Category: News

The folks over at Eurogamer have asked an interesting question in the latest episode of Here’s a Thing: What happens to your Steam account when you eventually bite the dust? 

Where do all of those cherished digital games actually go? Can you leave them to someone in your will, as you could with any physical media library, or are they destined to float around in the void until humanity meets what we’re assuming will be a fairly sticky end? 

It’s a curious thought experiment. After all, as enter the digital age, it’s highly likely that by the time some of us meet our maker, we’ll have amassed a virtual library of considerable personal and monetary value. 

In the case of Steam, the subscriber agreement suggests that it’d be near-impossible for account users to leave their collection to another person when they shuffle off this mortal coil.

The document states that Steam accounts are “strictly personal, and may not be sold or transferred to others unless “specifically permitted by Valve.”

Of course, that wording also implies that Valve could make an exception in certain cases. But would the company set a precedent by letting someone include their collection in their will? 

You can find out the answer to that question and more by watching the full video above. Props again to Eurogamer for this one.

Blizzard is bringing a handful of new social features to the beta version of its Battle.net desktop app, including user profiles, avatars, and group chats. 

It’s a notable move that indicates the Overwatch and World of Warcraft creator is trying to reinvigorate the recently revived brand by turning it into a full-fledged social platform. 

The addition of customisable profiles lets users choose an avatar, share links to their various social media accounts, and tell the world what’s on their mind by posting an ‘about message.’ 

A new group chat feature is being rolled out under the ‘Blizzard Groups’ moniker, and lets users connect with friends by creating and joining groups based on their common interests. From there, they’ll be able to keep in touch, share strategies, and catch up on conversations they might’ve missed will offline.

Each group can have multiple text and voice chat channels, while group admins will get a variety of tools to help manage membership and fire out invites. 

All of those various social interactions can be managed via the aptly named Social Tab (shown below), which essentially serves as the new hub for Battle.net’s fresh-out-of-the-oven social features. 

“These features are designed to give Blizzard players even more ways to stay connected,” explained the company, “and we’re looking forward to continuing to evolve the app and build even more ways for you to stay in touch and join forces for your next adventure.”

Every single Battle.net user can try out the new social features for themselves by switching over to the beta version of the app. To do that, just go to the Battle.net app settings, click on the ‘Beta’ tab, and then hit ‘Switch to Beta Version.’

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.

---

Originally posted on my Patreon

I want to tackle some game-feel issues with jumping that I often see in beginner GameMaker platformers. If you are a student learning about game development, or a hobbyist learning GameMaker to prepare for your first game jam, this article is for you!  

When I noticed that I was giving the same feedback to student games over and over, I dug into the tutorials they used. Many GameMaker students referenced Shaun Spalding’s excellent platformer tutorials for their first game. I like these tutorials because they are simple and straightforward in a way that won’t overwhelm a beginner, even one with no coding experience. 

The original tutorial for Gamemaker Studio

And an updated one for Gamemaker Studio 2

The trade-off for this simple approach, however, are a couple of game-feel issues that pop up as a result of the jump code. I’m going to focus on two small ways that beginners can modify the tutorial to make their jumping feel better:  Ledge Assistance and Jump Input Buffering 

These are common platformer implementation techniques, so the good news is that a lot of excellent stuff has already been written in depth about these concepts. But if you’re a beginner just building your very first platformer, this sort of stuff probably isn’t on the forefront of your mind. It’s already a big task to create all the pieces of a platformer from scratch, down to just getting your character moving at a basic level, so something like “jump input buffering” isn’t going to be a thing a beginner considers researching.

My hope is to connect these concepts to the base tutorial to help ease students into thinking about this sort of stuff with their games. Let us begin!

1. Ledge Assistance

Also known as ledge forgiveness, grace period jumping, coyote time, or a number of other terms, this is a fix for the following issue you may run into when setting up your jump code: You try and jump off a ledge at the last possible moment in order to clear a really big gap, but your jump input doesn’t register and you fall off the ledge instead.

The fix for this is allowing a few frames where the player can be not-on-the-ground but will still register a jump input – a grace period for jumping off of a ledge.

For an in-depth and  illustrated look at this concept, I highly recommend Kyle Pulver’s article on this topic.

Since this concept is so closely tied to input and feel, it can be difficult to fully understand by visualizations alone. So I made a simple demo to help people understand how the grace period changes the feel of jumping.

Try the Ledge Assistance Demo (keyboard required)

This is a very simple platformer setup based on the code in Spalding’s tutorials, but one where you can adjust the number of frames in the ledge assistance grace period.

