Category: News

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

Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence (AI) division has established a new research group to learn more about the ethical questions posed by the dawn of AI.

The British artificial intelligence outfit was acquired by Google in 2014, and often uses video games as part of its projects.

For instance, back in 2016 the company partnered with Blizzard to create an API tailored for research environments based in StarCraft II, and prior to that the DeepMind team developed an artificial agent capable of learning how to play Atari 2600 games from scratch. 

Now, the DeepMind Ethics & Society unit hopes to unravel some of the biggest ethical quandaries posed by the creation of artificial intelligence to pave the way for “truly beneficial and responsible AI.” 

“We believe AI can be of extraordinary benefit to the world, but only if held to the highest ethical standards. Technology is not value neutral, and technologists must take responsibility for the ethical and social impact of their work,” reads a blog post on the DeepMind website. 

“The development of AI creates important and complex questions. Its impact on society — and on all our lives — is not something that should be left to chance. Beneficial outcomes and protections against harms must be actively fought for and built-in from the beginning. But in a field as complex as AI, this is easier said than done.

“As scientists developing AI technologies, we have a responsibility to conduct and support open research and investigation into the wider implications of our work. At DeepMind, we start from the premise that all AI applications should remain under meaningful human control, and be used for socially beneficial purposes.”

DeepMind isn’t the only institution asking looking into this area. Other research projects, such as Julia Angwin’s study of racism in criminal justice algorithms, and Kate Crawford and Ryan Calo’s examination of the broader consequences of AI for social systems, have also begun to peel back the curtain. 

For DeepMind, the hope is that its new unit will achieve two primary aims: to help technologists puts ethics into practice when the time comes, and to ensure society is sufficiently prepared for the day AI becomes part of the wider world.

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.

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Press “O” to open: the running joke behind my un-streamlined controls

This weekend I traveled to Clujotronic — an arts and entertainment event — in Cluj, Romania, where I demoed my new game: Ebony Spire: Heresy. The audience of the event had very little in common with my target audience for the game but I learned a whole lot of from the people who tried the demo. Let’s take a look what people who never tried a old school RPG with un-conventional button mappings had to say.

Showing the game to a fellow designer who did not understand how to open doors.

The audience at Clujotronic was mostly young people in their 20’s. Most of them electronic fans with a taste for artsy stuff. A few of them were actual gamers of the mainstream kind (think AAA games). Most games featured at the venue (like Black the Fall, Second Hand: Frankie’s Revenge, Raiders of the Lost Island) were Indie games and it was great seeing people interacting with them for the first time. They all featured controller support and most players had little problems figuring out what to do. In my case there was only a screen and a keyboard and, for a few hours after setting up my “booth”, a mouse.

Arrow keys and Mouse are the first thing players look for in a game they know nothing about.

My target audience are technical, slightly older gamers who enjoyed dungeon crawling classics like Eye of the Beholder or Dungeon Master or fans of the roguelike genre that are looking for a more graphical game in the vein of the previously mentioned titles. The game relies heavily on the keyboard and breaks the conventional streamlined controls. I promised myself I won’t intervene and describe the game’s control to players until they all but gave up on trying. A good way to get data and see how much time they are willing to sacrifice before giving up.

What I noticed is that in the absence of a controller, when faced with a unfamiliar games, the first thing people gravitate towards is the mouse and arrow keys. If the game does not respond to those two types of inputs well… let’s just say that 70% of the people who tried the game gave up, assumed it froze/crashed and just left it at that. The remaining 30% are split between randomly pressing keys until something happens, checking out the monitor to see if it’s touch enabled (it wasn’t) or, those more interested in experiencing it, asking people around them for information. Touch screen-ers were more common than those willing to ask for information

First batch of players pre-key update

So after a few hours of me staring at people’s fingers gravitating towards the arrow keys I was faced with two decisions:

• The easy way out: Print the controls on paper and stick it to the side of the screen
• The slightly less harder way: Add support for the Arrow Keys and the Enter button.

I wanted as much data as I could get from the players and I didn’t feel like cheating and sticking a piece of paper in their face so I added support for the aformentioned keys in the Menu’s and the retention rate grew. I also hid the mouse from view.

 

Now that the “standard” way of navigating through the in-game menus was solved I almost had a full 100% retention rate until gameplay started (A few gave up once they entered the help menu and saw a wall of text). The first big hitch was met when the game started and arrow keys were once again useless. Here things took a weird turn.

