General game developing news and updates.
General
– Added three new playable heroes: Queen of Pain, Slark, and Templar Assassin
– Added a fifth ascension level: Apex Mage
– Added four new ascension modifiers: Glutton, Clumsy, Glimmer, Meteoric
– Bristleback now sells a variety of minor upgrade shards for the chosen heroes in the game
– The rate of earning Battle Points during the game has been increased
Aghanim’s Trials
– The next Trial will be on the Grand Magus ascension level
The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!
Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.
Location: Bordeaux, France
Evil Empire, the new team working on Motion Twin’s smash hit Dead Cells among other ambitious projects, is looking for a Senior Technical Developer with experience working on console platform, engine optimisation and tooling.
As our independent studio grows and new projects kick off, we’ll need key people to help take our games to the next level and navigate the complexity of working with large game platforms, meeting demanding technical requirements and shipping rigorously tested games.
Being a little bit crazy about video games is also handy.
Your responsibilities would include:
Integration of the game on new platforms, whether it’s next gen consoles or new and unproven technologies.
Integration of relevant SDKs and necessary backend elements that make up the complete package of a game release.
Graphics and sound drivers for new platforms when necessary.
Engine optimisation and working with the rest of the team to get our games up and running on most anything with a CPU.
Tool development and workflow streamlining in conjunction with team leads in order to help the rest of the team do their jobs in the best possible circumstances.
Your profile:
You should have at least 5+ years of experience in the games industry with a few shipped games to your name in technical and support programming roles.
Experience porting games to console targets managing QA cycles and feedback and generally getting through certification with most of your hair intact.
Good working knowledge of low level programming languages (C/C++).
Recent experience with modern graphics rendering libraries and best practices.
Rigorous, you’re a technical programmer, nothing should get past you, you’re detail orientated and like splitting hairs about the most efficient way to write every line.
Excellent written and oral communication skills. You’ll be reading and writing documentation in English all day everyday, you may also have to explain what you’re reading to less senior devs.
Ability to analyse problems and discuss them with colleagues, proposing solutions that can be executed as a team.
Bonus points:
Experience and working knowledge of Vulkan, SPIR-V and PulseAudio.
Experience running dev ops for games you’ve deployed.
English (at least B2).
Previous work experience in both indie and AAA studios.
Contract:
38 – 45k per year, depending on experience and profile. More for a star.
Full time (CDI) at 35 hours per week.
Based in our office in Bordeaux, though work from home and necessary precautions are in place during the COVID19 crisis.
Financial and logistical help with relocation (basically we take care of it all).
Fringe benefits include; restaurant cheques, as much junk food fruit and good stuff as you can eat, flexible working hours, access to any books and professional development resources as you want and more.
About us:
Evil Empire is a new studio formed by a few ex-Motion Twin people with the intention of creating more Dead Cells and using this as a stepping stone towards making our own games. We work in the same open space as Motion Twin and regularly beat them in Nerf wars and Smash.
The name of our studio is a dig at some of the shadier aspects of the game industry and, if you have a sense of humour, a signal that we’re all about being the exact opposite (and, unfortunately, people didn’t like my “Cat Nap studio” name suggestion – which really says something about their poor taste).
If you’re working at Evil Empire you will NEVER crunch (it’s nuts that this has to be said), you will have excellent health cover, five weeks paid leave, subsidized meals, flexibility with work time, free fruits and other noms and of course as much coffee as you can drink.
We also do regular trips to some of the most legendary gaming events in the world, including excursions to National Parks and other such shenanigans (team building right?), so there’s plenty of opportunities for motivated people to get out and see the world. Well, at least, we were doing this before Covid happened, and plan to do it again if events are ever a thing in the future…
Bordeaux is an awesome city as it’s big enough to have plenty to do, but small enough that you can walk across it in half an hour. Beautiful 19th century architecture and more restaurants than you can poke a stick are a big plus. You’re also 45 minutes drive from the beach and 3 hours from the ski slopes. Access to a very well connected airport and a 2 hour train ride to Paris mean you’re never far away from anything.
Interested? Apply now.
Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.
Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.
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Shaun McCabe is the game director for Ratchet & Clank (PS4), and the production director at Insomniac Games’ studio in Durham, North Carolina. Chad Dezern is the Creative Director for Ratchet & Clank (PS4), and the studio director of the North Carolina location. The two also co-directed Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One (2011), Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault (2012), Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus (2013).
***
Sure, it seems obvious now. Of course there should be a Ratchet & Clank game to tie in with the major motion picture. But Ratchet & Clank for the PlayStation 4—designed as a killer one-two punch alongside the film, the ultimate version of an origin story—didn’t always seem like such a great idea.
Of course, we were thrilled when we heard that the film was a go. We’ve long felt that Ratchet, Clank, Qwark, and their Solana galaxy milieu had all of the action, humor, pathos, and just plain
. . . bigness . . . to populate a feature. Or six. Hey, it’s a big universe.
But the prospect of making a film tie-in was especially daunting.
First, we had the legacy of the series to consider. This one needed to be a major step forward, but it also needed to retain the soul of the original game. We had 10 Ratchet games under our belts at that point, across the full spectrum: story-driven single player epics. Single player/competitive multiplayer hybrids. Couch co-op. Experiments in form. Experiments in scale. We’ve had universal successes and noble failures. The most recent title, Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus, was mostly well received, earning the backhanded compliment/upbeat critique “it was too short, we wanted more.” Okay. We’ll need to make sure the eleventh one is suitably epic.
“We needed to make a big game that blew away our previous efforts. It needed to sync up with the just-getting-started film. And we needed to ship it in 10 months to line up with the movie release.”
Second, there was the prospect of syncing up with film production. What did co-development of a game and film really mean? A lot of variables, that’s what. Sure, the film is based on the original game, and pulls some models from our asset libraries. But the script was in flux (rightly so, it was just getting started). And early conversations pointed to a major cleanup of the backstory, a rework of the character lineup, and the introduction new locations. How would we work out a game macro around that?
And finally, there was our second oldest arch-nemesis, time itself*. We needed to release the game day-in with the film, and time—that grumpy, no-good jerk—was unforgiving. We curled up in fetal positions and hid under our desks for a while.
But ultimately, we uncurled ourselves and climbed up on top of our desks because we love making Ratchet & Clank games. And so do a lot of other people at Insomniac. Even after 16 years, there is tremendous interest and excitement in the series. We all grew up doodling robots, reading science fiction, and watching Star Wars, Back to the Future, and Ghostbusters; it’s safe to say that we were deeply affected by the sense of wonder and fun in that particular strain of summer movie sci-fi.
So, we needed to make a big game that blew away our previous efforts. It needed to sync up with the just-getting-started film. And we needed to ship it in 10 months to line up with the movie release. **
Okay. We’ll stop whining. We love Ratchet & Clank. Sign us up.
*Our oldest arch-nemesis is a man named Paxton Crowlers.
**This changed, thank goodness.
Within the first 30 seconds of our first conversation about Ratchet & Clank on the PlayStation 4, we knew that we didn’t want to make a remaster or an up-res.
We wanted to apply everything that we’ve learned over the past 15 years. The original game is very much a platformer first and a shooter second. Shooting used a hero-facing mechanic that made it pretty difficult to aim; consequently, there were slower rates of fire, lower ammo counts, and fewer enemies. The weapons that are now the hallmark of the series felt more like gadgets that blew stuff up. Modern third-person shooters are more refined, with a seamless integration of camera and reticle. We felt like it was our sworn duty to modernize the controls, to design the game around a fun and fluid shooting mechanic–but that meant a rework of every weapon, enemy, and setup in the game. It meant effectively rebuilding everything.