The default is the grace frames set to 0, which is what it feels like in the default tutorial version. As you may be able to feel as you try to make the long jump from one ledge to the other, you can get into a situation where you try and jump at the last possible minute, but fall lifelessly to your death instead.

This feels terrible because there’s a disconnect between your input and what you expected to happen as a result. Kyle’s article goes more in depth into why this happens and provides an alternative implementation to avoid the issue, which is what I used to make the grace period.

By adjusting the grace frames (by clicking the up and down arrows), you are controlling the number of frames the player can simultaneously be “in the air” and press the jump button and still have that jump register. This is the “grace timer” that Kyle mentions in his article. Play around with this number and feel the difference it makes in the jump. Check the “show feedback” button to get a visual cue to illustrate when the grace period is active.

But Lisa, what is the right number of frames to use for a grace period?

Well, this depends entirely on your game and what player feeling you’re going for. If you are making a very tight, precise action platformer, then you’ll probably want to make the frame window as small as possible while still compensating for human reaction time (if you want to get all mathy, consider your target frames per second, and the fact that average human reaction time is somewhere in the realm of ~215ms, or you can just do it by feel. I recommend starting with 6 frames and adjusting from there).

However, let’s say you’re making a game about the laziest bat who “jumps” by flapping her wings a single time, in which case it may make sense to have a super floaty jump and really long grace period, so the bat could amble off the edge and start visibly falling before “jumping.” I dunno, I just made that up off the top of my head.

My point is that there’s no universal right answer here, you’re going to have to tune it with the feel you’re going for in your game, in which you have to consider many things: level of challenge, experience of audience, reaction time factors for your audience, input device, the fantasy of your movement, etc.

You will find the script example at the end of this article.

 

2. Jump Input Buffering

Another issue I see in a lot of student platformers is no input buffering on jumping, which is something that can feel bad if you’re making a game that requires a lot of repeated, precise jumping. Once again, Kyle Pulver has written about this and illustrated it at length, and I recommend reading his article

The solution to this issue is in a way the opposite of the ledge assistance issue: you still want a grace period in which a jump input will register as true, but in this case you want it *after* you hit the jump button instead of before.

Try the Jump Input Buffering Demo (keyboard required)

Similar to the other demo, when the jump input buffer frames is set to 0, this is what you get with the base tutorial version. If you happen to hit the jump button just slightly *before* the character collides with the ground, it will not register, and so the character will sit there on the ground and you will feel grumpy about it. This happens more often when you are trying to do a series of jumps one after the other, jumping as soon as the character hits the ground.

Increasing the buffer frames is basically saying “if the player hits the ground within this number of frames after I press the jump button, just execute the jump as soon as they touch the ground”

Again, there’s no universal answer for how big of a buffer to use. Play around with different frame amounts and try to feel the difference it makes in the jumping. You’re trying to find a balance between compensating for player reaction time and still having the movement look and feel grounded and believable.

And think about what player feeling you are fulfilling with your game. Would it ever make sense to have a really really high input buffer? What would that game look like?? What would the fantasy be for that input to make sense and feel good? Maybe you should try and make that game!

Read on for a script sample.

The Point

When it comes to the wide world of game feel, these are but two small tweaks, and one can really dig in and get really deep into shaping player input to feel amazing. There are many others to explore: tuning variable jump height, nudge assistance, the idea of programming jumping in terms of max time to peak as a number to tune around, and so on.

But when you are just getting started with your first platformer and are feeling like you have a handling on the basics, I think these are good places to introduce yourself to tuning player input. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, especially if you aren’t an experienced coder, when you take on too much right off the bat.

And you can see when looking at the script itself below, even these two tweaks get quite a bit more complicated than the original tutorial script for player movement.

But I think it’s a good place to start, and a great way to add a little extra polish to your first platformer, be it for a class project or a game jam or just for fun.

 

Script Samples

If you are following Spalding’s GameMaker tutorial, you should be able to copy and paste these scripts into the player object’s Create event and Step events, respectively. Set grace_jump_time and jump_buffer to whatever number felt good to you when playing with the two demos. I tried to comment thoroughly. Or you can just look at the whole GameMaker project attached below. Good luck!

Modified Player Create Event

Modified Player Step Event

 

All the Links in One Place

Ubisoft plans to buy back up to 4 million shares to fend off a hostile takeover from French media conglomerate Vivendi. 

In a brief press release, the Assassin’s Creed creator explained it’s granted a mandate to an unnamed investment services provider, allowing it to repurchase shares on Ubisoft’s behalf. 

