Alex Hutchinson started Typhoon Studios to make more lighthearted, hopeful games that were different than the ones he creative directed at Ubisoft, such as Assassin’s Creed III and Far Cry 4.

He didn’t get to finish his final project at Ubisoft, a lighthearted sci-fi game codenamed Pioneer after a disagreement with higher-ups at the Montreal branch of the publisher and he subsequently left in 2017. Hutchinson wanted to do something in a similar vein for his Typhoon’s first project, Journey to the Savage Planet, an irreverent exploration game inspired by science fiction comics of the 1950s.

“I’m a fan of golden age science fiction,” Hutchinson tells me as he sits in a room decorated with comic books. “I was excited by the idea that people had only kept the dystopian angle of science fiction. They had forgotten there was this big arc of hopeful, ‘we can go anywhere’ sort of fiction. That strangely feels more valuable right now.”

Hutchinson’s time at Ubisoft greatly influenced his view on and approach to game development. It led to Typhoon Studios applying lessons they learned working on major franchises to their work on Journey to the Savage Planet. They didn’t want to crunch and they wanted to build off the skills they developed while working on games like Far Cry 4.

The combination of Hutchinson’s fondness for science fiction and the team’s eagerness to build on their past experience let them “set a box around what we wanted to make,” he said. “Then we just iterated and iterated for a few months. Then we found the team was in love with humor, so those three things came together to create Savage Planet.”

Hutchinson had serious burnout from crunch at Ubisoft, working long hours to make sure the massive worlds of both Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed were full of things to do. He, and many members of his team that jumped ship from Ubisoft, didn’t want to go through that again.

“It’s half inspiration and half practical,” he said. “It’s a new team with new technology so we didn’t know what we could achieve. We wanted to be both practical and reasonable and keep it as a focused experience.” The team knew their game would be “feature-lite,” as Hutchinson put it. It was the first project they were working on as a small studio, so they wanted to refine a single idea rather than spend more development time trying to make a bigger game.

Journey to the Savage Planet is a first-person survival adventure game whose setting is established by purposely corny live-action videos about how megacorporations have endangered humanity. You explore an open area of an alien planet that is gated off metroidvania-style, fight aliens with different weapons, and solve various environmental puzzles. The game incorporates systemic, sandbox gameplay elements along with handcrafted components.

“You can have thousands of hours of gameplay if it’s purely systemic,” Hutchinson said. “You can do that, but if you want to have any sense of narrative you’ll need to do it by hand. If you want that you need to tailor your ambitions.”

Far Cry 4, as well as other Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed games, is also a mixture of handcrafted narrative and systemic content. Handcrafted missions take much longer to develop than systemic combat scenarios and puzzles that players naturally run into while exploring the worlds of those games. Hutchinson was interested in the idea that Far Cry 4‘s systemic content took “a tenth of the time to build” than story missions but took up just as much of the player’s time.

“People were laughing, we put the cooperative mode in and people were really enjoying [Far Cry 4],” he said. “Their friend was being eaten by a bear on fire, that’s the example that always comes up. I thought there was something to mine there. This is an unexplored space, we could take out the narrative and add our own systemic parts.”

Journey to the Savage Planet came from Typhoon Studios’ urge to expand on those elements of Far Cry. Savage Planet is similar to Far Cry gameplay but only 10-15 hours long. It’s narrative light (it was originally going to have even less narrative), letting the player explore the world at their own place while encountering different creatures and puzzles. “We just needed to put the narrative into it to add a framework,” he said.

Hutchinson emphasized that this is what he and the rest of his team felt they could do between 2017 and when the game launched earlier this year.

It has light difficulty as Hutchinson wanted players to be able to cruise through it and have fun. They also wanted to create everything themselves, so they knew it would be smaller. “Our level designers and artists were excited to build everything by hand,” he said. “Not a tiny part of a game. Not a texture for something but a whole, smaller game.” The entire in-game world was built by five artists and Hutchinson wrote the game himself, so a lot of the design process came down to time.

Most of your time in Savage Planet will be spent exploring the planet freely while hunting collectibles, cataloging all alien life, and fighting different enemies as you encounter them. Even with a list of tasks that need doing, most players will still spend far less time in Savage Planet than Far Cry 4.