Yet we couldn’t imagine a take on Ratchet & Clank that didn’t include hoverboarding on planet Rilgar, infiltrating the Ion Turret on Batalia, or swimming underwater at the Pokitaru resort. We wanted to keep most of the original planets intact, to hit the nostalgia button for our fans and to keep our production time manageable.
We ended up building a new game on top of the original foundation. We started with the main story beats. We chose Ratchet’s home planet on Veldin, Aleero City on planet Kerwan, Drek’s Warbot factory on Quartu, and Drek’s Deplanetizer orbiting weapon as our main locations. These would be shared between the game and film, so we reworked each layout from top to bottom (in the case of Veldin and Aleero City) or designed the location from scratch (in the case of Quartu and the Deplanetizer).
These became our narrative tent poles, matched as closely as possible with the film. Our longtime SCEA producer Greg Phillips was invaluable here; he’s a bottomless well of Ratchet & Clank knowledge.
With the big story points established, we created the gadget-driven progression scheme that opens up new planets. We pulled heavily from the original game. But we gave ourselves permission to diverge. We like the open world planets that started showing up in later games, and we like the jetpack mechanic that we developed for Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus. So we expanded planet Gaspar with a huge new jetpack area. The film has an action set-piece ship combat sequence in Aleero City. So we added that, too. We threw a boss battle into the Blarg Research Station because we don’t know when to stop.
After we established the macro design, we realized that we could get a leg up if we used some of the original layouts. So we enlisted help to extract our PS2 level data and import it into our engine (no easy feat, thanks to questionable archival practices; see “what went wrong”). When designers and environment artists moved on to the project, they started with perfect 1:1 replicas of all of the locators and instances from the original. That sped up normally time-consuming design iterations. We spent our bandwidth scripting encounters and polishing enemy setups for the new control scheme instead of grappling with fundamental layout issues.
All told, the final game included modern controls, two new planets, three extensively reworked planets, eight returning planets, a new weapon arsenal, new Clank gameplay, new space combat, new boss battles, and a new weapon arsenal, all wrapped in a structure that matches the film and also represents our best attempt at capturing the soul of the original game.
The film is based on Ratchet’s origin story from the PlayStation 2 game. Ratchet is a Lombax orphan mechanic. Clank is a robot factory defect. The two meet when Clank’s escape pod crash-lands on Ratchet’s adopted home planet.
But the story diverges after that. The film tells a story that is more character-driven and accessible than the (admittedly somewhat rambling) original game—Ratchet is nicer to Clank. Clank’s origin story is easier to understand. There are more secondary characters and fewer planets.
The new game’s macro needed a dramatic revision to match. It had to stand on its own. But it also had to line up perfectly with the film’s re-telling of the story. We couldn’t have mismatched writing, plot points, or visuals.
“Insomniac concept artists were lead visual designers for both the film and game, so visual consistency was baked into the new characters. Still, we didn’t expect to use any film assets at first. We were pleasantly surprised when the pipeline flowed both ways.”
Fortunately, Rainmaker was a great partner. We had access to the earliest scripts and dailies. We had a sense of where the story was headed. Longtime series director Brian Allgeier and series writer TJ Fixman are experts at crafting game narratives that match mechanic progression.
And they had a great idea: why not tell the game story from Captain Qwark’s point of view? That freed us up; now we could take a more involved look at the action on the surface of each planet. We could follow the film, but we weren’t bound to every scene. We could focus on making the pacing feel right for the game.
We shared more than a story—sharing models turned out to be a win, too. Insomniac concept artists Greg Baldwin and Dave Guertin were lead visual designers for both the film and game, so visual consistency was baked into the new characters. Still, we didn’t expect to use any film assets at first. We were pleasantly surprised when the pipeline flowed both ways.
We sent several massive hard drives to Rainmaker, containing every concept image, model, texture, and animation from the PS3 era—a treasure trove of characters, enemies, vehicles, and weapons. We didn’t know if we’d ever see them again. But soon, we received renders back for evaluation. Hey! Clank looks really good—shiny and smooth. And remember that low-poly background hovercar? Here it is again, presented with lovingly polished shaders and film-ready detail, ready for its big-screen debut.
Still, we were big cynics. “Sure, these look nice, but we’ll never be able to use film models in the game,” we surmised. “They’ll need so much optimization, we’ll be better off starting from scratch.”
But we convinced ourselves to try it. We opened a test model up in Maya, and it was like peering into that briefcase from Pulp Fiction.
The models were very, very close to what we’d need for the PlayStation 4—they were clean, quad-based, and in line with our density target. Sure, they needed some work. Textures needed uv space allocation, shaders needed to be authored for our engine, characters needed to be re-rigged for our tools. But getting these character models—this close to going into the game, without the usual concept-to-z-brush-to-maya-to-engine pipeline—was a big efficiency. We had our full stable of main characters ready to go before the end of preproduction.
The game-to-film-to-game pipeline didn’t stop there. We had the surreal experience of sending off environment concept images, seeing location renders from the film, grabbing film background models and dropping them in the game, then matching the whole thing up with shaders, lighting, and post effects. This has to be the first hardware generation that this is possible, and it’s glorious. Welcome to the utopian future!
Nefarious Mech
A compressed schedule, a new platform and our first cross-studio collaboration – any single one of these challenges suggested we were in for challenging production. And yet, Ratchet & Clank PS4 turned out to be among the smoothest productions in Insomniac history. Eerily smooth. We still expect to wake up and discover that it was all a dream…
The compressed schedule limited the number of new features we could add to our engine. So instead of the usual laundry list of engine requests we compile at the start of a project, Ratchet & Clank PS4 had only a couple: “PS4 support” and, well, “fur rendering” (cuz Ratchet). And while this meant a number of “wants” had to wait for the future, it also meant avoiding the sort of large-scale changes that end up slowing down production.
We also benefited from global code sharing practices. In our old engine, Insomniac was simply not good about sharing code between franchises. For example, the Ratchet & Clank and Resistance titles are known for their weapons. The underlying code, however, was really different. So while we were achieving the user-facing goal of innovative weapons, we weren’t being efficient about it.
Moving into our new engine, our gameplay and engine leads instituted code-sharing policies that aimed to share as much code as possible between projects. We now regularly percolate shared gameplay and engine systems through all projects. And we encourage programmers to pursue “shared” solutions whenever possible. The result was a huge efficiency boost without detracting from the player experience; both Fuse and Sunset Overdrive continued the Insomniac tradition of innovative weapons without paying such a big cost.
By the time Ratchet & Clank for Playstation 4 kicked off, we had a lot to draw from – hero, controls, weapons and other core systems were already in place. This allowed us to get up and running on the PC in a matter of days – perhaps the fastest start for any Insomniac project. This early momentum continued through preproduction. In just a few weeks, we created an in-engine proof-of-concept that in a short vignette demonstrated the promise of Ratchet & Clank on the Playstation 4 (hint: it’s hidden in the game and includes a gardening bot). And we wrapped up a 3-month preproduction by delivering a fully-playable proof-of-concept featuring an updated version of Metropolis.
In the end, doing less and sharing more enabled us to establish a solid foundation and build momentum that sustained us throughout the entire project.
ClankBots
We knew that Ratchet & Clank would be the first console game for many kids. If all goes well, we thought, it’ll be a formative memory—the beginning of a lifetime of healthy game playing habits.
We took this responsibility seriously. SCEA’s well-appointed usability test lab and its excellent staff were a godsend; we tested the game early and often with 7-9 year olds, even during pre-production. Our first test used greybox geometry to make sure that we were on the right track with the new Clank gameplay. We were encouraged to see that kids could articulate solutions to the puzzles, even if they didn’t understand all of the component pieces. We didn’t need to make the puzzles any easier, we just needed to clean up some of our messaging.