All repurchased shares will then be cancelled by Ubisoft, preventing them from being reissued on the market and potentially purchased by Vivendi. 

It’s another small victory for the studio, which is attempting to secure its independence and push back against Vivendi’s repeated advances. 

Vivendi currently holds a 26 percent stake in Ubisoft, and French law would require the firm to make a mandatory takeover bid once it owns more than 30 percent. 

The threat of a hostile takeover has been looming over Ubisoft for some time now, with Vivendi first buying into the company back in 2015. 

Since then, Ubisoft has come out on the offensive, and has reiterated its desire to remain autonomous time and time again.

It’s a tactic that seems to be working, with Vivendi CEO Stephane Roussel recently revealing the company isn’t sure whether to table a takeover bid or simply sell off its stock and move on. 

The latter would surely be welcomed by Ubisoft’s founding family, the Guillemots, who recently raised their own stake in the company. 

A few months ago, Gamasutra brought Conan Exiles creative director Joel Bylos onto our Twitch channel to discuss Funcom’s hit online survival game. Recently, Gamasutra’s Bryant Francis and Kris Graft had the pleasure of speaking with Bylos again about the game’s launch on Xbox One’s preview program, as well as the design of the game’s  new Frozen North expansion and what new features can be expected from it.

You can watch the stream embedded above, or click here to see it. And for more developer insights, editor roundtables and gameplay commentary, be sure to follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel.

STREAM PARTICIPANTS:

Joel Bylos, creative director of Conan Exiles

Bryant Francis, contributing editor at Gamasutra

Kris Graft, editor-in-chief at Gamasutra

Bryant Francis: The climbing mechanic and world traversal, can you talk about how it’s implemented right now?

Joel Bylos: We don’t have the leeway to give a paraglider, or anything like they have in Zelda, but basically any surface in the world is climbable, unless we deem it not to be, which we’ve done in some cases like dungeons, just to prevent people from exploiting certain puzzle mechanics. Essentially you can walk up to anything in the game, if you hold the jump button you’ll attach to it, you can do it right from the start if you like, and you’ll be pushed into a third-person camera view just to make that work, but basically you can jump up and attach to any of the rocks or cliff faces, and you climb then. Your stamina bar determines the amount of climbing time that you get, and so forth.

We had to refigure a large number of the rocks in the world to make their collision more precise, because otherwise the player would be floating in the air while climbing. And there was areas the players could reach now that would be outside of their theoretical reach before. Pretty much in this game you could reach almost anywhere by building there, we kind of knew what when we were making it, so we did take the time to make sure they looked okay when you got up to them, but now we had to make sure that the actual attach surfaces were fairly close to perfect when you actually got on them.

“We had to refigure a large number of the rocks in the world to make their collision more precise, because otherwise the player would be floating in the air while climbing. “

We had to make sure locations worked well with climbing. We had to make sure locations didn’t break with climbing, like in dungeons.  We knew that some of our puzzles would break so we made some of the dungeon walls unclimbable. We tried to make that realistic by making them slick with water, making them difficult to climb.

A problem we had been trying to solve in the game was that people had been building these bases in places that were basically unreachable and then destroying their staircases each night when they logged off. In PvP, they would build a staircase up to their base […] on top of a very high rock, then they would delete the staircase so players could never get to their base to raid them. It was clever, but it amounted to an unraidable base game, so we decided to add climbing as a way of at least reaching those bases.

Kris Graft: It’s one thing to do this in a game like Zelda, that’s single-player, you can kind of take into account what players might do. But in a MMO game like this, you could be thrown some curveballs.

Joel Bylos: Yeah. But it’s a relatively robust system, it’s one of the most polished systems we’ve launched. It could use some animation polish but it actually works very well, players have not been finding massive exploits or anything like that. It also solved a problem with world traversal with people, who were up on high cliffs, getting down quickly. It’s never that fun if you have to find a way down, it’s much more fun to jump off a cliff. So we have this whole mechanic where you do what we call the ‘heroic plunge,’ where you jump off a cliff and spin and grab the wall on the way down, and you’ll just slide with both your hands.

Kris Graft: That’s how I jump off of cliffs as well.

Joel Bylos: (laughs)

Kris Graft: The other side of the climbing mechanic in Breath of the Wild is the paraglider. Did you consider putting that in, or could something like that be implemented in the future?

Joel Bylos: We’ve discussed things like that. We can’t obviously do paraglider. I mean we could but it’d be kind of lame, it doesn’t really fit the setting that well. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a movie called Yor: Hunter from the Future? It was like an 80s cheesy barbarian movie. In that movie he captures a giant flying lizard creature and uses it as a paraglider, it’s kind of amazing.

