Wolfenstein: Youngblood is Now Available on Steam!

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is the first modern co-op Wolfenstein adventure. Team up with a friend or play solo as one of BJ Blazkowicz’s twin daughters and wield a powerful arsenal of new weapons, gadgets, and abilities to liberate Paris from the Nazis.

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Next up in our Super Nindie Maker 2 series, we’re lucky enough to have a bumper offering from Playtonic Games. Following on from the opening gambit courtesy of Shovel Knight designer Mike Herbster, the developers behind Yooka-Laylee and its upcoming 2.5D sequel Yooka-Laylee and The Impossible Lair have cooked up a crop of no fewer than four Super Mario Maker 2 courses for your enjoyment.

Kindly taking time from their hectic schedule readying the next chapter of Yooka and Laylee’s adventures, these levels have been crafted by Hamish Lockwood (Designer), Daley Johnson (Engagement Director), Karl Roe (Programmer) and Matt Griffin (Audio Designer). Proceeding in that order, we’ll begin with Hamish’s pun-tastic offering, ‘A Crate Job’…

Hamish Lockwood (Designer) – Username: PlaytonicH

What was the thought process behind the creation of your level?

I started this level the same way I normally would at work – by experimenting with some mechanics to find a gameplay theme I think will give me a lot of mileage. This is the first level I’ve made in Mario Maker 2 but I have about half a dozen “sketch” levels/ideas that didn’t work out before I found one I liked enough.

It’s interesting – I found the crates and doors combo surprisingly limiting after working with them for a while. You can’t have too many crates (I suspect because they’re physics objects?) and you can only have 4 pairs of doors per scene. It turns out there were just enough to make what I wanted but like I say, it was a surprisingly strict challenge! But this sort of thing encourages creative thinking so it’s quite fun to work around it.

Anyway once I got going I created a series of rooms/puzzles that slowly increased in challenge or introduced a new idea. For example:

1. The first room makes you move crates out of the way.
2. The second room makes you move crates but to a specific location.
3. The third room forces you to learn to break open the crates to find things inside.
4. The fourth room is a celebration of that (it’s fun to break a lot of crates at once!) but there’s also a tempting risk/reward challenge if you choose.
5. The fifth room used to be more challenging but I required the checkpoints elsewhere so I removed the hazards so it didn’t feel unfair or frustrating.
6. Let’s come back to the sixth room…!
7. The seventh room is the final “big puzzle” that tests what you’ve learned so far, but introduces a couple of new elements. I actually didn’t think it was clear enough that you can throw crates through pipes and have them land somewhere convenient. So I went back and made an extra room – room six!
8. The sixth room was designed to force the player to learn throwing crates through pipes.
9. The eighth room is a reward room, but it also highlights the players goal in the seventh room. You can see all those coins early which makes you want to enter the correct door in the “big puzzle room.”
10. The final room is a very easy flag challenge with a secret coin at the top!

To be honest I think I could have cut the fifth room and I definitely think the big puzzle room is messily designed. These things would normally be addressed if making levels for a real game… But that’s the nice thing about Mario Maker – I can stop whenever I feel like it, haha!

How have your design experiences helped or hindered you in this process?

Making levels is my job so obviously that experience has helped! After making a bunch of levels you acquire a mental list of do’s and don’t’s which I think can help to speed things up. Just small things like “don’t use too many ingredients”, “don’t let the player get killed after respawning”, “don’t ask the player to kill themselves if the puzzle becomes unsolvable”, etc.

It can be quite hard to forget these things and as a result I found myself wanting to spend loads of time on this level. It took about a week or so and in the end, even though I’m not perfectly happy with it, I decided it was good enough. This isn’t the best attitude to have as a level designer but I didn’t want to spend months on a single level like I might if it were for a professional game!

Is there a stage from a 2D Mario game that’s a particular favourite of yours? What makes it so memorable?