Later tests revealed that very young players tended to ignore the right analog stick; they didn’t quite grasp the benefit of moving the camera, and weren’t quite coordinated enough to move two sticks at once. So we designed levels with as few sharp turns as possible. And we created a casual control mode that allowed for movement with the d-pad. This broadened our potential audience, with no negative consequences for the other difficulty modes.
Usability tests are not for the faint of heart, and Ratchet & Clank’s tests had their fair share of head-scratching mistakes and hair-pulling difficulty spikes. Overall, though, it was inspiring to watch even the youngest players play the game. They couldn’t stop talking about it, even when we begged them to stay quiet to avoid skewing test results. By our later tests, the kid groups finished with play times similar to seasoned adult gamers: proof that our difficulty tuning worked.
Constructobot
Insomniac is comprised of two locations: one in Burbank, CA and one in Durham, NC. Both are lousy with Ratchet & Clank experts.
On both coasts, there are animators familiar with every nuance of Ratchet’s moveset. Designers with a deep understanding of enemy swarmer behaviors. Programmers well-versed in crate destruction physics. Environment artists deeply imprinted with the visual style tenets of the series. Brian Hastings—credited with the original “an alien travels from planet-to-planet” pitch- resides in Burbank. Dave Guertin—credited with Ratchet’s original character design—resides in Durham. We wanted to work with a dream team of all of these people.
By working cross-country, with a development team that spanned studios in almost exactly equal numbers, we tapped into the full power of our collective knowledge. Further, this allowed us to run an efficiently staffed production. We started with a small team in NC during preproduction, grew to a larger size during production, then rolled off most developers and polished with a small team. The headcount chart was a project manager’s dream.
But as it turned out, it was a bit of a nightmare for everyone else.
We’re not being glib here. We have to list this in both categories. It was the single biggest win for the project, but it was also the single biggest source of pain.
Why? Because culture.
We thrive on “face time” at Insomniac. When Insomniacs talk about breakthrough moments, they almost always involve a small, multidisciplinary group gathered around a monitor to solve a problem. We use tools like email, IM and yes, even the telephone, when it makes sense. But we ultimately thrive on informal, in-person “collisions” – that’s when we do our best work.
Ratchet & Clank for the Playstation 4 wasn’t our first foray into remote collaboration. Over the years, we’ve supported offsite employees and contractors. And a handful of Insomniacs in our Durham, NC studio worked directly on Sunset Overdrive, primarily developed in Burbank, CA. Ratchet & Clank, however, was a whole new level of remote collaboration.
Going into production, our goal was to support “bi-coastal breakthroughs”, taking what’s worked so well for us over the years and splitting it across studios.
We tried cross-studio, multidisciplinary strike teams. We bought HD cameras for every team member and strongly encouraged video chat over IM or email. And we established on-site leads in each studio so folks had daily in-person contact with their manager.
Some things, like the HD cameras, were a big win; the “face time” helped foster unity on a team many of whom had never met each other in person before. Today, video chat is the tool of choice for inter-office communication at Insomniac.
The cross-studio strike teams, on the other handed, proved more challenging. Despite everyone’s best intentions, iteration time slowed down thanks to time zone differences and communication overhead. The impromptu brainstorm meetings that are the backbone of our work became formal and rigid. In the end, we reorganized the teams so most members of a feature group were on-site together. Our next cross-studio collaboration, Edge of Nowhere, we adopted the “same-site strike team” approach whenever possible and saw a big improvement over our initial approach on Ratchet.
Finally, on the leadership side, we discovered that our flat hierarchy and reliance on individual empowerment doesn’t always work for remote development. So one of the first things we did on Edge of Nowhere was creative a “team structure” document aimed at giving people a clearer sense of the decision-making hierarchy and to whom they should go when issues came up.
As the saying goes, “culture eats strategy for breakfast” – we have to be careful in our effort to foster “bi-coastal breakthroughs”. Again, because culture. But we also know that with talented Insomniacs around the world and amazing opportunities on the horizon, we’d be foolish to stop trying.
You’d think we’d value our own work. But sometimes, we move from project to project so quickly that we forget to label and store everything. If I had a time machine, I’d send myself a nasty letter—“give everything a descriptive name and archive it, you idiot!”
“You’d think we’d value our own work. But sometimes, we move from project to project so quickly that we forget to label and store everything. If I had a time machine, I’d send myself a nasty letter—’give everything a descriptive name and archive it, you idiot!'”
We simply don’t have access to our source files from the PS2 era. Back then, we had a numbers-only naming convention, with number-to-name directories scribbled in private notebooks. We used a home brewed asset management system that we can no longer access. And our directory structure was a free-for-all, with source files frequently hidden away on local directories.
(You’re probably aghast, but that’s not the worst of it. We also used Hot Wheels as an asset control system. Seriously—if you wanted to check out a level, you’d grab the corresponding Hot Wheel to signal that it was yours for editing. Level 6 was the 1968 Beatnik Bandit. I always liked that one. Wait, maybe that system was pretty cool).
Anyway, our PS3 era assets are more accessible—we used Perforce at that point, finally—but still plagued by questionable naming practices and haphazard structure. Finding things usually involves messaging the person who made it, which makes asset wrangling the domain of the few people who remember that sort of thing. Thanks goodness for Greg Baldwin and his encyclopedic knowledge of the character and weapon lineup.
Luckily, the PlayStation 3 R&C Collection proved to be our saving grace. Idol Minds went through the painful process of extracting our assets from the PS2 master disc for the collection. We realized early on that we could use those libraries. So we enlisted support from technology consulting firm Tin Giant to extract data from the collection and convert it to our engine formats. Amusingly (to us, anyway) the assets retained metadata from the PS2, so we got to revisit our asset numbering system and remember our fledgling development practices.
We’re now a lot better at naming assets, maintaining clean directories, and keeping our data accessible, by the way. We learned the hard way.
Agents of Dor
Here’s another one for the depressingly thick “mistakes we make every single time” file.
We’re really bad at scheduling cinematics.
We think we know how long they’ll take. We base our estimates on the script—one minute per page is a good rule of thumb—plus some lessons learned over the years about dialogue-heavy scenes vs. event-driven scenes. We go back and forth to make the script manageable. We try to leave some buffer. It’s never enough.
We always forget to take ambition into account. We’re never satisfied with just the story cutscenes, just the basics. We want elegant transitions between every gameplay segment. We want NPCs to have more fluidity and expression than we initially planned. We want Ratchet and Clank to jump seamlessly into their new Galactic Ranger ship, and then we want the ship to fly to the stars on a custom path authored for that specific level. If we don’t have even one of those things, we get very sad and everyone pouts.
Keyframed animation is a big part of the appeal of the series, and squash and stretch takes time. Our animators tend to love the work, so they push themselves hard against an unforgiving schedule. Thank goodness the work is fun, because there sure is a lot of it.
That’s no excuse. We need to get better at scheduling this stuff. We’re applying a multi-pronged solution: we’re now creating animatics for connective cutscenes at the early greybox phase, just as we’re wiring up the game. We use the animatics to understand what we’re getting ourselves into, with a more rigorous review process that takes character numbers, blocking complexity, and shot composition into account. We derive the schedule from feedback from the animators based on that visualization.
We’ll inevitably find scenes that weren’t obviously necessary until we played through the game from start to finish. That’s just the nature of it. So we’ll keep building in that buffer to save us from ourselves.
