Our prayers have finally been answered as Nintendo has just announced that an Animal Crossing: New Horizons themed Nintendo Direct will be airing on 20th February.

This announcement comes to us through Nintendo’s Twitter account. Details are scarce, but we do know that this will be a “25-minute livestreamed #AnimalCrossing: New Horizons Direct, featuring an in-depth look at Nook Inc.’s Deserted Island Getaway Package!”

Here are the times you should tune in to catch this special presentation:

• Europe: 2pm UK / 3pm CET
• North America: 6am PT / 9am ET

With New Horizons launching on Switch in nearly a month, we surprisingly still have plenty of unanswered questions about the game. So hopefully we can expect to have a few of them cleared up soon!

What burning questions do you still have lingering inside about Animal Crossing: New Horizons? Will you be tuning in for this special Direct? Let us know down below!

This Week at Bungie, we had to fix the timeline.

Earlier this week, when we deployed 2.7.1, we discovered an issue causing players to lose various currencies. Our team immediately took action and brought the game down for maintenance while we worked to discover the source of the issue. We did this to minimize any further impact to players. We ended up doing the first-ever character rollback in Destiny’s history to ensure that no one lost any of their hard-earned materials. We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused by the unexpected maintenance and appreciated everyone’s patience while we worked to get the game back online.

We’ll continue to improve our efforts to minimize issues and downtime. Even though some bugs are always going to crawl through the cracks, we’ll be waiting on the other side with a swatter.

Empyrean Foundation

Next week, the Empyrean Foundation rebuild effort begins. Saint-14 will ask all Guardians to contribute to building a beacon that will be a foundation for things to come next Season. The Tower Obelisk will be the focal point of this event, so make sure you have it unlocked and ready to go as it’s going to have some hefty benefits to take advantage of.

Players will need to come together and contribute resources towards a common goal. To participate, players can donate their Fractaline using the Tower Obelisk. The event will have seven stages, each requiring increasing amounts of Fractaline to progress through. There will also be a hologram at the Tower Obelisk where you’ll be able to track the community’s progress in game.

Of course we aren’t going to ask you to fork over your hard-earned Fractaline without providing some benefits. Here’s what’s in it for you:

• Contributing to the Empyrean Foundation costs 100 Polarized Fractaline.
• Contributing generates a 25% flat progression for all Timelost weapon bounties in your inventory.
• Your Tower Obelisk will generate Polarized Fractaline for you each week equivalent to its Resonance Power.
• Increase its Resonance Power by upgrading other Obelisks
• Players who donate more than 5,000 Polarized Fractaline before the end of the Season will earn a Triumph and emblem.

Everyone in the community will also receive a shader when all stages are completed. Here’s a look at community goals for the seven stages.

Stage 1: 400,000,000

Stage 2: 700,000,000

Stage 3: 1,200,000,000

Stage 4: ???

Stage 5: ???

Stage 6: ???

Stage 7: ???

Everyone is welcome to contribute. This event will be available to all Destiny 2 players and doesn’t require the Season Pass. You can start prepping this week by stockpiling Fractaline and making sure that your Tower Obelisk is powered up and ready to go.

Prime Time

Yesterday, we announced that we are teaming up with Twitch Prime to deliver in-game rewards to Destiny 2 players with an active Prime membership. We are planning to have six monthly drops, with each drop containing four rewards.

The first gear drop is live now and will be available until February 25. It includes the SUROS Regime Auto Rifle, the Coup de Main Ornament, the Skyline Flipside Exotic Ghost Shell, and the unsecured/OUTCRY Exotic ship.

Guardian Giveaways

This week, the Bungie Store is celebrating Guardians everywhere with a giveaway contest featuring curated collections of Destiny gear, including sold-out Shadowkeep Collector’s Editions signed by the Bungie team. For a limited time, a variety of discounted merchandise bundles are available on bungiestore.com and eu.bungiestore.com.

To enter, follow @BungieStore on Twitter, retweet the current giveaway post and add #GuardianGiveaways. The contest ends February 4, 2020 8:59 AM PST. Entries from EU, UK, USA, & CN only (see Rules for excluded provinces and states). 18+ to enter. Please see the Official Rules for more information.

Guardians for Australia

Our “Guardians for Australia” T-shirt is still available for pre-order on the Bungie Store and Bungie Store EU. Half of all profits generated by these T-shirt sales will be donated to NSW Rural Fire Service. The second half will be donated to WIRES, Australia’s largest wildlife rescue organization.

Purchase of the shirt also includes an exclusive Destiny 2 “Star Light, Star Bright” emblem. Thanks for helping us support Australia’s firefighting and animal rescue efforts.