Most players (a bit over 50%) went straight for W,A,S and D controls once the arrow keys were deemed useless. Twelve people asked if the mouse is missing. Around 25% of them moved on without wanting to hear any explanation about the controls. Slightly less than that asked for help immediately after the arrow keys failed to do anything.

The “O”gh moment when it all clicked

Once they figured out you can move around with WASD and turn the camera with Q+E they started exploring the first level. After experiencing the grid-based movement a few of them asked if the game was turn based. Spotting the first NPC made them want to grab a mouse out of instinct to shoot. This was a big amount of players (sadly I did not record this data). Others moved next to him and asked how to engage and attack. But the controls did not click with them until two more buttons were revealed: “I” to access the Inventory and “T” to throw items at the enemies. Quite a few of them questioned the decision to interact with the environment (here doors) by using the “O” key. They expected to press E or F. But as soon as they found their first items on the floor, and thinking about the previous keybindings it all clicked. More than once I heard: “How do I pick up an item.. Wait? Is IT P? Oh it is P! I GET IT NOW”. And then, suddenly, O to open doors, I to open the inventory, T to throw, P to pickup, L to access the log suddenly made sense for them. And after playing the game and noticing other people trying to figure it out they chimed in and helped excitedly. It even became a running gag around the venue. When people would ask if the bathroom is occupied some would answer: “Press O to open and see for yourself” or the now classic at the bar: “Should I press B for beer?”.

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Let’s look at the facts for a minute

People figuring out the controls and being excited for the discovery was a great thing to witness however there’s a problem here hiding in plain sight: out of all progress data I recorded while the game was demoed the following things stand out:

• Less than 3% of the total players reached the final (3rd) level of the demo
• Only 15% explored the first level and its two portals
• A whooping 40% of all people that tried the game gave up at the main menu

I cannot stress the last part enough: Because the default input method WAS NOT the norm almost half of the people who tried the game never even got to the game part. Imagine this data wasn’t picked up during the demo and I would have only found out about it after doing the steam release. A 40% refund rate would have killed me, my game and my business. Now I can argue that the drop rate would have been lower because of my target audience and their experience, because people that invest money in the game would stick around more and learn how to play it but it would still have dented my income and review scores.

The amount of polish before I launch next month is huge. I need to get a tutorial system in the game. Or a better way to present the controls. I am sticking to them but I learned that learning them through pure discovery, even if rewarding, can potentially put people off. People who are to be my customers and supporters.

I also learned that players who expect a mouse and do not find it will touch, press and even shake a regular monitor. Even when there is someone nearby to explain the game to them.

 

Ebony Spire: Heresy was demoed at Clujotronic. It’s a first person, dungeon crawling, turn based rpg inspired by roguelikes. The main mechanic revolves around picking up items and using them against your enemies. And the enemies can do the same things you can do. And you need to press “O” to open doors. It will release on steam in November. You can pick-up and play the Clujotronic 3 level demo for Linux and Windows from itch.io. And even buy the game at half-the-release price if you want to throw mean words about the controls at me. 

Accidental Queens is a game company you might not be familiar with because they’ve only been releasing games this year. Earlier in 2017, they released the game A Normal Lost Phone in which plays found a smart phone, unlocked it, and began to piece together the life of the person who owned it.

There’s a degree of voyeuristic delight the propels the player forward. There are puzzles, mostly consisting of investing your time and attention into the assorted texts, emails, and other information on the device. It doesn’t feel like puzzles because it doesn’t feel like a game. There isn’t even a suggestion that the game has natural start or end points, much less a story, until one begins to emerge within the context of what you put together yourself. It’s a small game with a big message, and it has sold 100k units, and is won numerous accolades. 

Another Lost Phone: Laura’s Story is the pseudo-sequel just released by Accidental Queens, is available on Steam and on Android phones. This time, you explore a phone owned by a young professional woman named Laura. Again, there’s some very complicated messages and themes at play here. Miryam Houali and Diane Landais from Accidental Queens explain how you do a message game but make sure to get the message right.

In Another Lost Phone: Laura’s Story, players are tasked to find out what happened to Laura, a young woman who has apparently vanished without a trace. Stumbling on her lost phone, they need to discover what happened to her by uncovering crucial pieces of information and hidden passwords scattered among texts, apps, photo gallery and social networks.

This builds upon the basic system that Accidental Queens developed originally during a game jam. At this point, it’s a fully realized phone operating system, complete with music playing in the background via the iTunes comparative app and even requiring you to toggle various in phone systems like Wi-Fi and GPS. 