We like to start projects with a small preproduction team, grow for production and then roll people off as we hit Alpha, Beta and then Gold. The extra time on Ratchet & Clank PS4, however, really threw a wrench into the gears (knew we’d do that at least once, right?).
“We had only two programmers, and, for the last few months, only one designer.”
We had the opportunity to extend development by several months. But most of the production team needed to roll onto other projects based on our original Gold and besides, we didn’t have the headroom in the budget to accommodate a significant increase in labor.
In order to make it work, we rolled the majority of people off at our original Gold (which became Alpha) and finished the game with a small polish team.
This is awesome because at a certain point, you can just get more done with fewer people (our project manager would certainly agree). But it also meant that we had to take the work of an entire, full-scope Ratchet & Clank game and spread it among just a handful of people. We had only two programmers responsible and for the last few months, only one designer.
Our tiny postproduction team were champions. They took on a monster of a challenge and delivered as polished a Ratchet & Clank experience as we’ve ever done. In the future, however, we’d like to stick to a gradual rolloff that scales the team size with the work remaining.
Big Al
We take pride in our ability to hit our dates and finish strong. So while the prospect of delivering the gold master in ten months seemed a little crazy, it was also the sort of crazy that an Insomniac could get into.
We soon learned, however, that film release dates are far more fluid than those of games. Release windows mean everything to a film’s success. And given the competitive nature of the market, there’s little incentive for distributors to lock down dates too early.
For us, this meant more stops and starts than we’re used to. We’d be geared up for a strong finish only to learn that the finish line had been moved back. And while the extra time would ease some of the pressure, it was also a bit of a letdown.
Don’t get us wrong, we’re thrilled to have had the extra time and know that it made a difference to the end product. But we also learned that extra time can be as emotionally draining as not enough time.
The Universe is vast and mysterious
Pool Shark
At this moment, we have no idea. We’re walking around with VR headsets strapped to our faces.
But we’re delighted by the reaction to the game, amazed and humbled that there’s still an appetite for Lombax and robot adventures after three console generations. For all of our initial hand wringing, we’re proud of it. The lessons we learned during development helped us improve our cross-studio coordination, plan our cinematics with more detail, and move through production cycles more gracefully.
So who knows?
What we do know is that Ratchet & Clank games are incredibly fun to make. There is intense passion at Insomniac for the universe and its characters. There are stories to tell, weapons to design, creatures to sculpt, planets to explore. And most significantly, there is a team of talented people here who have come through time and again to deliver games that are full of life and ambition. Above all, that’s why the series endures.
The Steam Labs initiative tends to focus on experimental new features the team behind Steam is considering adding to the platform as a whole, but the program’s newest add seems a little more mundane than its usual pitches.
Steam Labs launched an experimental Chat Filtering feature today which, at its most basic level, allows Steam users to block profanity and slurs from messages on Steam.
Of particular note to developers, the Steam Labs launch of Steam Chat Filtering also includes an API that developers can use to bring Steam chat filtering to their own games. More details on that can be found in the Steamworks documentation here.
Its tech based on what Valve has already included in games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Destiny 2, and Dota 2, though the Steam Labs feature includes customization tools for players to curate their own blocklist for words or phrases they want to avoid in their general Steam experience. For the basic block lists, Valve says it first built the Chat Filtering tools based on data from a variety of sources, then compared that data to “a large sample of in-game chat.”
“Based on this sample, we’ve found that by filtering variants of the top 5 most commonly used strongly profane or hateful words, we can eliminate about 75 percent of profanity and slurs used in chat,” explains the Chat Filtering page over on Steam Labs. “Over 56 percent of the instances of profanity or slurs found in our sample were a variant of f***. Another 10 percent of them were variants of s***. Another 10 percent were instances of potty-mouth school yard language we’ve chosen not to filter as strong profanity or slurs. The remaining 24 percent of the instances were strong profanity and slurs we found to be used commonly enough that we’ve also added them to our lists.”
All in all, it comes across as a bit of a basic feature to launch through the typically more innovative Labs initiative, but Valve notes that part of the reason for the Labs launch comes from the desire to solicit feedback from players and learn which kinds of tools work best for Steam’s users.
An update to Team Fortress 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart Team Fortress 2. The major changes include:
Marvel Super War has blasted its way onto iOS and Android in Australia and New Zealand. Marvel’s first-ever MOBA originally hit mobile devices in December 2019 and over the past year has become available in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao, South Korea, Japan, and India. This most recent release also brings the game to Australia and New Zealand.
Marvel teamed up with NetEase Games to create a five-on-five real-time MOBA featuring all your favourite Marvel characters. Take control of over 50 heroes and villains from the Marvel universe, each with their own unique moves and playstyle. The 55+ characters are split into six types: fighter, energy, marksman, assassin, tank, and support. This means that strategy and a well-balanced team are essential, for those who want to win big.
If you are a fan of Marvel games and live in any of the regions specified above, you can grab a copy of Marvel Super War from the App Store or Google Play for free. If you don’t live in any of the selected regions, then you may want to check out Marvel Duel, a new Marvel-themed auto chess game which came out last month.
Fancy checking out some gameplay for Marvel Super War? Then check out the trailer below:
It has not been confirmed whether we shall see Marvel Super War make its way to a global release, but if that does change, you will be the first to know.
For more arena-battling goodness, check out our list of the best mobile MOBAs.
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Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.
Location: Plano, TX, or Remote
GENERAL DESCRIPTION:
Robot Entertainment, the independent developer of the Orcs Must Die! franchise, is looking for a Senior VFX Artist to join our team. This individual will be responsible for creating VFX across a variety of game platforms. This is an excellent opportunity for someone with game industry experience looking for new challenges, including mentoring junior staff, and developing leadership skills.
Responsibilities
The Ideal Candidate…
Educational Requirements
BS/BA/MS degree in Art, or equivalent work experience.
This is a full-time, professional exempt, remote or on-site position, with benefits. Open to United States citizens or those individuals who are legally residing and working in the USA. Robot will not facilitate or sponsor candidates for US work visas or US residency “Green Cards” for this position.
Robot Entertainment, Inc. is committed to providing equal opportunity for all employees and applicants for employment. The company shall ensure that decisions affecting employees are made without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected category. This policy is administered in accordance with federal laws (including but not limited to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended, Age Discrimination in the Employment Act of 1967, as amended, Equal Pay Act of 1963, as amended, Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, as amended) and all other applicable state or local law prohibiting discriminatory acts.
Robot Entertainment, Inc. is a privately owned developer of entertainment technology and intellectual property, based in Plano, Texas, USA. More information about Robot can be found at http://www.robotentertainment.com.
Interested? Apply now.
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Secrets can tell you a lot about how a game was designed, and Taito’s classic Bubble Bobble is full of them.
Today we’re off on a trip to visit one of the least-seen, a secret room that shows up if you get to level 20 without dying. I’ve been there several times, and I’ll show you how you can reach it too, and fairly! But I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s introduce the game first….
Taito’s popular 1986 arcade game Bubble Bobble is one of a class of game that we might call SRPPs: Single Room Platformer-Puzzle games. These are a category of game that consists of a series of single side-view rooms, where the player controls some small surrogate on the screen, and must typically use a basic set of abilities, often just jumping and a means of attacking, to defeat all of the enemies in the playfield-like room, which then allows passage to the next room, among some large number of them.
Although Donkey Kong itself fits the description if taken literally, SRPPs are actually a fairly exclusive genre. Taito made a few of them, some of them sequels to Bubble Bobble itself; others of the same type are Bubble Bobble‘s predecessor Chak’n Pop, contemporary The Fairyland Story and Toaplan’s 1990 release Snow Bros.