Rollback to the Future

Player Support has a key role of working with the entire team to make sure you are aware of deployments and efforts to restore service during outages.

This is their report.

UPDATE 2.7.1 AND ROLLING BACK ACCOUNTS

After Update 2.7.1 went live on Tuesday, January 28, the Player Support team began noticing a trend of topics where users had lost various Destiny 2 currencies and infusion materials. After verifying this issue, it was decided by several Bungie teams to take the game down in an attempt to prevent more players from being affected.

Due to the rollback:

After the rollback completed, Destiny 2 server came back online around 7:00 PM PST. We are continuing to investigate why this issue occurred and may provide more information about it in the future.

TWITCH PRIME SUPPORT

To receive the gear drops mentioned in the Prime Time section above, players will need an active Amazon Prime account, Bungie.net account, and a Destiny 2 account. Once these accounts are linked, players can claim their drops on the Destiny 2 Twitch Prime website, then log into Destiny 2 and speak to Amanda Holliday in the Tower Hangar to claim the drops.

CURRENT KNOWN ISSUES

While we continue investigating various known issues, here is a list of the latest issues that were reported to us in our #Help Forum:

For a full list of emergent issues in Destiny 2, players can review our Known Issues article. Players who observe other issues should report them to our #Help forum.

Year of the Rat Kings

You ever see a video so funny that you sprayed milk out of your nose? I haven’t, but I have a strict no-drinking-milk-while-watching-videos policy. Take a look at our winning movie this week (and careful with the milk!)

Movie of the Week: Rat Attack

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj1vjarEP70?wmode=transparent&rel=0&fs=1&w=1136&h=641]

Honorable Mention: Awakening

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8il7bURWIVE?wmode=transparent&rel=0&fs=1&w=1136&h=641]

Movie of the Week winners will find a new emblem in their collections. Just make sure to put a link to your Bungie.net profile pages if you win so we know where to send them. We’ll pick our favorite video from anywhere on the safe-for-work internet where Destiny videos are posted. But if you really want that emblem, the best place to submit your video is the Community Creations page.

When you read this, I’ll be traveling to visit family in Texas and Oklahoma next week. But don’t worry, the Community team has been growing fat with strength and will have everything covered while I’m out. I won’t be fully out of action though. I’ll be contributing to the Empyrean Foundation community event from the road using Stadia.

We look forward to watching the community mobilize in force to answer our challenge. We always try to set the bar high, since you have crushed our expectations in the past. Let’s see what you got this time.

<3 Cozmo

Mobile quiz show maker HQ Trivia has closed its doors and laid off its remaining 25 employees after a planned acquisition fell through at the last minute.

As reported by TechCrunch, the studio terminated all of its employees and contractors upon learning the news, with CEO and co-founder Rus Yusupov letting staff know via email.

“We received an offer from an established business to acquire HQ and continue building our vision, had definitive agreements and legal docs, and a projected closing date of tomorrow, and for reasons we are still investigating, they suddenly changed their position and despite our best efforts, we were unable to reach an agreement,” he wrote.

“Unfortunately, our lead investors are no longer willing to fund the company, and so effective today, HQ will cease operations and move to dissolution. All employees and contractors will be terminated as of today.”

For those unfamiliar with the name, HQ Trivia is the company behind HQ, the once popular live quizzing app that allowed players around the world to win a share of a cash prize. At its peak the game boasted over 2.3 million concurrent players and offered cash prize pots worth up to $250,000.

Eventually, however, interest in the title waned, and last year the company laid off around 20 percent of its workforce after monthly downloads fell by 92 percent.

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from video game industry ‘watcher’ Simon Carless (GDC, Gamasutra co-runner, No More Robots advisor), rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend.

The latest highlights include the politics in games discussion re-ignited by Tim Sweeney’s DICE comments – I was at the show in Las Vegas this week, btw, thanks to Meggan Scavio & the AIAS team for putting on another great event.

Also discussed this week: the full launch of Media Molecule’s Dreams, a look at new games like Wide Ocean Big Jacket, a long-time collector on the video game collecting boom, & loads more besides. (Oh, and happy Valentine’s Day!)

Until next time…
– Simon, curator.]

——————

Video game development in Iran: Limited tools, front companies and a specter of war (Aron Garst / Washington Post – ARTICLE)
“January 3 was a regular workday in Isfahan, Iran, for indie game developer Mahdi Bahrami. Then he read the news. Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani had been killed in Baghdad by an airstrike authorized by United States President Donald Trump. That’s when Bahrami’s normal day dissolved into fears for his loved ones and his livelihood.”

