The more popular a Nintendo product gets, the more bizarre the third-party accessories become – remember the Wii days? It’s perhaps to be expected, then, that the Switch Lite is the latest machine to get in on the weird accessory shenanigans.

That’s right, available to pre-order now from Amazon Japan with international shipping is this Nintendo Switch Lite neck strap. With a stretchy silicon grip section to wrap around your console, and a strap to wrap around your own head, you’ll be able to keep your console on your person with minimal effort.

If the pictures are to be believed, it can help to support the console while you play or droop around your neck like a super-expensive ID card. It’s certainly an interesting way to carry your console, and while we couldn’t face the idea of letting it dangle around like that, perhaps this sounds like the perfect accessory for you.

If it does, you can go ahead and pick up a Grey, Turquoise or Yellow option from Amazon for 1,100 yen before tax and shipping (approx. £8 / $10).

What do you think? Will you be getting one? Let us know with a comment below.

One of the many games featured in August’s Nindies Showcase presentation, EarthNight, has just scored a solid release date on Nintendo Switch. You’ll be able to get your hands on it from 3rd December.

In case you can’t quite remember what it’s all about, let us give you a quick recap. The game is a hand-drawn action-platformer set during a dragon apocalypse – mankind is living in exile on space colonies orbiting the planet. The game’s star duo – a sword-wielding freelance photographer and a young student blessed with ethereal superpowers – take it upon themselves to reclaim their home by skydiving through Earth’s atmosphere and striking back against the monsters below.

Here’s a little more info taken from the press release:

“The two heroes approach their dragon-slaying mission with drastically different tactics. Stanley’s powerful legs allow him to make both high jumps and long leaps, while Sydney favours agility by making use of an air dash and double jump ability. Both heroes wield their bespoke skills to overcome hostile environments and push towards the vulnerable heads of their scaled serpentine foes.

“Each EarthNight level features procedurally-generated dragons with multiple exits and secrets rewarding exploration. Slaying dragons grants Sydney and Stanley rewards like dragon eggs and other mysterious objects that unlock powerful upgrades. With the right tools, the duo can topple even the toughest opponents while moving through stages at breakneck speeds.”

“EarthNight represents seven years of hard work from a collective of talented artists and the final product is something we’re immensely proud to share with everyone,” says Rich Siegel, founder of Cleaversoft. “We hope that Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Steam players are as excited to hurtle back to Earth and slay dragons as we are to watch them.”

The game will be available for $14.99 / €13.99 / £12.59 / $21.00 AUD when it launches in December.

Do you like the look of it? Will you be adding it to your collection? Tell us below.

BEES!

Bzzzzzzz, bzz, bzzzzzz. Bzz bzzzzz bzzzzzz.

Minecraft 1.15 has had it’s first snapshot, and this one adds bees. This snapshot also includes bee nests and hives for those little bees to live in, and honeycombs. I’ve not been able to play with this snapshot, but honey is always nice.

On the technical side, Java Edition now requires OpenGL 2.0. If you have a computer that’s at least not 10 years old, you should be okay.

Loot tables have a new function called copy_states, which copies states. I mean, what else would you expect?

You can start playing this snapshot by selecting it in your launcher. The server jar is located here: https://launcher.mojang.com/v1/objects/288962c67d083e35d4313cf0eba8ad1e27173d17/server.jar

(Don’t you love having to write news when you can’t open Minecraft!).

Why don’t you show some of the bees in action, or if you’re a more… savvy player, show some of the new dispenser or loot table functionality?

UPDATE

Mojang has posted their blog post about this update, which has more information about these changes.

You can find the full post here: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-snapshot-19w34a

We’re buzzing with excitement!

Can someone tell Cory to stop making bee puns now?

• Bees are cute, fuzzy, neutral mobs
• Don’t hurt them, they don’t want to hurt you
• If a bee does sting you, it will leave its stinger in you and eventually die, dropping nothing
• Bees love pretty flowers and spend their lives gathering pollen from them
• After gathering pollen, bees fly back to their home nest
• Bees help you by growing crops while carrying pollen back to the nest
• Bees can be bred using flowers
• Bees like sharing the location of their favorite flowers with other bees
• If a bee can’t find nectar, after a while it will return home for a bit
• If a bee doesn’t have a home nest, it will wander around until it finds one it can use
• Bees don’t like the rain and they sleep at night. They will go back to the nest in these cases

In real life, bees dance in their nests to show other bees where flowers are!