Of them all, Bubble Bobble is the best known, so popular as to be almost legendary. Its popularity is a result of its shallow difficulty curve, its insanely catchy music, its easy-to-grasp gameplay, its vast number of power-up items, and the game’s ridiculous depths as far as secrets go.
One of the secrets is the purpose behind this article: there are a set of three secret rooms that become available to players (up to two can play at once) if they can reach rounds 20, 30 and 40 (out of 100) without losing a life.
These rooms are (assuming you weren’t spoiled) one of the keys to finding the game’s “true” and “Happy End” ending, for reasons we’ll get into, but reaching even level 20 without dying at all is quite challenging. This guide is here to help you achieve this feat on your own, and understand how the dev team’s decision to implement these secrets adds a new dimension to the game’s design.
The Bubble Bobble series
In addition to the original game, there are at least three intersecting and crossed-over series connected with Bubble Bobble that interested devs and players might wish to examine. There’s the original sequence themselves, which could be taken to include Rainbow Islands (arcade and ports) and Parasol Stars (various console and microcomputer versions, but no arcade release). Bubble Bobble might also be seen to be a follow-up to the earlier arcade game Chak’n Pop. All of these games are SSRP-type games (except maybe Rainbow Islands), although some of them have some amount of scrolling within their rooms.
Even if they’re in a similar genre, these games still play differently enough to Bubble Bobble that there was demand for more games with Bubble Bobble‘s specific play mechanics. That would bring us the rare Famicom/NES game Bubble Bobble Part 2 (1993) and arcade games Bubble Symphony and Bubble Memories.
On top of these, there’s also the Puzzle Bobble side-series, also known as Bust-A-Move, which have completely different play style but use many of the same characters.
The game consists of 100 rooms of enemies that can be tackled either by one player going solo, or two playing cooperatively. Each room has different enemies and a different layout. Every room is a single screen. While the game is a platformer, unlike most of them, a player character falling off the screen doesn’t immediately lose a life, but instead wraps around to the top. It’s very easy to die in Bubble Bobble, so even small advantages should be appreciated.
The player’s representatives in the game world are “bubble dragons,” color-coded green or blue depending on player. A bubble dragon’s a cute li’l lump of scales that can jump about four blocks high (blocks here are much smaller than those in Mario, mind you), with very little control over your motion when you’re in the air. You can adjust your motion slightly while in mid-air, but there’s still not much you can do once you’ve launched yourself.
Zen-Chan (aka “Bubble Buster”)
Walks left and right, jumps straight up, sometimes takes a running jump to the side.
Monsta (“Beluga”)
Moves diagonally, bouncing off of solid objects. Fairly predictable.
Mighta (“Stoner”)
Moves as Zen-Chan, but also fires large, round rocks at players on the same line.
Pulpul (“Hellaballoon”)
Flies left and right quickly, while slowly moving up or down. A little harder to handle than Monsta.
A lot of deaths come from when you take a leap, and an enemy hits you before you land. In fact, a lot of deaths happen, period. Our favored soaplizards are fragile like, well, bubbles. If any enemy so much as brushes against one of them, they perish on the spot. Bubble Bobble is not sparse with extra lives, at least at first, but it’s not long where you’re losing them all over the place, and then the game is over.
Continues are odd—you are free to join or continue a game at any time so long as the other player is still playing. If you’re in a single-player game, then your game ends the moment you lose your last life, but in a two-player game continuing is easy so long as both players don’t run out of lives at once. Unlike as you might be expecting, adding another credit does not allow a running player to simply buy extra lives. This adds a bit of strategy; to get far, the players must be desperate not to run out of lives at the same time. It can help to keep credits in the machine for the event that one player fails early; then they can at least pound on the start button to try to rejoin before their partner also fails out.
It’s not just enemies that are problems for our reptile heroes. Bubble Bubble‘s levels have some places where, if a player enters them, it is basically impossible to escape. One of the earliest such places is Level 19, which has a number of tall shafts with ground at the bottom, far too far for a player dinosaur to leap from. There are a lot of these places where a player can get out by blowing bubbles then jumping on them, holding the jump button down and thus bouncing on them over and over. If that’s not possible (the case if the shaft is two blocks wide, as the bubbles have nowhere to go), sometimes a player can get out by popping a passing Water Bubble, letting the flow carry them out of the trap.
If none of these options will suffice, the player must either try to somehow defeat the remaining enemies from their trap (usually using passing elemental bubbles) or wait for the Skel. The Skel, aka “Skel Monsta,” aka “Baron Von Blubba,” is a skeletal white whale that appears if the players take too long to complete a level. It is an example of what I call a baiter, after Defender’s harassing enemy, a powerful, sometimes invulnerable, foe that arrives if the player stalls the game for too long. The Skel is easy to avoid if the player has full movement, at least at first, but it homes in on the players faster and faster until it kills one of them. In a two player game each gets their own Skel. At least, in the process of losing a life, the player is freed from their trap.
However, this is not acceptable for us on our audacious quest. For we are bubble dragons on a mission: to lay our eyes on one of the game’s fabled Secret Rounds, and behold for ourselves the wonders contained therein.
Bubble Bobble‘s reputation is not built off of its easy-to-grasp gameplay alone. A lot of it, maybe most, comes from the insane array of awesome items and secrets buried in the game. Bubble Bobble‘s cute facade hides a true player’s game, an experience that must be studied and practiced to master, and even then, there’s a lot of studying and practicing to do.
About those items. It’s usually not far into Bubble Bobble (maybe as early as the first level) where one of the game’s many entertaining special items show up. There’s the Blue Cross, for instance, which immediately floods the whole board with water and instantly defeats all the enemies, turning them into valuable diamonds. The various Cane items create a gigantic, high-scoring bonus item that appears in the center of the board once the last enemy has been defeated.
Then there are three different flavors of candy, each of which provides a useful powerup that lasts for the rest of the current life. There’s powerful weapons, invincibility hearts, time stop clocks, bonus rounds and many other wonderful prizes to discover. There’s even an item (the Bell) that alerts you if other powerful items are due to arrive soon. The best of them all may be the Umbrella, which outright skips you forward from three to seven levels.
These special items are quite powerful, and Bubble Bobble is hard enough that figuring them out is an important step towards learning to play it well. We’ll be getting to that shortly, but in the meantime I should explain what the Secret Rounds are.
When you reach levels 20, 30 and 40, if at least one player in the game managed to get there without losing a life, its entrance is actually presented as one of these secret items; it just has the graphics of a silver doorway instead of some random treasure. If a player manages to make it to level 50 without dying, the prize is a golden door that skips 20 levels, but good luck finding that one.
Preparatory work
First things first. If you’re playing this in an emulator, go into the machine settings and set it to Easy. There’s no reason to make this harder than it has to be. Bubble Bobble has a dynamic difficulty feature that increases the difficulty when you gain a life, and decreases it when you die, that can play a major role in your progress. This means, even if you start the game on Easy settings, after a while it’ll creep up towards high difficulty anyway. High dynamic game difficulty both increases enemy speed and reduces the time enemies stay trapped in bubbles before breaking out.
Since your aim is to get as far as you can without dying, this means it’s actually a good idea to avoid extra lives. These have two sources: points and EXTEND bubbles. If you’re serious about getting there by any means, you might want to disable extra lives by points in operator settings.
The first few rounds are easy, especially in an arcade where you’re very likely to find powerful items in the first few levels. On a freshly initialized MAME setup this never happens, but in the meantime you’ll have to clear these boring early boards yourself. Take advantage of the downtime by launching a lot of unnecessary bubbles and jumping a lot. Why? Well….
