Following on from its reveal of seven new titles in February, Super Rare Games has now shared details on the first release of the lot, Assault Android Cactus+. Pre-orders will go live for the game on 12th March, exclusively on the Super Rare Games website, and it will set you back £29.99 / $32.62 USD (or the regional equivalent).

The Super Rare physical edition is limited to a total of 4,000 units and includes a 20-page full-colour manual, interior artwork, exclusive sticker, as well as three trading cards randomly selected from a five-card set.

In case you’re wondering, the game is described as an arcade-style twin-stick shooter set in a vivid sci-fi universe. The player takes on the role of Junior Constable Cactus who must respond to a distress call and ends up stranded on a crippled space freighter under attack by its own robot workers.

With a draining battery mechanic instead of lives, Assault Android Cactus+ challenges players to think fast and shoot faster. Charge headfirst into an army of refitted robots, transforming stages and massive boss showdowns.

Will you be adding this to your collection? Leave a comment below.

Dark Horse

The world of The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt still has plenty of tales to tell, that’s why CD Projekt Red has once again teamed up with Dark Horse to release a new comic book series. It’s officially titled The Witcher: Fading Memories. It is the first issue (of four) and is due out on 17th June 2020. It’s being written by Bartosz Sztybor, drawn by Amad Mir and the cover artwork of the first issue has been done by Evan Cagle.

Here’s the official description, to help set the scene:

Geralt has become impoverished and dejected since monster threats have seemingly vanished. Times have always been hard for Witchers—but without continual work, his situation has worsened. As Geralt explores new possibilities for his life path, he receives a request from the Mayor of Towitz, a small town where children are being kidnapped by Foglets…but something feels off about this new threat.

You can see the previous releases in The Witcher series over on the Dark Horse Comics website. Do you enjoy the occasional comic? Would this Witcher one be of interest to you? Let us know in the comments.

Today we are brought the saddening news that Minecraft Festival has been postponed until Fall of next year.  The reasoning cited was health and safety as a precaution for attendees and organizers with the recent COVID-19 outbreak happening worldwide.  September is still half a year away, and no one knows what is going to happen, so please don’t take this as an indication to panic.  This is a “better safe than sorry” and no wants to continue the spread of this.

If you would like to educate yourself on COVID-19 you can visit this website for full details.  https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-coronaviruses

With this saddening news, we do have some good news to share.  Minecraft Live is still happening and we’ll cover more on that at another time.

“One unexpected consequence [of the COVID-19 outbreak] is a lot of us who are skeptical about remote work are gonna be less skeptical about it.”

– Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, speaking today at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference.

Take-Two Interactive chief Strauss Zelnick told an audience at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference today that he expects the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak will make believers out of some remote work skeptics in the game industry.

“I actually think one of the things that might come out of this, if it’s as widespread as I think it will be, one unexpected consequence is a lot of us who are skeptical about remote work are gonna be less skeptical about it,” Zelnick said. “I’m one of them, by the way; I’m not a big believer in remote work. But I think I may be surprised.”

It’s an illuminating response, one that came in answer to a question about whether or not the Take-Two CEO expects game makers working remotely due to COVID-19 concerns will be less productive than they would be in the office. The question specifically referenced Take-Two’s staff in California, but it comes right as Bungie, Microsoft, and other companies are making a show of allowing employees to work remotely for an extended period.

“They’re gonna have to find a way to be just as productive at home,” said Zelnick. “We have access to technology.”

He went on to predict “a significant change, maybe a long-lasting change, in business travel” across the game industry as the COVID-19 outbreak continues and more business is conducted remotely via videoconferencing platforms like Zoom.

After an early 2017 visit to Seattle, Brandon Laatsch and Alex Knoll were stuck at the airport for nearly seven hours. They had been up in the Pacific Northwest to see an early version of Valve’s new Index virtual reality controllers.

They were excited. “[Valve] showed us the Index long before anyone else,” said Knoll, who was still working on Stress Level Zero’s other project, Duck Season, at the time. “We immediately got the idea into our head of how this is going to change how we interact in VR.”

That experience gave them the idea of “the incredible physics experience” they wanted to create. Laatsch told Gamasutra over video chat, “We let ourselves run wild creatively. What would these controllers be for? It moved away from being controllers in your hands to capturing the presence of hands themselves. Let’s make something that centers around your physical agency.”

Laatsch started working on this new concept as soon as he got back to Los Angeles. It launched in December of last year as Boneworks and has become a breakout VR hit on PC and a standard-bearer for interactivity in VR.

Boneworks is an experimental, sandbox-style VR adventure with an extremely high level of interactivity. Laatsch describes the game’s concept as “full body presence, maneuverability throughout the world.” Players can move, pick up, and throw any items they would be able to in real life in order to solve puzzles and defeat enemies. Objects have weight and can be manipulated in ways not possible in most other VR games. “Creatively this felt like the start of VR generation 2,” Knoll said. “…It went from seeing everything to touching everything.”