• Bee Nests spawn naturally in Flower Forests, Plains, and Sunflower Plains biomes
• When a bee visits this block and completes its journey undisturbed, the level of honey increases
• Max of 5 levels of honey
• Level 5 is quite…sticky
• Bees use nests and hives to share flower locations with other bees
• Sometimes bees that already know about a flower will choose not to use this information
• Bee Hives are crafted by players using honeycomb and wood planks
• Use a silk touch tool to get the block with the bees stored inside
• Bee Nests will be destroyed unless you use silk touch
• Use shears when at full honey to get honeycomb
• Use a bottle when at full honey to get a honey bottle
• Campfire smoke calms bees – place one underneath the nest / hive to keep them in chill mode
• Redstone-friendly!
• Bees like Bee Nests and Bee Hives the same amount! They don’t play favorites
• Added the Honey Bottle!

Organic, gluten-free, delicious locally-farmed honey!

• Use an empty glass bottle on a hive or nest that is full of honey to get a bottle of honey!
• Drink it!
• ???
• Profit!
• Oh yeah, also craft it into sugar!
• Added Honeycomb!

Disclaimer: Cannot be used to comb your hair

• Shear a full-honey hive or nest to obtain
• Craft with wood planks to create a Bee Hive

• Dispensers can now fill bottles with water and honey
• Dispensers can now shear honey combs from Bee Nests and Hives

COPY_STATE

Copies state properties from dropped block to BlockStateTag in dropped item

PARAMETERS

• block – source of properties (block id)
• properties – list of property names. All must be present on block

• MC-74762 – Chunks Swapping
• MC-103313 – Hitbox of slime and magma cube is offset for some seconds
• MC-115643 – Can’t hear punching blocks with ‘Friendly Creatures’ volume off
• MC-133255 – Cartographers generate maps for existing Mansions and Monuments rather than unexplored ones
• MC-142918 – The stonecutter does not allow custom recipe inputs to be shift-clicked in
• MC-148562 – Obsidian towers in the end are not generated as intended.
• MC-150202 – Chunks sometimes are dislocated / copied to another location
• MC-151354 – Can’t rearrange servers with shortcut
• MC-152100 – blaze powder does not put in slot with shift
• MC-152172 – Cartography table plays the sound multiple times overlapping on shift-click
• MC-152173 – Loom plays the sound multiple times overlapping on shift-click
• MC-156276 – Cannot shift-click while riding a horse, within inventory
• MC-156852 – Ghost blocks remain when insta-mining; reappearance of MC-5694
• MC-156876 – “desert_small_house_7″one door open status is open
• MC-156884 – Bows sometimes don’t use the correct texture when being drawn in creative mode
• MC-156952 – Village tree center has leaves that are persistent
• MC-157136 – Villagers restocking is not properly tracked
• MC-158988 – Minecraft will remove up to several hundred chunks per region if region file isn’t exact multiple of 4096 bytes

Hi, everyone! I know we shared some exciting news last week when we revealed the newest game in the “Surviving” series from Paradox. We mentioned that the game would be available to check out soon via Xbox Game Preview, but today I got to announce the crucial answer to the inevitable question of when: Surviving the Aftermath is available to play today as an Xbox Game Preview title on Xbox One.

Xbox Game Preview lets us share this game with our fans much earlier than usual, which is going to be fantastic for a creative game like Surviving the Aftermath. Players have their work cut out for them in this post-apocalyptic survival game: yes, you’ll need to deal with crises at home, from supplying food and water to ensuring your colonists can withstand several potential catastrophes. However, handling your own colony is just the beginning — once you get your colonists ready to start scouting the world around them, you’ll discover that you’re not the only ones fighting to survive. Visitors, new colonists, and hostile bandits are out there waiting for you, and it’s up to you to decide how your own survivors will handle these new problems!

Just as in the game, this Xbox Game Preview title launch is just the beginning. We think you’re going to enjoy what we have so far in Surviving the Aftermath but joining us in this early phase means you can take part in shaping this game for the future. We want to hear your feedback: what parts of Surviving the Aftermath feel fun to you? What parts should have been left behind and destroyed in the apocalypse? How many meteors are too many? We’re working with Xbox Game Preview to allow you to supply direct feedback and comments from inside the game via the lady bug menu at the top right of your screen, and join us as our game grows, changes, adapts, and ultimately thrives as it faces the world of tomorrow.