Nearly every round in Bubble Bobble generates two items, a points item that appears first (usually 7 seconds in), the value of which depends on how long it took you to finish the previous level, and a special item (at 12 seconds) that give you some kind of ability. There’s a tremendous variety of these, and they give Bubble Bobble a lot of its appeal. What’s not well-known is the fact that, despite appearances, they aren’t random at all.
Every special item has a trigger condition, something you’ve done in the game up to that point that makes it appear. Internally, Bubble Bobble maintains a large array of counters, and is constantly watching, recording everything you do in a game like a Z80-powered NSA agent. At the start of every level, the game looks through its list and stops when it finds the first counter that’s exceeded a specific target value. This target value is usually unchanging, but for some items depends on the game’s operator-set difficulty level.
When the machine finds a count that’s gone over its threshold, it resets that counter to zero and sets a specific special item to appear on that level. It only does this once per level; any other counters that have been passed continue to grow. There is a set order in which the threshold values are checked, usually prioritizing the more exotic and powerful items, whose triggers are difficult to activate. It also does this regardless of whether the item actually appears or not; if you finish the level before it shows up, it’s lost.
The thing about all those counters is, they are not reset at the start of a game! Any progress the previous game made towards generating special items is retained, meaning successive games can take advantage of them to improving their own state. This is what makes playing via MAME a bit more boring than on a physical arcade machine; when an emulated MAME machine starts up, all the counters are initialized at zero, meaning that the first level, instead of possibly generating an awesome item like a Lamp or an Umbrella, will see no special item generated at all!
(As a personal aside, I love it when communal game systems like arcade machines use the actions of past games to influence succeeding ones. Usually, one expects a video game to begin from a zero state every time it is played, but this isn’t always the case! Pinball machines sometimes have what are called progressive jackpots that make this kind of thing more visible.)
But one thing that is true of an initialized MAME game is that the Candy and Shoe items, which provide basic but life-lasting powers like rapid fire, fast bubbles, long range and quick movement, but which appear late in the threshold list and this often get overruled by flashy yet temporary powers, have a better chance of showing up. You can trigger them yourself, and should take advantage of the early rounds by building them up. Pink Candy (long range) appear after players fire 51 bubbles; Orange Candy (rapid fire) appears after players jump 51 times; Blue Candy (fast shots) appears after players directly pop 51 bubbles; and the fast-movement Shoe counts the number of frames that players have collectively spent moving along the ground. If you’re efficient about building up your counters, you can have all four of these powers active by the end of Round 5.
Pink Candy: Long Range
Triggers when you fire 51 bubbles
Orange Candy: Rapid Fire
Triggers when you jump 51 times
Blue Candy: Fast Shot
Triggers when you pop 51 bubbles
Shoe: Extra Speed
Triggers when you run a sufficient distance on the ground
There are two other items of special interest to us. The Magic Potion items, when collected, immediately cease the current round and turn it into a bonus round, filled with points to collect, but more importantly immediately defeat all the enemies upon collecting it.
There’s a number of other items that instantly finish a round for us, but most of them have special requirements, like popping a lot of Fire bubbles, collecting a lot of items or killing enemies with different elemental bubbles. Potions are special because their requirement can be done on many levels.
Their trigger counter follows the number of times either player wraps around the screen from bottom to top. Do this at least 15 times and a potion will appear in an upcoming round. You can do this quickly by finding a place where a bubble floats near the top of the screen and bouncing on it repeatedly, causing your lizard-guy to bounce up off-screen, or else finding one of the rare levels where there’s a step from which you can naturally jump high enough to wrap the screen.
Of even greater importance are the Umbrella items. These items instantly advance you ahead up to seven levels, and you still get credit for the levels you passed as if you cleared them. If you could somehow make Umbrellas appear at will the Secret Rounds would be easy to reach, but their appearance is limited by the fact that their trigger condition counts popped Water Bubbles, which do not appear in most rounds, and appear slowly when they do. 15 Water Bubbles popped (whether they release water or not) will cause the weakest Umbrella, that skips three levels, to appear.
To get the five-level skip Umbrella, you must have a total of 20 Water Bubbles popped at the start of a level; to get the most valuable, seven-level-skip Umbrella, you have to have popped 25 of them. You’ll be lucky to see much more than 25 Water Bubbles appear in the first 20 rounds, so you’ll probably only be able to trigger one Umbrella in that time. Fortunately, the first two Water Bubble rounds are fairly easy, and with careful play you can pop many of them before the Hurry Up alert appears.
Cane: Makes a giant bonus item appear at end of round
Triggers when you pop 3 of the same EXTEND bubble
Potion: Immediately begins a bonus round
Triggers by wrapping around the screen from bottom to top enough times
Cross: Grants a special attack power
Various triggering conditions
Umbrella: Skips next 3, 5 or 7 rounds
Pop 15, 20 or 25 Water Bubbles
Ring: Grant all candy powers & bonus points for rest of round
Triggers when you eat three of the same candy
All of that said, here are the first 20 rounds of Bubble Bobble, and how to conquer them, hopefully on the first life:
#1: Difficulty: *
Befitting the first level of such a long game, this one’s a breeze. Not only are there only three weak, slow Zen-Chan enemies to deal with, but trapped enemies won’t start to escape until nearly the Hurry Up timer. Take advantage of this by blowing a lot of bubbles and popping them, while jumping a lot, to set up Candy items in upcoming rounds.
#2: Difficulty: *
Just one more enemy here than last time. Jump up to the center ledge and bubble the Zen-Chans as they come down. With practice, you can get them all before they fall down further, but if you miss one or two it’s not hard to track them down. After they’re all bubbled, you can use the rest of the time preparing more Candy, or doing laps back and forth on the bottom level to prime a Shoe powerup.
#3: Difficulty: *
The first thing to do is to immediately jump up to the point to the left of the READY! in the screenshot, and keep firing bubbles to the right until all enemies are encased. Remember, if you clear a level before a special power item appears, you lose it, and if you defeat the last enemy in a level, any special item left uncollected will immediately disappear. Make sure to wait at least 12 seconds to get the item!
#4: Difficulty: *
Jump up to the ledge above you and bubble the Zen-Chans as they fall into range, just like in Round 3. You’ll probably start seeing EXTEND bubbles here, which are generated when you pop three or more enemy bubbles at the same time, carried over from previous rounds. Spelling EXTEND will instantly clear the current level, which is good, but also award you an extra life and thus increase the difficulty, which is bad. Still, I usually just go for the letters anyway, because it’s fun.
#5: Difficulty: **
This is the first level with Water Bubbles. Try to bubble the four Zen-Chans then hold out on popping the Water Bubbles until Hurry Up begins. Be careful though, the Zen-Chans will probably escape before then and have to be rebubbled. The air currents in this level also tend to draw their bubbles to the top of the screen, where they’ll get mixed up with the Water Bubbles. If you end up killing the last enemy by accident don’t feel too bad about it, as it frequently happens.
#6: Difficulty: **
This level is similar to the previous one, but two of the Zen-Chans have been replaced by Mightas, which have projectile weapons. Be careful any time you’re in a horizontal line with them. It’s still early in the game so they’ll be slow, but still, bubble them quickly. It’s a lot easier to farm Water Bubbles here, and it’s possible to get up to 15 popped total by now, but it’s best if you stop at 13 or 14, so as to have the best chance of getting a seven-level Umbrella later.
#7: Difficulty: **
Four Mightas appear here. Use the same trick you’ve been using, standing on the ledge below them and bubbling them as they fall in front of you. By now you should have both long range and rapid fire, which will make it much easier. The Mightas won’t stay bubbled as long before escaping, but make sure to grab the special item, which will appear in the upper-right corner, before passing this round.