Laatsch and Knoll believed that VR design was lacking elements of non-VR game design. Teleportation, the lack of an ability to jump or crouch, and the lack of full-body presence (our bodies are more than just floating hands and heads) limit the player’s perspective.

“VR games weren’t attempting to use those in their suite of tools,” Laatsch said. Stress Level Zero wanted to restore those elements in Boneworks and use them to encourage players to explore and interact with the environment in whatever way the players wanted.

Once they knew what they wanted the Boneworks concept to be, the team searched for a narrative structure that would help them direct their focus. They chose to set the game in a virtual operating system so they could move players into open rooms with combat encounters and puzzles.

Puzzles range from destroying boxes in order to reveal a crowbar that’s blocking a door, to using a hook to weigh down a bridge you need to walk across. All the puzzles are fairly simple and they give players the option to approach from multiple heights, angles, and items depending on the level.

“I wanted to just improvise most puzzles,” he said. “I had very few that I planned out in advance. I would essentially have the place where the player starts, the place where he needs to get to, and all these pieces and I would just start putting things together.”

Knoll and Laatsch knew players would try to manipulate and break the physics engine whenever possible to bypass puzzles, which is common for many games trying to do what Boneworks does. “Pre-launch, a lot of players assumed that they would be able to exploit the flaws in the physics system,” Knoll said. “And post-launch, it seems as though they’ve found that the physics is working well enough and is robust enough that there aren’t really any exploits they can accomplish with bugginess of the physics.”

The two designers believe the lack of bugginess is due to their commitment to “classic game mechanics.” Their commitment to the concept of full-body maneuverability means they couldn’t take some game design shortcuts that save time.

“We were able to do it by sticking with a pure simulation where there isn’t something introducing an infinite force. The way jumping works is that your feet physically thrust down to propel yourself up,” Laatsch said. “It’s not sudden like you just get a magical force pushing you up. Something went down in order to create this equal opposite reaction and the decision to stick with that made it our system robust against the normal sort of physics exploits. Just by sticking to the principles of classical mechanics.”

So when your character goes to jump in Boneworks, their legs actually bend as they prepare to leave the ground. Like all objects in the game, the player has an actual weight (82 kilograms) which helps ground the design. The jumps, and amount of force the player can apply to objects, is rooted in that weight. “It takes more code and more time to implement,” Laatsch said. “But the reward of implementing it that way and sticking with that format made everything sort of inherently compatible with each other.”

Despite a lack of exploits available to players, they’ve still created all sorts of ways to bypass puzzles that Knoll created. One player even created a pogo stick by combining a metal stick with a cannonball to better maneuver around a level. Solutions like that, which Laatsch and Knoll had no way of predicting, is something the development team wanted. Players can’t use exploits to help them get through puzzles, they wanted the physics engine to give a level of freedom that feels like an exploit even when it isn’t. 

For many challenges, if a player can think of a solution it’ll probably work. They can climb over fences, use a crowbar as a Swiss army knife, and all sorts of unconventional approaches. “If you feel like you’re breaking the puzzles in order to solve them, you’re doing it right,” Knoll said. This level of freedom for players does come with its own set of challenges, particularly that puzzles can’t be too complicated or intricate. Making too much of a specific task would mean players might be limited to how they can progress. 

“A lot of the design over the course of the game for me was very much like a roller coaster,” Knoll said before bringing up the level “Runoff” as a specific example. “Almost all the puzzles involved go upwards and all of the combat generally involves going downwards. That sort of exemplifies the feeling that I wanted to get across the entire game.”

Laatsch brought up a comparison to Breath of the Wild, that players can basically fast travel by using Link’s glider once they climb to a high enough peak. “The rewards for the puzzles is sometimes getting up to a higher altitude,” Laatsch said. “And then from that vantage point you’re going to be able to physically progress faster by going downhill.”

On the surface, Boneworks is a straightforward first-person shooter with a deep level of environmental interactions for its puzzles. What makes it special is how unprecedented that level of interaction really is. It’s something that the two didn’t think they could make without the experience of their previous games and the visit to Valve. 

It took iterating off their other games for years. The release of non-VR games No Brakes Games’ Human Fall Flat and Spiderling Studios​’ Besiege led them to believe that the market might be ready for a game with a physics engine with the depth they envisioned.

“I don’t think anybody could have made this game in 2016,” Laatsch said. “The three years of iterations, four or five years of developing the in VR, [and] thinking in VR before it all came together gave us the necessary experience. There was nothing stopping us from writing this code four years ago, other than that nobody knew how to do it.”