[embedded content]
The unforgettable film Yor: Hunter From the Future

So we talk about things like that we talked about being able to skin certain creatures and maybe use them to do something like that. But we’ll see, we haven’t reached that point yet.

Kris Graft: Yeah. You previously said everything has to be ‘super violent,’ I think like skinning a creature, or capturing a creature and then forcing it to be your paraglider…I think that would fit in the Conan world, that’s just my personal opinion though.

Kris Graft: You hear a lot of people say that one of the major advantages of developing on console is that you just have one or two kinds of platforms to get it running on, and if it runs great one, it’s going to run great on all of them, because they’re all the same. And you have definitely found that to be true, right? (sarcasm)

“I was naive enough to actually think that. If it runs on one Xbox One S, it’ll run on all Xbox One S’s, if it’ll run on one Xbox One, it’ll run on all Xbox Ones.”

Joel Bylos: (laughs, sarcastically) Yes, that is definitely our experience. I was naive enough to actually think that. If it runs on one Xbox One S, it’ll run on all Xbox One S’s, if it’ll run on one Xbox One, it’ll run on all Xbox Ones. What we found was, for some reason it might be crashing for someone’s, and it could be not crashing on someone else’s, while they could be running the exact same console. They could have no external hard drives with basically the same setup as you.

So yeah we found that it’s been interesting with the console. I honestly believed that it would run the same for everybody. On the day of launch people were telling me it was crashing constantly. And I was running it at home, and I was crashing almost never, my minimum time-to-fail was like five or six hours. People were telling me they were crashing every minute, every ten minutes. From a development point of view that can be slightly frustrating, because tracking down those errors is also quite hard.

Kris Graft: How successful have you been at tracking down those errors?  Have you been able to do that efficiently?

“When you’re testing for stability you have a MTF, a Minimum Time to Failure, which is basically the average amount of time any of them playing the game before they crashed.”

Joel Bylos: Yeah I think so. We’ve been patching every week, because there can be multiple causes of any crash, right? Patching everything as we go.  Our minimum time to failure on every version, which is how our testing unit gives us feedback.

When you’re testing for stability you have a MTF, a minimum time to failure, which is basically the average amount of time any of them playing the game before they crashed, and that has increased from two hours to seven-and-a-half. Which is obviously a huge stability improvement. Which doesn’t mean on the average that people crash every seven-and-a-half hours, it just means that that’s the minimum before they force the game to crash.

Kris Graft: What reasons have you found that has caused a crash or a bug that you didn’t expect? Like, somebody had Daytona USA installed, and that was the reason that people were experiencing crashes.

Joel Bylos: (laughs) I don’t think we’ve found particularly other games to be the source. We did find people running external hard drives, was one cause, could have been one of the causes. Here’s some juicy stuff.  Before launch, in Europe we had the rating to show full nudity. Dicks on consoles, essentially. The way we worked with Microsoft to figure it out was to have DLC that enabled nudity in Europe, so that people who could download that DLC, in Europe only, to get the nudity on their characters. 

We had set this all up, we had tested this version.  The version we were going to launch with we had tested for two weeks, it was very stable, it wasn’t crashing much, the coders had done a lot of things to it. And we had other versions that were waiting to be basically patched out later, because those were the versions that we’d been testing. And those versions [hadn’t] undergone thourough testing, at least not nearly as thourough testing as normal.

“Microsoft found that there were people getting around and getting the nudity DLC in places that they shouldn’t, and we had to quickly release a version that was newer, and hadn’t been tested well, and we had launch problems.”

So we had been working on them. And then about two days before the launch, we launched on a Wednesday and Microsoft called us on a Monday night, and basically they found a problem in their store, where people in the US were able to get around the region lock and get the DLC for nudity, because the trial had accidentally launched early. People were downloading the game in trial mode well before it was actually launched. A few weird things going on there. So basically people were figuring out a way around [the region lock], so we had to disable the nudity in Europe or else we’d get fined by the ESRB.

So basically we had to disable that version of the trial, that a bunch of European people had downloaded, that had nudity DLC as well. So we had to disable that, and release a build on launch day that had not been tested in the way that the other builds had been.  So on the Tuesday night I had played for six hours with pretty much zero crashing and zero problems. And then on Wednesday we had to quickly change our version.

And so that’s shenanigans, but that’s what happens sometimes. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just that Microsoft found that there were people getting around and getting the nudity DLC in places that they shouldn’t, and we had to quickly release a version that was newer, and hadn’t been tested well, and we had launch problems.