#8: Difficulty: *
Now that you’re decently powered up, you shouldn’t have much trouble here. The worst thing about this level is that, once bubbled, the enemies won’t cluster together but tend to separate into one group on each side of the screen. You’ve probably got most, if not all four, of the main powerups by now, and the special items will probably be boring for a few levels.
#9: Difficulty: **
Five Mightas show up. You can handle them the same way as before, but be quick! If you delay even a second, one will probably fire a rock at you. If that happens, drop down a level and try to get them there. Make sure to rebubble them if they start to escape before you pop them, which is pretty likely.
#10: Difficulty: ***
The game is now starting to heat up. Not only is this a particularly chaotic level, but it’s also the first one with the bouncing purple Monsta enemies. (The game tends to introduce new enemies on round numbers that are multiples of ten.)
This is one of the levels that caused me to suggest playing on Easy difficulty; if the dynamic difficulty has gotten too high, it’s easy for enemies to escape from your bubbles in just a couple of seconds. Play this one carefully. Water Bubbles show up after a short while and can help you clear out the enemies, but be cautious. Keep out of danger and pop whatever you can. It’s easy to run out of time if you’re too cautious, though. This level is a major stumbling block. Don’t use it to farm Water Bubbles or EXTEND letters, just get through it.
#11: Difficulty: ***
At the beginning, quickly jump to the middle island then up to the center ledge. Firing left and right as quickly as you can, bubble all seven enemies as they come down.
Pop the four on the left first. You probably won’t have enough time to pop the others before they escape, leaving one angry Monsta and two angry Zen-Chans on the board. The Monsta’s not hard to care off: watch its bouncing pattern to predict when it’ll come to your horizontal level so you can finish it off. The Zen-Chans will tend to gravitate to the bottom of the screen where they’ll jump back and forth across the pits. Fall onto the middle island, on the side they aren’t, then bubble and pop them from there.
#12: Difficulty: **
If you’re fully powered up, and you’re playing on Easy, this one can be finished quickly. Bubble all the Monstas as they rise up, from off the bottom of the screen, into your horizontal line. Then as they drift up, fall through to the top of the screen and crush them. Blowing lots of extra bubbles helps you here; when you pop a bubble, all bubbles that are close to it pop too, and so on, enabling you to pop lots at once if they’re in a cluster, even if it extends far across the screen.
If you’re not playing on Easy, or the dynamic difficulty has risen enough, some Monstas might escape. Try to pop any stragglers as well as you can. Do not fall into the traps in the sides of the screen unless you need to to pop the last enemy! It’s very difficult to escape from them. Water Bubbles spawn on this screen, but it’s usually better to go ahead and wipe out the enemies.
#13: Difficulty: **
This would be a very hard round if it weren’t for the Water Bubbles that float up from the bottom. Take care of the two Monstas bouncing around outside before focusing on the ones in the heart.
There is a special trick when dealing with all the “elemental” bubbles (Water, Lightning and Fire): their effects tend to spread in the opposite direction to which you are facing. Use this to pop the Water Bubbles at the top of the heart and direct their flows into it, to kill the enemies trapped in there. Don’t get swept into the heart yourself unless a really REALLY good prize appears in there, as you’ll probably just get killed. Once only enemies inside the heart are left, you can try to farm Water Bubbles, directing the water away from the heart’s opening but make sure to kill the last Monstas before the Skel Monsta gets you.
#14: Difficulty: ***
This one’s actually not that hard if you follow these steps.
1. Take care of the Mighty that falls beside you.
2. Three Monstas will descend from above. Watch carefully so they don’t land on your head, and when they get to your horizontal level dispose of them.
3. The other Mighta will attack from the right now; get it first.
4. Be patient. After a few seconds another Monsta will descend from above. Again, make sure it doesn’t hit you on the head, and bubble & pop it when it’s in line.
5. Finally, a single mad Monsta will be bouncing around crazily around on the screen. It won’t be hard to defeat on its own, but if you’ve been quick, the special item will still be around, and it could be something fun like a Red Cross, allowing you to fry the last enemy with fireballs.
#15: Difficulty: **
Try to bubble all three of the enemies in the middle first, and pop them all before moving on to the top. If one escapes back into the middle room, just re-bubble and pop it. If one of their bubbles floats up and out, don’t panic, just get it as best as you can.
Be careful with entering the top chamber, jumping from below. Wait for an opening then bubble them all quickly. The special item appears in the top chamber, and is sometimes a Potion. One thing you might consider doing is farming Water Bubbles, which tend to aggregate in the top-right of the screen. If you get stuck in the top before clearing the rest of the board, the flows from the Water Bubbles is your ticket out.
#16: Difficulty: **
Start out quickly, before the enemies activate, by killing the center Monsta as it falls into place, then jump onto the left-hand, single-block platform. As long as you keep shooting left, you’re safe here. Bubble the Monstas as they enter range and pop them quick. Repeat for the other side when it’s safe, then go up and take care of the last two trapped in the middle of the screen. There is a high chance of a good special item on this board, and it could be an Umbrella. It’d be very nice to skip the next three levels….
#17: Difficulty: **
Do it step by step. First, take care of the Monstas coming up from beneath your starting point. Try to get as many as you can from this perch. When it looks safe, fall and wrap around to the top, which is a good place to bubble remaining Monstas. Watch out for the two Mightas; the only way they can escape from the middle is by jumping straight up, so be ready for them when they do. Don’t worry about the special item, appearing in the middle chambers, unless it’s really good.
#18: Difficulty: ***
Be very careful here. Try to get to the top of the screen along the side. Bubble Zen-Chans, which should be moving pretty fast now, opportunistically. Water Bubbles will eventually appear and greatly help you in clearing them out, focus on survival until then.
#19: Difficulty: ****
Argh! They put this one right there, one level before your goal! It might be a good idea to save-state at the beginning and practice this one.
I should explain here a maneuver in Bubble Bobble some call the “kiss of death.” It means pressing the Bubble button, when facing an enemy, at the precise moment it touches you, so that you both bubble and kill it in the same frame. If an enemy is in a locked-off chamber, this can be the only way to kill it, by jumping straight up beside it and “kissing” it as you pass by. It’s actually not that hard if the enemy is still, but precise movement is necessary.
First off, you’re completely safe from the Monstas in your starting chamber, but the time limit on this level is a bit short so you’ve got to focus on killing the many enemies here. The first thing I do is “kiss” the Monsta above while it’s still in the start-of-level paralysis. Then retreat back into your starting chamber and bubble/pop Monstas that come to you. I like to stand in the low-ceiling’d opening, where you’re both safe and able to blast arriving Monstas. You can care of a good number that way.
When your easy kills run out, fall straight down from the ledge, wrapping around, and land on top of one of the walls between the narrow shafts. You absolutely do not want to fall into one of those, as they are inescapable. Instead, after bubbling any remaining enemies that approach up there, leap right and fall into the wider middle shaft.
This is where you want to be, because the Lightning Bubbles that float into this level tend to gather there. You can pop them and use the horizontally-emerging lightning to kill enemies as they pass by at that elevation. The timing is tricky to master; there’s about a second between popping the bubble and the lightning coming out. Remember, it always emerges going the opposite direction as you’re facing! Play this one cautiously, you’re almost there!
#20: Difficulty: ***
If you enter this level and haven’t died yet, then the special item here will be the gate to the first Secret Round; reaching that is not only a great achievement in itself but worth over 300,000 points. It’s also got pretty dang awesome music and graphics! Even if you die here, the gate will appear, but you have to get to it before it disappears.