Surviving the Aftermath is going to be an intense, exciting, and inspirational journey for us. I’m talking about both the game and the development process, mind you! Players who join us for this experience will get Surviving the Aftermath at a reduced price while it’s in Xbox Game Preview and can look forward to regular updates and new features as the game grows and improves with feedback you have provided.

I hope you’re as excited to build something amazing with us!

Surviving the Aftermath is available now for Xbox One on the Microsoft Store as an Xbox Game Preview Title. Click here for additional information.

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.

Here are just some of the many, many positions being advertised right now. If you’re a recruiter looking for talent, you can also post jobs here.

Location: Irvine, California

Obsidian Entertainment is looking for a Combat Designer with proven experience developing first-person melee combat gameplay to join our team of talented developers. This role will work closely with artists, animators, audio, and gameplay programmers to determine the overall flow, look, and feel of the total combat experience. The ideal candidate will be someone who can collaboratively plan and create fun, visceral, and epic combat including the main character, AI characters, and gameplay objects across varied encounter types.

Location: Chicago, Illinois

Currently, we’re looking for a junior programmer. This opportunity is for a full-time position in Chicago, IL. Junior programmers at Disbelief are called on to develop and debug in a variety of areas from game play to core engine programming. You are expected to learn new systems and projects as you grow as a developer, with support and training from more senior members of the team. Most importantly, you will work to solve problems with the help of the team. We work with leading edge technologies to make them perform at the top of their capabilities, and we take pride in solving problems others can’t. We believe a diverse team is a stronger team, and we encourage marginalized programmers to apply.

Location: Bellevue, Washington

Senior React Front-End Developer will take a prominent role in UI development utilizing their expertise implementing React.js components and workflows (e.g. Redux) to support our Pokémon Organized Play initiatives.  This role is responsible for ensuring overall Web and/or React Native Mobile app robustness and ease of maintainability, writing high-quality code that is well-tested, and meeting the high demands of our fans.  The Senior Software Engineer will work with members inside and outside the Technology Organization with a focus on software design and user experience, plus set an example for other Software Engineers.

Location:Maryland Heights, Missouri

Simutronics is expanding its awesome team and we are looking for an Assistant Technical Artist with experience in 3D art pipelines for games. We need someone who can help the art team keep everything running smoothly. If this sounds like you, then we want to talk.

Location: Burbank, California

Insomniac Games is searching for its next Lead Level Designer. This should be someone who’ll lead the Level Design team in the operation of designing, developing, and polishing game levels including level geometry, enemy encounters, puzzles, and unique gameplay. The individual in this position works closely with the project Leads, Design Director, Game Director, and/or Creative Director to help ensure game levels have cutting edge features, are creatively entertaining, and well balanced. This role will schedule team through the pre-production, production, and polish phases.

Despite being the glimmering jewel of the GameCube’s launch, Luigi’s Mansion has enjoyed relatively few sequels for such a beloved Mario spin-off. The 3DS had a pop with a well-liked sequel, and the original got a second chance on the same system with a remake. Now it’s time for a true home console follow-up with Luigi’s Mansion 3, but can it stand up to the original in all its glorious originality?

The game starts off as you might expect – Luigi’s been sent an unsolicited invitation to come and stay as a VIP guest in a luxury hotel, and if that sounds familiar, well, how else are you supposed to set up this kind of game? He’s not alone though, as Mario, Princess Peach and a small gaggle of Toads are also along for the ride, and when they arrive, everything seems peachy (sorry) to the sextet of participants. To us players however, the red flags are all over the place. None of the staff seem to be normal, for starters; they’re all wearing creepy masks and their lack of feet makes them look like they’ve walked in from Fire Emblem: Awakening or something. It’s almost as if (and please at least try to act shocked) the whole hotel is haunted and populated by ghosts, which is just as well or this would be a very boring game.

And lo, it comes to light that there are some shady events transpiring, namely that the hotel’s owner (as well as the ever-welcome King Boo) has lured our supporting cast so they can be trapped in paintings against their will. Our old friend E Gadd has also befallen this fate, and so it’s up to Luigi to scour the many floors of the hotel, free his friends, suck up ghosts, and accumulate the ungodly amount of loose cash lying around the place because someone’s got to make a profit.