“We didn’t want people to see it as a liability,” Hutchinson said of the game’s lighter difficulty and shorter length. Running a studio with fairer labor practices had an impact on the actual game they released. Hutchinson knew that, saying that’s why they didn’t release it at full price. “We’re also asking people to take a risk with a new IP,” he said.

Reception for Journey to the Savage Planet was mixed when it launched in January. Some reviews, including Eurogamer and GameSpot, applauded the shorter length, lighter difficulties but still found an issue with the game’s reliance on repetitive combat–something that critics have blamed on the studio’s history with Far Cry.

“We were satisfied with the results. It felt like the emotion of the reviews were positive,” Hutchinson said. “We were not being aggressive with the scope, we knew it wasn’t going to be an A+. We made a piece with that idea. We wanted people to be happy. We wanted people to enjoy the process of playing.”

Hutchinson and many members of his team are experienced developers, so after a certain point in development, they knew they wouldn’t have time to fix certain shortcomings. “The reviewers and players would be surprised how often the teams know where their game is during development, especially closer to the end,” Hutchinson said. “You can make big changes at the start but once your two-thirds of the way through you become aware of the problems that will ship with the game. You know what doesn’t work and what’s great.”

Typhoon Studios, which was purchased by Google to be part of its Stadia Games and Entertainment division at the end of 2019 right before Savage Planet launched, is happy with the final version of Journey to the Savage Planet. The team managed to ship the game with no overtime and only one few-month extension that their publisher 505 Games agreed on.

“We’re all a bit older now, and many of us have small children, so nobody wanted to do crazy hours. We all wanted to make a great game, stay small and enjoy the experience, which meant still seeing our families,” Hutchinson said. “So we just kept making steady progress, trying to scope continually and not changing our minds too much on what we’d decided to achieve. We just wanted to keep it under control to make it polished and tight.”

Nintendo recently confirmed that the next fighter joining Super Smash Bros. Ultimate will be from the company’s other colourful Switch fighting game ARMS. The IP may not have taken off quite like, say, Splatoon, but we’ve got a soft spot for the limb-y scrapper’s energy and sense of humour, and in all honesty we’re just relived we’re not getting another sword fighter.

ARMS launched back in 2017 with 10 playable fighters and that roster grew to 15 over time. Below we’ve listed them all followed by a brief bio from the (now-defunct) official ARMS website to give your memory a jolt if it’s been a while since you brawled with Spring Man, Ribbon Girl and company. At the bottom of the page you’ll find a poll to vote for the fighter you think should be the first to come in Smash Bros.’ Fighters Pass Vol. 2.

ARMS was free to play for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers from 26th March to 6th April, so even if you didn’t catch it at launch, many of you will likely be more familiar with the faces below than you were before the Nintendo Direct Mini. The announcement and release is scheduled for June, but in the meantime take a look at the roster and tell us which one you’d most like to see get that prestigious Smash invitation.

If your preferred ARMS fighter is different from the one you think Nintendo will pick, go out on a limb and let us know your prediction below.

Over the weekend we experienced a few XP and progression issues. To thank you for your patience while we got everything back up and running, we'll be leaving the 2XP, 2XP Weapon and 2XP Tiers event on until Tuesday, April 7th at 11PM PST.

— Infinity Ward (@InfinityWard) April 7, 2020

eastasiasoft is bringing its upcoming bullet-hell twin-stick shooter Null Drifter to Nintendo Switch later this week and a brand new trailer has been released to celebrate.

The game promises “simple yet nostalgic presentation while shooting and dashing through single-screen bullet-hell action”. Players will be able to test their skills in a series of gradually evolving challenges, aiming to challenge high scores in worldwide online leaderboards as they go. We’ve got an official description and feature list for you below:

Blast into a 1-bit lo-fi simulation that will gradually train your skills up to become the ultimate space-fighter pilot! Secretly part of the Project Starship world, this twin-stick shooter is designed to prepare pilots for their mission against the awakened forces of the void. By slowly introducing new challenges and more frenetic battles, the Null Drifter simulation will push the limits of any pilot to the next level!

Features:
– Shoot and dash through single-screen bullet hell action!
– Experience simple yet nostalgic presentation.
– Customize video effects and color palettes.
– Test your skills in a series of gradually evolving challenges.
– Upgrade weapons on the fly!
– Enjoy an AI-composed lo-fi soundtrack.