One issue is a new enemy type is introduced here, the Pulpuls that appear in the middle of the screen. They fly like Monstas, but they move in a more gradual, wavey pattern left and right while slowly ascending or descending. In a large area like this, they’re not that hard to handle. Bubble and pop them quickly. When they’re out of the way you can focus on the other problem: the gate appears at the top of the screen.
There are two ways up there. The first way is to bounce on your own bubbles as they ascend the side of the screen. It’s not that hard to do really: blow some bubbles so they hit the side wall, then jump on top of them while keeping the jump button held. As long as you keep holding Jump, you’ll leap up off the bubble instead of falling through and popping it. As the bubble rises, you can keep rising up with it, and land on one of the upper ledge blocks when you get there, just watch out for the Mightas lurking at the top.
The other way is to pop one of the Water Bubbles emerging from the bottom and let it carry you through to the top. The issue is, the water won’t wrap back around to the top of the screen, leaving you vulnerable to the Mightas that are up there. Be careful if you take this route; bubble the Mightas as soon as you can, or immediately leap into the gate.
Remember not to kill the last enemy, or the gate will disappear! Leave it bubbled, and get to the gate. Also note, the gate will disappear immediately if the level enters Hurry Up.
If the unexpected happens and an Umbrella warps you past Round 20, don’t despair! The Silver Gate will appear on the next level you play. The levels immediately after 20 are relatively easy, so this may be for the best.
Then, if you make it….
If all goes well and you made it to Round 20 without dying, then the special item for that stage will be the Silver Gate. Collect it, and you end up here.
There’s a lot of weird things about this room, some of which are outside the scope of this article. (Try waiting for Hurry Up sometime and see what comes to get you instead of the Skel Monsta.) In game terms, you get 360,000 points in gems, you skip the next round, and you get a look at this mysterious mural in the background art:
It turns out these symbols are a code hiding a secret message for players who happen to get here. The key is in the top line, which is the 26 Latin/English letters, written out in what’s called the Bubble Alphabet. It looks hard at first, but with practice it’s possible to read messages written in it without great effort. Most of the letters are just flipped or rotated. See if you can figure out what this one says.
The information given here is not important, it’s just telling you that, to win the game and get a “Happy End,” you have to make sure to finish in two-player mode. But these screens have another purpose, to teach you how to read Bubblish. When you do win the game, there’s another secret message for you, and it’ll help a lot if you can already read it when it appears….
Bubble Bobble hides secrets even greater than this! Can you reach Round 100 and defeat the Super Drunk, and decode the message found after? I wish you the best of luck on your journey through the cave of monsters!
Sources
The best source of information on the game online is the excellent resource, The Bubble Bobble Info Page, by Stephen Tjasink and Paul Rahme. That page hosts a FAQ written by Chris Moore in 1998 that reveals the game’s algorithm for generating special items.
BONUS: On SRPPs
Bubble Bobble is the most famous and most popular of the genre I’ve called “SRPPs,” games where you’re in a single room (usually just one screen in size), and, using your platforming skills, must clear all the enemies before heading to the next room. In the classic form of the genre, you have some distinctive means of attack for clearing out your opponents. These games very frequently have a large number of levels, usually 50 or more, and two-player co-op modes.
What isn’t a SRPP? Joust and Balloon Fight aren’t, because they’re not platformers. The original Mario Bros may be an early example, but it’s borderline because its levels all have the same layout. And Solomon’s Key isn’t about defeating the enemies.
What is a SRPP? These games, which are all originally arcade games unless otherwise noted:
Bubble Bobble‘s predecessor Chak’n Pop
Bubble Bobble, Bubble Bobble Part 2 (NES), and its direct sequels Bubble Memories and Bubble Symphony. Also, its storyline sequel Parasol Stars. Note however that its first arcade sequel, Rainbow Islands, is not an SRPP, because it’s not about defeating all the enemies, and it scrolls up! And Parasol Stars, while an arcade-style game, never got an arcade release
Bubble Bobble‘s sibling games Fairyland Story and Don Doko Don, also made by Taito
Toaplan’s Snow Bros, and its weird sequel Snow Bros 2 With New Elves
Jaleco’s RodLand
SNK’s ZaPaPa
Mitchell’s Pang, aka Buster Bros, and Funky Jet
Data East’s Tumble Pop and Diet Go Go. Also Joe & Mac Returns (unlike the original Joe & Mac!)
Subsuno’s Penguin Brothers
Irem’s Yoyo’s Puzzle Park for the PlayStation
Riot’s Pop’n Magic for the PC Engine
NEC’s Chip Chan Kick for the PC-FX
Kaneko’s Wani Wani World for the Mega Drive (aka Genesis)
More recently, there’s Cowboy Color’s Handsome Mr. Frog for PC on Steam, and Whip! Whip! for PC on Steam, and Switch.
Thanks to brandon (@eryngi777), @zarawesome, and Misandrist Stache (@totesmcduck) for suggestions for this list. An old NeoGAF thread provided more suggestions.
In case you haven’t heard, Apple’s upcoming iOS 14 update for iPhone will include a host of opt-in privacy updates that will make it more difficult for companies to track activity on your phone.
Now, in a blog post, Facebook is warning that these changes will impact the business of developers who rely on the company’s Audience Network for ad-driven revenue.
Facebook’s warning is for developers of all stripes, but does include a segment of game developers who rely on in-game ads. A special page branded for gaming promises that Audience Network can “expand the reach of your game’s monetization,” help you “retain game players” and “drive sustainable growth.”
Those three pitches might be rendered moot by Apple’s privacy changes. But what’s interesting is the change in Audience Network effectiveness isn’t entirely controlled by Apple. It will be determined by how many users USE Apple’s new privacy features to prevent Facebook from tracking their data.
According to Facebook, “while it’s difficult to quantify the impact to publishers and developers at this point with so many unknowns, in testing we’ve seen more than a 50% drop in Audience Network publisher revenue when personalization was removed from mobile app ad install campaigns,”
Essentially, if enough users opt-out of behavior tracking, it raises the risk that they won’t see Audience Network-driven ads, or that the ads won’t be relevant. This might lower their effectiveness and therefore, their ability to generate revenue for developers.
Because of this, Facebook says there may come a time when Audience Network will not be supported on iOS 14.
Deck builders are great in our opinion, and roguelike deck builders, doubly so. There’s no better feeling that building synergies as you gather together your deck of hard-fought cards, overcoming enemies and bosses that gave you so much trouble previously. That’s why we decided to partner with Slothwerks, the developer of Meteorfall, for this week’s giveaway. The much acclaimed sequel, Meteorfall: Krumit’s Tale – our review here – releases on August 27, so we’re giving away some Android copies to celebrate!
For those that don’t know, Meteorfall: Krumit’s Tale is a roguelike card-crawler, combining aspects of deck building with good old fashioned dungeon crawling. Each run sees you choose a character and defeat as many dungeons as you can before you die. Along the way, you’ll build a deck of items, abilities, and potions, while also earning perks to increase your survivability.
It’s a super fun take on the roguelike deck building genre, and also features Meteorfall’s signature art style, and quirky approach. If delving dungeons and defeating monsters with card play is your idea of a good time, be sure to enter our giveaway below.
All you have to do in order to enter is fill out the entry box – but please make sure to browse our terms and conditions first.
Meteorfall: Krumit’s Tale – Android giveaway
If you simply can’t wait to play Krumit’s Tale, it’s available on Google Play and the App Store from tomorrow. For more similar games, be sure to see our lists of the best mobile card games, the best mobile roguelikes, and just to top it off, the best games like Slay the Spire on mobile.