What the CEO of Epic Games gets wrong about video games and politics (Kyle Orland / Ars Technica – ARTICLE)
“Sweeney is trying to walk a thin tightrope here, allowing for wide-ranging individual expression as a platform holder while trying to maintain political silence as a corporate entity. But those dueling principles can come into inherent conflict because producing and selling games, like producing and selling any other work of art, involves any number of inherently political choices and expressions. [SIMON’S NOTE: Having attended Sweeney’s talk, it was an unfortunate self-derail at the end of an interesting and provocative speech on the need for open platforms, which you can watch on YouTube.]

The Unpredictable Challenges Of Gaming With Cerebral Palsy (Jane Humen / Kotaku – ARTICLE)
“Despite my best efforts, I cannot do anything that requires quick physical movement. Because of my brain injury I respond to on-screen stimuli more slowly than most players. This is particularly noticeable in racing games like Mario Kart, where making quick turns is sometimes impossible, or shooting games like Fortnite, where slow reaction times detract from my ability to survive without help from other players.”

That time the US Secret Service mistook a cyberpunk RPG for a hacker’s handbook (Jody McGregor / Dicebreaker – ARTICLE)
“The Secret Service confiscated computers Steve Jackson Games used to run its BBS (which is what people used to have in the days before online forums and comment sections existed), as well as every computer with files relating to then-unpublished GURPS Cyberpunk. They tore open boxes, damaged a letter opener trying to pick a locked filing cabinet and, according to some accounts, ate jelly beans off someone’s desk.”

Squeezing into the Industry: How a Couple African Kids Made a Video Game (Ben Myres & Cukia Kimani / GDC / YouTube – VIDEO)
“In this 2019 GDC session, Nyamakop’s Ben Myres and Cukia Kimani delve into the unique challenges/opportunities of making games in an African country and explore the notion of “breaking into” the independent games space.”

No Man’s Sky’s Interstellar NIMBYs Clash With a Would-Be Railroad Tycoon (Gita Jackson / VICE – ARTICLE)
“”You had already so many beautiful communities out there, along with these excellent creators that we have. But they were so scattered around the whole entire No Man’s Sky game, and online,” May said. “I mean, basically there were only maybe five or six that were getting an internal viewing, but it wasn’t enough for the world actually see some of these creations.””

Are Graded Video Games the New Equivalent to Graded Comics and Baseball Cards? (Harry Rinker / Rinker On Collectibles)
“Taking the high ground initially, I told Jason that there was a long list of positives already in place to create a possible long-term video game collecting market. First, the earliest video games are now 50 years old. As a result, games from the first 20 years fall outside Rinker’s 30 Year Rule—for the first 30 years of anything’s life all its value is speculative.”

Why did Dreams take Media Molecule seven years to make? (Martin Robinson / Eurogamer – ARTICLE)
“Finally, some seven years after it first broke cover at 2013’s PlayStation Meeting as it accompanied the unveiling of the PlayStation 4, Media Molecule’s Dreams is here, its long and winding road concluding towards the tail-end of that particular console’s life. Except it’s not the end of Dreams, of course – it’s the beginning of a project that will transform over time according to the community’s needs and wants. [SIMON’S NOTE: semi-related, here’s an interesting The Verge piece on crediting/exposure of Dreams creations.]”

Ubisoft Reveals A Surprise Division 2 Expansion ‘Warlords of New York’ That Is Designed To Revive The Game (Stephen Totilo / Kotaku – ARTICLE)
“These massive games that are designed to be people’s forever pastimes often flop badly. With conspicuous frequency, many of them are able to correct themselves, as developers reinvent their work, take on useful feedback and, at times, just keep their heads down and make them into something new and better. With luck, the fans come along.”

The Making of Titanfall 2’s ‘Effect and Cause’, Revealed by Respawn Entertainment Senior Designer (Game Brain / YouTube – VIDEO)
“Titanfall 2’s stellar time traveling level, Effect and Cause, is arguably one of the most memorable gaming moments of the 2010’s. I sat down with senior designer, Jake Keating, to hear about the level’s creation and the biggest challenges he and the team faced making ‘Effect and Cause’ a reality.”