Here’s a better look at that minimalistic art style:

The game’s scheduled to be available on Switch from 9th April, with pricing set at $4.99/€4.99.

Think you might give this one a go? Fire a comment our way below.

At Microsoft, we’re embracing the “new normal” for how we work and live as the world comes together to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. The health and safety of our employees, interns, and their families is our highest priority, which means shifting in-person experiences online and working together to find creative solutions to new challenges.

For more than 30 years, Microsoft has hosted students from around the world as part of our summer internship program. This year, more than 4,000 students had plans to join us — the largest and most diverse class in our history — taking on roles spanning all our functions. And while we’re incredibly disappointed that we won’t be with them on our campuses, we’re committed to creating a meaningful and fun virtual internship experience for each one of them, and remain eager to absorb their energy and learn from them as we always do.

As we prepare to welcome our incoming interns, we’re working to set them up for a remote experience that will provide a rewarding professional development opportunity as well as meaningful connections. We’re fortunate to have the infrastructure and support needed to deliver a world-class remote internship program through onboarding tools like Microsoft Dynamics 365, and collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams. We also recognize that some individuals may be unable to participate in the virtual internship, so we’re providing an opportunity to defer their internship to next year, if needed.

In short order, the program team will begin hosting remote events that focus on building connections, fostering learning, and empowering interns to achieve their goals and uncover their passions. Participants in the program will connect with one another, build community within their teams, and engage with senior leaders across the company through a variety of virtual events. And we’ll empower our interns to co-create their summer experience with us. In the past, they’ve done everything from hosting their own volunteer projects and sharing TED-style talks to creating a musical.

While this experience is not what anyone expected, we’re embracing this opportunity together with our interns to learn from one another and grow. After all, the power of a growth mindset is that every obstacle is an opportunity to succeed. Adversity often creates some of the biggest leaps in innovation, and I predict that this year’s intern class will not only help us shape our virtual experience, they will have a lasting influence on our program for years to come.

Welcome to our upcoming class of 2020 interns, and thank you in advance for your hard work, creative thinking, and won’t-be-stopped attitude.

Tags: COVID-19, interns, students

Earlier today, we shared a list of the top 15 most-downloaded Switch games in Europe last month and now have yet another list, this time from Japan.

Below, you can see a list of the 20 best-selling games on the Switch eShop in Japan throughout the month of March, 2020. Also included are each game’s release date and, where applicable, information on any title’s adjusted pricing over the data’s time period (thanks, Perfectly Nintendo).

Let’s take a look, shall we?

1) Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo) [20.3.2020]
2) Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX (The Pokémon Company) [06.3.2020]
3) Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch (Level-5) [20.9.2019] (was on sale)
4) GUILTY GEAR XX ACCENT CORE PLUS R (Arc System Works) [16.5.2019] (was 93% off)
5) Layton’s Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires’ Conspiracy DX (Level-5) [09.8.2018] (was on sale)
6) Of Mice And Sand -Revised- (Arc System Works) [21.12.2017] (was 91% off)
7) Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl – Gold (Level-5) [12.4.2018] (was on sale)
8) Yo-kai Watch 1 for Nintendo Switch (Level-5) [10.10.2019] (was on sale)
9) Cube Creator X (Arc System Works) [26.4.2018] (was 95% off)
10) Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Nintendo) [07.12.2019]
11) Octopath Traveler (Square-Enix) [13.7.2018] (was 50% off)
12) Guilty Gear (Arc System Works) [16.5.2019] (was 91% off)
13) Cities: Skyline – Nintendo Switch Edition (ParadoxInteractive) [14.9.2018] (was on sale)
14) Human: Fall Flat (Teyon Japan) [28.12.2017]
15) Minecraft (Microsoft Japan) [21.6.2018]
16) Gotcha Racing 2 (Arc System Works) [29.3.2018] (was 91% off)
17) Overcooked! 2 (Team17) [07.8.2018]
18) Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Nintendo) [28.4.2017]
19) Double Dragon 4 (Arc System Works) [07.9.2017] (was 87% off)
20) Pikuniku (Devolver Digital) [24.1.2019] (was 92% off)

It’s no surprise to see Animal Crossing: New Horizons at the top of the list; the game has been performing ridiculously well in our regular weekly Japanese chart updates.

Any surprises? Tell us below.