The Poltergust 3000 is so last year, the Poltergust 5000 is totally ‘whatever’, and the Poltergust 4000 was a Kart that isn’t practical in confined spaces, so this time around Luigi’s wielding the Poltergust G-00, which, just like the new iPhone, is able to produce an exact replica of Luigi made entirely out of nondescript jelly (OK, we might be wrong about the new iPhone bit). That’s not all it can do though; Luigi is now able to fire suction shots which attach to certain objects like a plunger, emit a dark light to reveal hidden objects a la Luigi’s Mansion 2, and even slam ghosts about the place like they’re made of wet tissue paper.

But the main event in this new arsenal is the cheeky chappy we alluded to earlier known as ‘Gooigi’. Not only does ‘he’ raise numerous ethical questions about the enslavement of sentient gelatinous artificial life forms, but also has all the abilities of Luigi to boot, as well as the means to pass through grating and other spaces that are too small even for the slightly less portly of the two plumber brothers. Gooigi’s molecular makeup does come at a cost though, as although he appears even more powerful than Luigi on the face of it, he does share the same weakness as Sonic the Hedgehog and the aliens from Signs: water. Get him even marginally moist and he’ll melt away into a useless pile of slop before slurping himself back up into the Poltergust.

You use Gooigi either when Luigi simply can’t traverse an obstacle, or in a few instances where two bodies are required to make progress, such as a door that needs raising and holding open through a mechanism that you simply can’t reach and get through the door at the same time. At first, the situations that demand the gooey cousin seem a bit too obvious, giving the impression that they’ve been shoehorned in; a gimmick to grab people’s attention that doesn’t necessarily fit the gameplay, especially as only one of the -igis can be controlled at any one time. As the game goes on, however, you’ll be surprised and pleased at the clever ways the two can work together to overcome obstacles and this sense of building wonderment is something that rings true for the gameplay as a whole.

To begin with, you may be a little bored if you’re a Luigi’s Mansion master; the game is of a slower pace, and the solutions to most of the mandatory puzzles probably won’t tax you much at all. Get further into the game, though, and things start to take a pleasing turn for the better; simple puzzles are still present, but they’re often presented in a way that forces you to think twice, and sometimes even second guess yourself. We even found puzzles that seemed completely impossible at first glance, only for the solution to be so achingly simple that we felt properly embarrassed even though we were in our own homes, and with the curtains drawn. In terms of the mainline gameplay, the solutions are generally relatively simple but often clever in their execution. If you want a bit more brunt however, you can find it with the hidden gems.

Each floor of the hotel has six gems hidden somewhere, and although you’ll probably stumble across one, two, maybe three in your first run through a floor, the rest are often extremely well hidden. Sometimes you’ll even be shown the gem which is only just out of reach, and there were instances where we went mad trying to figure out how to get our grubby, white-gloved mitts on them, but the sense of accomplishment for finally being able to snag that one last gem that’s been eluding you is pretty difficult to top. It’s all optional as well, so if you’re not keen on that higher level of difficulty, you can just pass them all by without so much as a by-your-leave.

All of this would be for nothing if the puzzles weren’t fun, however, and as you’ve probably guessed already from the overall tone of this review, they’re great fun. Couple these brain teasers with bouts of scuffling with undead ghoulies and you’ll be having yourself a jolly old jaunt through this gigantic beast of a building. But that’s not what Luigi’s Mansion is most remembered for, is it? Who remembers how many pink ghosts were in the dining hall or where to find the most pearls? No, what we and everyone else on the planet remembers are the Portrait Ghosts, and their triumphant return in the form of Boss Ghosts is where the gameplay shines the most fiercely.

A medieval knight, a prehistoric caveman, a literal pirate shark – the boss ghosts are, without a doubt, the highlight of the whole game. We don’t want to give anything away here, but suffice to say it’s amazing just how many creative and ingenious boss fights are possible using little more than a vacuum cleaner. Each contest is memorable, dramatic, and even decently challenging, and completing them will grant you a new button for the elevator that’ll allow you to make your way to the next floor. Every boss is brimming with personality, and leaves you desperate to see what the next area has in store for you.