2020 Predictions #7: Why Auto-Chess Games can’t Monetize – and How to Fix That (Giovanni Ducati / Deconstructor Of Fun – ARTICLE)
“In 2019, it was DotA’s turn to incubate a new idea with a lot of potential: Auto Chess. In this analysis we will explore, if 2020 will be the year in which Auto Chess sees widespread commercial success. To save you from the suspense, the answer is NO. But we encourage you to read further to understand why. [SIMON’S NOTE: there’s so little writing about F2P, which is >50% of the revenue of the game biz – read all of these great stats-filled prediction pieces if you can, since you need to know what’s up, whether you agree with the monetization tactics or not…]”

Not-so-Dead Cells: Why maintaining an archive of your game is good for both you and your players (Gwenael Masse / VentureBeat – ARTICLE)
“So do we have a responsibility to preserve our past, for the benefit of us and others? We think so. It’s taken two years, but we recently released the Legacy Update on Steam, an archive of major Dead Cells iterations from 2017 to the present. They say you can’t make everyone happy, but it turns out you can — with a little planning.”

How Hades plays with Greek myths (Alex Wiltshire / RockPaperShotgun – ARTICLE)
“When Supergiant Games started to make Hades, their Rogue-like action-RPG, they had plenty of experience making narrative games. Across Bastion, Transistor and Pyre, they’d found they were pretty good at telling stories. But in a Rogue-like? And what’s that? They intended to put Hades in Early Access? Could they ever fit with the kind of rich characterisation and storytelling that made Supergiant’s name?”

And relax … the joy of video games where you do almost nothing (Keith Stuart / The Guardian – ARTICLE)
“Coffee Talk comes from a long line of quietly transgressive games that don’t ask much of the player, that defy the popular notion of video games as a hectic, dizzying pursuit where buttons are bashed and the onscreen action is intense and demanding. Games, like music, can sometimes sit in the background, asking for little more than occasional check-ins.”

The Animation of Phoenix Wright (New Frame Plus / YouTube – VIDEO)
“A professional animator explains what makes the extremely limited animation in the Ace Attorney series so effective.”

‘Nobody talks about it because everyone is on it’: Adderall presents esports with an enigma (Coleman Hamstead / Washington Post – ARTICLE)
“Aspiring to become a full-time streamer and make a career out of his love for gaming, former semipro Halo player Matthew “MellowMajik” Murphy follows a weekly ritual. Every Friday and Saturday night, he comes home and gets on his new favorite game, Fortnite. But before he logs on, Murphy swallows a pill he thoroughly believes will aid him in becoming the best player he can be.”

Luigi’s Mansion 3 Developers On Money, Moral Choices And Luigi’s Approach To Heroism (Stephen Totilo / Kotaku – ARTICLE)
“Ask a long-time Nintendo developer a question about Luigi’s Mansion 3 on the Switch and the next thing you know, you’re getting a snippet of insight about the creation of 1991 Super Nintendo classic The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past. Nintendo’s top people have been honing their craft for a long time and their expertise runs deep. [SIMON’S NOTE: I didn’t realize until at the DICE Awards last night that the core developer of Luigi’s Mansion 3 is a Western dev, long-time Nintendo partner Next Level Games. Duh…]”

Dutch’s real-life mom plays through Red Dead Redemption 2 (Owen S. Good / Polygon – ARTICLE)
“The 75-year-old mother of the actor who played Dutch van der Linde in Red Dead Redemption 2 played through the entire open-world game so she could understand what it was her son had done, and why millions hailed the work. And the essay she wrote about her experience is a wonderfully affirming, outsider’s commentary on fan culture, particularly in video gaming.”

‘Wide Ocean Big Jacket’ Is About the Million Tiny Moments That Define Our Lives (Patrick Klepek / VICE – ARTICLE)
“Wide Ocean Big Jacket wasn’t on my radar until days before it came out last week. It looked quirky and charming, and after spending a little under two hours finishing it, I can confirm it is, in fact, quirky and charming. But “quirky and charming” has become an overused descriptor for a certain type of indie game, and Wide Ocean Big Jacket is more than just its aesthetic, it’s heartfelt, funny, and most importantly, grounded.”

Between censorship and Steam, Chinese indie developers are hanging by a thread (Steven Messner / PC Gamer – ARTICLE)
“In a market defined by free-to-play online games, the term ‘indie’ doesn’t mean much to a lot of Chinese gamers. But that doesn’t stop over 10,000 attendees from gathering on the first floor of the enormous Shanghai Convention and Exhibition Center of International Sourcing to showcase and celebrate Chinese indie games.”

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[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at tinyletter.com/vgdeepcuts – we crosspost to Gamasutra later, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to [email protected]. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra & an advisor to indie publisher No More Robots, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

Today we are checking out TextureLab, a free and open source texture generation tool for Windows and Linux.  While fairly early in it’s development, TextureLab aims to be similar in capability to Substance Designer in function.