“Some people have twenty thousand hours in the game, and some people have a hundred, but they still have an opinion about this stuff, right?”

Joel Bylos: Today I did a temperature test with people. On Fridays we have a meeting with the entire team, where we just talk about what everyone’s been working on, so people all in the loop. Often what I do in those meetings is we thumbs-up/thumbs-down/neutral on a feature, just to see how people feel about things.

And so I did a temperature test today on the dev team, for several of the features that are left to complete for the game.  So it was quite interesting. I was like ‘how do you feel about this feature,’ is it thumbs-up, thumbs-down, neutral, and there’s also, if you’could only pick one of these features on the list, which one would you do? And so, very diverse and interesting results based on the type of player that our devs are. And many of them are very different, there are people who play a game solely in PvE, they like to be on a server with other players, but they don’t like to do PvP.  And they’re not interested in interaction on that level of continually struggling against other people.

There are people who literally are just giant jerks, who go around killing as many people as they can find on a server, and destroying people’s bases, and teabagging them. So it’s interesting to see what people feel about things and what they think is important for the game. And it’s super interesting because some [of our devs] have 20,000 hours in the game, and some people have a hundred, because it’s a product assistant, who gets coffee for the project manager. He might have only played the game for a little bit, he might have only been working a phone job for a few days. But he still has an opinion about this stuff, right?

Kris Graft: That was going to be my next question, about cutting features, about how you get to that decision, about which of your darlings you’re going to kill. Is it just super democratic, like that?

“I try not to do democracy in game development. Design by committee can work, but it’s difficult.”

Joel Bylos: No no no, I try not to do democracy in game development. Design by committee, it can work, but it’s difficult. I think it’s more like design by merit, so people come with really cool ideas and implement them, and then you’re like ‘oh yeah, that was an amazing idea. Great work.’

We don’t democratize it, what we do is, I don’t know if you saw that presentation where they were talking about their feature scorecards? We have a similar system, where basically we say, does this feature market the game? Will it sell copies in the market? Will people buy a game if they see a video of this? That sounds super cynical, but it’s one of many factors, these are all points on our scorecard. So as a marketing feature, is this feature going to cause the current community playing the game to be mad, or happy? Does it add value to that community or does it piss them off?

“We have a system where basically we say, does this feature market the game? Will people buy a game if they see a video of this? As a marketing feature, is this feature going to cause the current community playing the game to be mad, or happy?”

And does the dev team want to work on this feature? Are they excited about this feature? Does this feature meet other development goals by developing it? An example of that is, we have the slavery system with the thralls that you knock out and drag back to your base. That gives us 90 percent of the work for a pet system in the game, having pets that you bring back to your base. That would be an example of a feature that helps development of another feature.

So you have these questions, you give them a point scale, we rate them. I fill out those, I talk to the community manager to get the temperature of the community about each feature, I talk to the marketing team to see what they think, I talk to the developers and get their temperature on things. I make judgment calls on a couple of things like: is this a feature we can do well?

For example, climbing was a feature that I believed we could do well, and we did fairly well with it and I think it meets the standards for our game.  And then there’s stuff like actual estimates, how much time will it take to implement this feature? And then all of those things we put together in a point score, and we look and say, ‘Look, this feature is a minus-six, it’s probably not a good feature to add to the game. This feature is a plus-seven, it’s a no-brainer, we should have it.’

Kris Graft: So it’s the exact same questions that you ask at different points in development, to make these decisions about features?

Joel Bylos: The discussions about which actual features to add to the game, that’s more of a discussion that I have with the executive producer. Once we have a list of features that we think define the vision of the game, that’s when we start asking these questions about them.

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

How does a game get its name?

That’s the question No More Robots founder (and onetime Gamasutra staffer) Mike Rose posed on Twitter today, and the responses he got are worth reading if you’re at all curious about how much (or how little) work goes into naming games like 80 Days, Rock Band, DayZ, and more.

Luckily, Rose was thoughtful enough to make a Moment out of the whole thread, which we’ve taken the liberty of embedding below for easy reading. 

It’s fun to compare this list with the weird trivia, posited earler this year, that (based on surveys of Steam data) game names are actually getting shorter over time.

Devs hungry for more bite-sized bits of game industry insight might also enjoy this Twitter-sourced story from 2014 about the different ways people talk about “beating” games around the world, or the more recent Twitter thread of game devs sharing the hidden mechanics that make their games stand out.

How game developers name their games