solely the creative outcomes of our projects, but also the production realities of getting them made. The market realities of choosing our projects. The financial responsibilities of ensuring our projects are able to find funding (either internally or externally). The management responsibilities of building our team, ensuring it works well, and guiding its growth.[1]

Now games are not movies, nor are they TV series. The realities of game production (and distribution) are a long way from the way other screen media gets made. Every games company is also a tech company. Nonetheless, TV has a good way of summing up the varied duties that are incumbent on the person with creative authority and production responsibility. In TV, that’s a Showrunner.

“The person who has overall creative authority and management responsibility for a television programme. Generally the creator or co-creator.”

And in that definition is a simple way of summing up the things I do at Defiant. The conversion to Gamerunner is very simple :

“The person who has overall creative authority and management responsibility for a videogame. Generally the creator or co-creator.”

All of which makes a lot more sense. If nothing else, it better reflects the ways that I work (and try to work) with our team. I don’t direct, I run with them. I hustle ahead of the pack to try and clear the way before them, so they can focus on making the game. I help them to set goals, and help judge whether we’ve achieved them or not. More than anything else, I worry about things so they don’t have to. A runner is the most junior position in the hierarchy of a TV programme. They serve everyone, running and fetching. It seems to me that the title is reflected at the top as well, because in the end that’s the most important thing. My job is to serve the game, and to serve the team, in order to create the best possible outcome for all involved.

I have the authority to make that happen, and the responsibility to make sure it does. And that’s why my title is Gamerunner.

It’s also why I humbly hope that the AAA field starts to treat their creatives the same way. If Amy had gone to EA as a Gamerunner, and not a Creative Director, maybe she would have had the authority as well as the responsibility — and in the world of making things for the screen, that makes all the difference.

[1] All of these responsabilities are shared with others inside Defiant. Don’t ever get the impression it’s a one man show — this is just one persons view of it. Most prominently, the co-founder Dan Treble is our “Tech Director,” and that title has the same issues as discussed here with “Creative Director,” — in actual fact, he’s across every part of the studio and business, and is the glue that holds it together.

[2] I’m keen to talk more about our “writers room” model for game design, and the ways that model is evolving. That’s for another day, though.

The mobile app economy shows no signs of slowing, with Google Play and the App Store both seeing record levels of downloads and consumer spending during the third quarter of 2017. 

According to a new report from App Annie, the two stores pulled in combined downloads of nearly 26 billion worldwide — a year-over-year increase of 8 percent. 

Combined worldwide consumer spending increased even more, leaping up by 28 percent year-over-year to $17 billion. 

More people are actually spending time using apps as well, with app usage among Android phone users growing by 40 percent to 325 billion hours. 

As was the case in previous quarters, Google Play maintained a healthy lead over iOS in terms of worldwide downloads, and actually widened its lead by 10 percent. 

That growth was largely driven by emerging markets, and particularly the influx of first-time smartphone owners in those regions.

India, for instance, was the biggest contributor to download growth by a large margin, and has been the largest market for Google Play downloads since Q4 2016.

On the other side of the coin, worldwide consumer spending on iOS was nearly double that of Google Play, and Apple’s marketplace increased it’s lead compared to Q3 2016. Both stores, however, reached record levels as growth rates exceeded 25 percent.

The graphs below illusturate how both storefronts are faring in terms of consumer spending and downloads. For more information, you can grab the full report from App Annie.

As much as I’m enjoying Star Trek: Discovery I have often wondered what a new Star Trek television series, set after the events of Voyager and Deep Space Nine, would look like. For a decade and a half it’s seemed like Thar Be Dragons in those deep waters of the series’ chronology. 

Somehow I’d forgotten about Star Trek Online, however–at least until an io9 article that described the game in exactly these terms came across my feed. I have to say it really is the unofficial heir to the television series’ mantle of canon, and in the weeks I’ve played the game I’ve truly come to appreciate its storytelling and unique take on its source material.

The quality of its narrative is uneven, but mostly good and mostly very Trek-y. The best parts of the game are those that manage to go beyond mere combat to tell an interesting story about Trek’s weird, wonderful galaxy. Helping a species new to warp drive take their first steps out beyond their homeworld, for instance, or traveling back in time to stop a comet from attracting transphasic ghosts. 

There’s also no small joy to be had in how the game takes minor plot points from the old TV shows and spins them out into grand stories in their own right, often bringing back the original actors to provide voice work for the continuation of their stories. An obscure species that featured in a single episode of Voyager becomes the big bad for an entire satisfying arc about the Delta Quadrant; the fate of Tasha Yar spools out into an entire series of quests, and her half-Romulan daughter became a world historical figure. In the meantime, an epic and moving mission sees you help Captain Harry Kim make peace with a clone of himself created by a temporal rift. Yes, it’s all really weird–and that’s as Star Trek should be.