Or you can just delete all the data on the phone right from the start. I did to see if I could. And you can. 

Asked about transitioning the original title to this more elaborate version, art director Houali said that the impact the first game made upon players seemed to be something they could easily build upon because there were so many other subjects the team wanted to tackle. Diane Landais shared that the team through this would be easy to accomplish by simply adding a few new apps. Then Landais laughs because, of course, nothing is that simple. 

“The first game was mostly finding a password or guessing it,” Landais says. “This is more about piecing things together and deducing a password or how to advance the game. This design shift meant from a design and technical standpoint we had to redesign. One that was hard to do right was the recovery app which unlocks content within the messages and notes apps. In the original, each app had one bit of content. Now we have apps talking to each other.”

Miryam Houali points out that there were mistakes me in the first game, from a design perspective, that needed to be corrected — especially after getting some negative feedback. And that’s where Accidental Queens moved into territory that they knew required outside help.

“We know what we want to talk about, but it takes asking people how they felt after playing and why.”

In the original game, there is a puzzle in which you must forward a photo from the phone to someone else. There are numerous photos to choose from, but there are also images of the phone’s owner presenting as male instead of female in a game that doesn’t give you any heads-up that it is entering into trans-issues territory.

This puzzle solution resulted in Accidental Queens getting criticism for not fully thinking through their issue. While they wanted to make people feel uncomfortable in certain privacy violation ways, there were unforeseen issues that made a percentage of their audience too uncomfortable to continue. 

“We tried not to do that again on this one,” Landais says. “Any potential problem, we asked ourselves if it was useful to have it make people uncomfortable. What are the bigger complications of that?”

So for the sequel, which takes on a number of emotionally and politically complicated issues, the team decided it was best to ask someone else to answer these questions. In a game about complicated emotional and psychological abuse, the team didn’t want to risk hammering anyone over the head with their message but also wanted to make sure they presented a human, realistic portrayal of these events. So they turned to the professionals.

Houali says, “We had domestic abuse survivor groups play to point out any abuse mistakes we didn’t spot. There was four different organizations, all French based, helping us with the subjects and we sent them prototypes. We sent them beta versions. They pointed out mistakes in dialogues or how the message was conveyed. Our production time was very short, but at each big milestone we had a playtest station.”

As very small scale developers on a short production timeline, using so much of their resources and time to make sure that every detail about their message is conveyed accurately, seems sort of breathtaking. Especially when there are groups out there willing to help with work like this, why aren’t more larger-scale studios putting this much care into their product?

There was also considerable playtesting with individuals. “As developers we know what we want to talk about and how we imagine it being an entertaining game to play,” Landais says, “but it takes asking people how they felt after playing and why. That’s the only way to get this right. 

There’s a sort of trigger warning device at the beginning of Another Lost Phone: Laura’s Story which gives you different depths of plot and theme analysis, depending on how much you’re willing to have spoiled.

This is a delicate balancing act that both Accidental Queens games have had to straddle: if people know The Message of a game, it changes how you play and what you’re looking for. How do you put that out into the world without changing how others approach what you’ve made?

Landais says, “We wanted to spoil as little as we can, and going in there was a vague idea of those subjects. We don’t want to say those messages up front because they are more efficient way to play. For example, we wanted to share that psychological manipulation was coming from multiple sources. And if you know that at the start of the game that was still too much.”

But how do you let people know what your game is about? For Landais, the best route for games right now seems to be keeping that a kind of open secret. There are enough people in games-space right now complaining about too much politics in their games.

“I understand where they’re coming from,” Landais says. “We could’ve marketed this as “Oh look at these good LGBTQ people” and look — first of all, if you’re going to market a game like that you’d better deliver. But second, if you announce like that you’re going to drive away the people the need to hear your message. Some people who had “problematic” visions wound up empathizing with characters in our game before they realized what they were reading. You are trying to change someone’s perspective, and telling that in the sale of the idea is not going to let them understand your point better.

Miryam Houali agrees. “Some people say that the game was still too preachy. We wanted players to have their own opinions. We don’t think that people disagreeing with us makes them bad people, we just want to give them the tools to reflect on their beliefs. We can try to touch a lot more people with this approach instead of making overly political games.”

And that’s how Accidental Queens are using a subtle marketing push that leaves all the themes in the background, mixed with spending a majority of their time making sure those same themes are done beyond reproach, to turn out something truly special in Another Lost Phone: Laura’s Story.