TextureLab features include:
– Export all textures at once or save them individually
– Unity Export
– 25+ nodes and counting
– Cross-Platform (It’s built using electron and vue)
– Fast! All filtering and texture generation operations are done on the GPU
– Free and Open Source

TextureLab is licensed under the GPLv3 open source license with the code written in TypeScript and hosted in an Electron app.  TextureLab is not the only open source alternative to Substance Designer under development, we have already looked at MaterialMaker , TexGraph and Imogen in the past.  You can learn more about and see TextureLab in action in the video below.

[embedded content]

Art GameDev News Tools

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I’m glad we’ve seen some decent games come out recently – it’s been a good week for reviews for premium games, which is let me do some experimenting with news and older content to see what we can do to keep things ticking over.

In case you were wondering, the new Editor & Staff Writer for Pocket Tactics have been hired, and they’ll be starting next month. You’ll be getting some official comms from me as to what’s going to be happening so you guys are in the loop, but it won’t be till week after next at least as I’m on holiday next week. With that in mind, there also won’t be a Weekender update next week. The header image is courtesy of Book of Demon’s Steam page.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away…

New App Releases

Company of Heroes (iPad)

This is just a reminder for anyone who didn’t read our review yesterday, but Company of Heroes is now finally out on iPad. Feral did another great job adapting this classic RTS for the smaller screens, although as always with these kinds of games they can only do so much. There are plenty of actions in CoH that require a bit of finesse and these are still a little bit awkward to do on an iPad, even if the excellent new control scheme.

Also worth noting that this is just the base game’s single-player campaign and then up to 4v4 Skirmishes against the AI. There’s no multiplayer as of yet, and nothing from the game’s two expansions either. These are hopefully coming further down the line.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-rMobgLbuo?controls=0]

Book of Demons (iPad)

Another tablet-exclusive game, Book of Demons has been making a name for itself on Steam since 2018, and is now ready to conquer the hearts & minds of iOS tablet users. It mixes hack’n slash dungeon crawling with deck-building mechanics. It features procedurally generated dungeons and a seperate rogue-like mode. The Steam page mentions controller support, but we’re unsure whether this functionality has made it into the iOS version.

I’ve got Matt S on the case, so hopefully our review will be live before the end of the month. Early chatter from the web seems favourable, though.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiELWd723yE?controls=0]

Also of note:

• Microsoft’s game streaming service, Project xCloud, has finally come to iOS, although it’s a lot more restricted than the Android counterpart.
• Pokemon Home, the new service app that allows you to track your Pokemon collection across multiple games (amongst other things), is now available on. We can only find an iOS store link right now, but it’s also supposed to be on Android (and the Switch).

App Updates & News

Some pretty cool updates and announcements dropped this past week, here’s the summary:

Stardew Valley has finally updated the mobile version to 1.4, which was a huge update that added a new map, lots of new items, a new end-game mystery… even a movie theatre! You can read the full change-log here, but it contains spoilers. Saves from the PC version of the game should also now work in the mobile version.

GWENT is coming to Android! After some rumours started circulating earlier in the week, CDPR finally announced that the hit Witcher card game spin-off will be coming to the Google Play store on March 24th, 2020. Progress can be synced between iOS and PC if you use your GOG account. Pre-registration is available now, and if you sign-up you get an exclusive avatar to use in-game.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrGfn2iePDQ?controls=0]

Minecraft Earth’s Early Access build has also been updated to Version 0.12.0, and includes persistent health between Adventures as well as being able to eat meat to regain health. There’s also a new mob called the Wooly Cow. A few new Android phone models have also been green-lit to play the game. Check out the full notes here.

Perchang, creators of Warhammer Quest & Warhammer Quest 2 are back with another entry in the tactical RPG series. This time they’re ditching the Old World for the Mortal Realms with Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower. This new title is reported to have a big campaign, ten playable champions as well as weekly trials. It’s due out on iOS and Android later this year.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TtpZzc5JtQ?controls=0]

App Sales

It’s nice to see some decent sales on the table again – this year’s been a little dry so far. Here’s what we’ve found:

• Asmodee Digital are running a sale on a number (but not all) of their titles on iOS and Android. Notable ones include Twilight Struggle & Jaipur, but there are a few others as well.
• Stardew Valley is down to $4.99 on mobile to celebrate the release of the 1.4 Update.
• Knights of the Card Table, a quirky deck-building dungeon-crawler is down to $2.99 – it’s best price to date.
• We weren’t huge fans of Codex of Victory when it released back in 2017, but it’s currently down to $0.99 so who cares. Maybe it’s gotten better in recent years?

Seen anything else you liked? Played any of the above? Let us know in the comments!