“Star Trek Online really is the unofficial heir to the television series’ mantle of canon, and in the weeks I’ve played the game I’ve truly come to appreciate its storytelling and unique take on its source material.”

But it’s worth paying tribute to what makes this possible in STO. It’s the way each mission is structured as an “episode” of a television show. If you look, most missions in the game follow the narrative beats of an hour-long network TV show, which makes the game’s switching between its space and ground phases feel natural and even necessary. It’s, of course, a lot more combat heavy than The Next Generation, but that doesn’t stop the story from being told. 

Many missions start with a certain goal that is quickly superseded by rapidly evolving events. A quiet series of lunar scans turns into a search and rescue operation which turns into a race against time to stop a planetary superweapon from going off; it’s an old narrative trick but it’s used to stunningly great effect here in a way that has the added benefit of thoughtfully expressing Trek-y themes. Having these wild, sometimes improbable narrative jump-cuts makes STO feel like the show.

Like most of these games, of course, combat can become a tedious and pointless grind–which feels especially prevalent in the away team missions. These third person combat sections, which most resemble traditional MMO combat, are the weakest part of the game in nearly every measure; gooey controls, ugly graphics, repetitive and uncreative combat. But the game shines in both its space battles (where there’s a surprising amount of replayability due to the fully 3D nature of it, permitting a kind of strategic thinking I’ve not toyed around with this much since Homeworld) and in its non-combat bits. 

Making a successful videogame that ties into a popular, non gaming IP relies on capturing the feel of the original work to some degree. STO manages this quite neatly in a number of simple, cost-effective non-combat puzzles in many of its missions. I am always pleasantly surprised when a game forces me to sit up and actually pay close attention to what I’m reading, where I’m asked to remember key facts and details, or names, or a certain order of operations for a later task. It’s almost always all multiple choice menus; STO gets a surprising amount of mileage out of its dialogue box, which does duty as everything from a frequency tuner to a warp core to an alien artifact. One gets the sense that this was a cost cutting measure. It forces a single, simple UI to do so much; that it’s done with such finesse is a testament to the skill of Cryptic’s developers.

“These wild, sometimes improbable narrative jump-cuts makes STO feel like the show.”

In another mission, you have to question a prisoner. Your officers advise the most culturally-sensitive path to building a rapport with the prisoner–a medic who participated in an assault on a defenseless ship. You need him to tell you how to safely remove a horribly invasive neural device he’d implanted in one of the survivors. Your dialogue choices, which are not always wildly different from one another, determine whether he opens up to you or walls himself off. It’s a relatively rare moment in this game, but it’s the sort of thing that really pays off. There’s a frisson that comes from these sorts of non-combat/dialogue puzzles where reading comprehension, empathy, and emotional reasoning are the primary skills you bring to bear. It’s also highly appropriate for a Star Trek game.

STO succeeds in large measure because it manages to nail Star Trek’s tone so well, using its limited suite of mechanics and UI tools in creative ways to capture that spirit. By fitting this into a narrative structure that mimics a 60 minute episode of a TV series, Cryptic manages to do this while also creating a satisfying series of missions that make this one of the best story-rich MMOs out there. The “page turner” effect I look for in in-game stories was definitely there. I wanted to do the next mission just to see what happened. I was, dare I say, engaged.

In any event, the game offers some surprising lessons on doing a lot with a little, especially where text is concerned. It’s almost like a visual novel was grafted onto this graphically intensive, explodey game–and I mean that as nothing but the highest of praise.

Now if we could just get working holodecks on our ships…

Katherine Cross is a Ph.D student in sociology who researches anti-social behavior online, and a gaming critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications.

Games industry veterans across the UK are calling on the British government to champion the sector by officially recognizing and funding a British Games Institute (BGI). 

The BGI campaign was launched earlier this year, and is now looking to gather more momentum through petitioning website Change.org. 

Games Workshop co-founder and former Eidos CEO Ian Livingstone is leading the charge, and says it’s time the government showed its support for an industry that contributes over £1.2 billion ($1.58 billion) to the UK economy each year. 

The proposed BGI would be modeled on the British Film Institute, and would look to “support future growth by driving innovation and opportunities in the sector.”

“Some of the most creative and competitive games studios in the world are based in the UK, yet almost all UK games companies struggle to raise finance and access skills, and have to fight against low public recognition of our amazing art form,” said Livingstone.

“The BGI’s programmes will help address these challenges. I’m convinced that the BGI can increase the level of investment, widen games’ cultural impact and source the skills our studios need to stay world-class.”

The BGI has been backed by trade bodies UKIE and TIGA, along with over 500 senior games, investment, arts, and education figures. 

You can find out more about the campaign, including how to show your support, over on the BGI website.