Each area is completely distinct from the others thematically, ranging from a shopping centre to a gym complete with pool, a museum of natural history to a film studio; the variety is seriously rich throughout. What did leave us a tiny bit disappointed is the fact that all of these floors are not only distinct in terms of their aesthetic but also in terms of their layout. Each floor in Luigi’s Mansion 3 can only be accessed from the elevator, meaning the interconnectivity of the original game and suspicious dead ends are all gone, leaving only the essentially linear progression of floors in its place. It’s only a small gripe, and one that probably won’t bother most people playing given the sheer scale of the building and the gorgeous themed areas, all of which are immensely beautiful and charming. Speaking of which, we should probably talk about that as well.

The entire game from head to toe is absolutely dripping with charm and polish. The animations are so good that not only would they not look out of place in an animated feature film, they frankly put similar-looking games on the Switch to shame. Luigi’s face displays a range of emotions we wouldn’t have assumed would be practical to put in a game, but there they are; from the mild bemusement and satisfaction of another floor’s elevator button gracefully screwing itself in place, to the upwards look of timid horror at a colossal carnivorous plant (which might we add isn’t even in a cutscene, it can just happen mid-gameplay), the facial movement is an absolute masterclass.

As for the visuals when things aren’t moving, well you’ve probably seen the screenshots and trailers and all that good stuff, so let us just say that those don’t do Luigi’s Mansion 3 justice. At all. The lighting, the textures, the lighting, the models, the lighting… it’s easily one of the best looking games on the Switch to date, if not the best. There’s this one moment when Luigi’s torch casts light over a sand dune in one of the later levels that made us stop and just wonder how on Earth they got this to look as good as it does on a console that’s essentially a glorified mobile phone from two-and-a-half years ago. We know gameplay’s the most important part of any game, but boy oh boy did this game make us think twice about that stance.

What’s more, Luigi’s Mansion 3 runs extremely well at a very solid 30fps, with only very slight drops when there’s a lot of action on-screen at once. The environments are also littered with individual objects such as books, pizza boxes, jars, bottles, urns and other rubbish, and they all act separately within the physics engine, so to see such stable performance is fantastic – especially with the anti-aliasing and 1080p resolution (thanks, Digital Foundry) taken into account.

Multiplayer is also employed in various ways; you can enjoy a handful of Mario Party-like minigames on one console with up to seven other players in ScreamPark, delve into a randomly-generated mini-mansion with up to seven others online or locally (provided you have enough consoles and copies of the game) in ScareScraper, or even play the whole game with a friend, loved-one, or sworn enemy in co-op mode. The latter has player one controlling Luigi and player two Gooigi, which results in a largely symmetrical experience, although the person at the helm of OG Luigi is definitely more in control of things overall.

Whilst ScreamPark is a fun little aside (Cannon Barrage is our personal favourite), the main multiplayer meat is in ScareScraper. You have to play cooperatively with friends to overcome various tasks in either a five or ten-floor hotel. This usually ends up being catching ghosts or escorting Toads to safety, and even though we used that dirty word, escorting Toads is actually a lot of fun. We can’t imagine you’ll have much difficulty finding games online with other random players at launch, but we wouldn’t expect it to maintain any real long-lasting audience.

GDevelop 5 beta 82 was just released.  GDevelop is a completely open source game engine with a very beginner friendly visual programming language and a complete set of tools for creating 2D games.  A new tool addition this release is integration of a Yarn dialog editor enabling your game to support complex and branching dialogs.

Details on new features from the release notes:

• The Yarn Dialogue editor is now embedded in GDevelop (thanks @blurymind!). Yarn is a powerful editor allowing to create advanced and dynamic dialogues with multiple choices.

  • When choosing a dialogue to load using the Dialogue Tree actions, you can edit or create a json file containing a dialogue in Yarn format.
  • Read the help page about dialogue trees to learn more about how to use them.
  • See the example “Dialogue Tree with Yarn” to see how to use dialogue actions. You can also try the example online.

• Improved Shape Painter object with new shapes and advanced features (thanks @Bouh!).

  • Add ellipse, rounded rectangle and star to Shape Painter
  • Add support for other advanced shapes (arc, bezier curves), and shapes composed of multiple shapes.

• Various new smaller features:

• Add condition to check for WebGL support (thanks @Wend1go!)
• Add “Scene just resumed” condition (thanks @Wend1go!)
• Add menu item to extract events into a new group (thanks @Bouh!)

Be sure to check out the complete release notes for a full list of improvements and changes in this release.  If you are interested in learning more about GDevelop be sure to check out our hands-on video below.

GameDev News