If I think back to the most memorable levels for me in 2D Mario games I think of things like the Kuribo’s Shoe level in Mario Bros. 3, the Giant Land in Mario Bros. 3, or the first level in World 7 (I had to look it up) in Mario Bros. 3 where you scale up a level made entirely of pipes. These levels all have a really cool, strong theme (the shoe item, the giant enemies, the visual theme) that makes them extra memorable for me. I think levels become memorable if you can easily finish the sentence “This is the level where you…”

Also pretty much anything in Yoshi’s Island – I don’t know how they made something so good, so long ago!

Is there any feature you’d love to see added to Super Mario Maker 2?

I spoke of the limitations I worked around but I do understand why those are the way they are. I also really appreciate how Nintendo seemed to prioritise accessibility in this game. I think the way they implemented the locked cameras (by drawing a straight line) is very clever, although unfortunately I found I wasn’t able to lock the cameras on all my rooms, mostly due to the flag at the end. You can’t really have a line drawn through that! I would love a more robust camera system but that then moves away from keeping the game accessible because with more functionality comes more complexity. So I personally would like that, but at the same time I don’t think it’s a good fit for the game! So I suppose I’ll instead request the skinny Mario costume to make a return!

Next up we have Daley Johnson, Engagement Director at Playtonic with her level ‘Treetop Arcade’…

Pokémon might not actually exist, but that doesn’t mean trainers far and wide can’t enjoy real-size versions of these lovable creatures in plush form. The Pokémon Center website is currently taking pre-orders for a “jumbo-size” Mareep Poké Plush that matches the electric sheep’s height listed in the Pokédex.

This super-soft and woolly plush is “about 24 inches tall and 40 inches long” and is a Pokémon Center Original design. As for the price, it’ll set you back a whopping $500 USD and takes 5-7 business days to ship. Pre-orders are open until 1st September 2019 and the item will be sent out to customers in January 2020. Unfortunately, it’s only available within the US.

Here are some more details and photos from the website:

Just as big as it says in the Pokédex! This jumbo-size Poké Plush is a full 2 feet tall and more than 3 feet long, and it really gives you options! Will you count Mareep in the bedroom? Maybe put it under a glass tabletop? Possibly keep it near a rocking chair to maximize fluffy enjoyment during quiet times?

It’s your decision, and no matter where this Mareep winds up, it will be among the fluffiest and cuddliest plush you own! Make Mareep yours and give your home a bit of extra warmth and character with this Center Original!

• Recommended Age: 4+
• Item Dimensions: 23.62 x 44.88 x 22.83 IN
• Country Of Origin: Made in China
• Materials: All new material / polyester / polypropylene / expanded polystyrene

Is this the Pokémon plush you’ve always dreamed of? Would you be willing to exchange $500 for this plush version of Mareep? Leave a comment below.

Click Here!

Following Apple’s decision to temporarily halt Siri grading as it evaluates the program’s privacy safeguards, Amazon and Google this week followed suit and updated their respective policies on human reviews of recorded voice assistant audio.

Apple on Thursday suspended its Siri grading program, which seeks to make the virtual assistant more accurate by having workers review snippets of recorded audio, after a contractor raised privacy concerns about the quality control process.

Now, Apple’s competitors in the space, namely Google and Amazon, are making similar moves to address criticism about their own audio review policies.

Shortly after Apple’s announcement, Google in a statement to Ars Technica on Friday said it, too, halted a global initiative to review Google Assistant audio. Like Siri grading, Google’s process runs audio clips by human operators to enhance system accuracy.

Unlike Apple’s Siri situation, however, a contractor at one of Google’s international review centers leaked 1,000 recordings to VRT NWS, a news organization in Belgium. In a subsequent report in July, the publication claimed it was able to identify people from the audio clips, adding that a number of snippets were of “conversations that should never have been recorded and during which the command ‘OK Google’ was clearly not given.”

The VRT leak prompted German authorities to investigate Google’s review program and level a three-month ban on voice recording transcripts.

“Shortly after we learned about the leaking of confidential Dutch audio data, we paused language reviews of the Assistant to investigate. This paused reviews globally,” Google told Ars Technica.

Google did not divulge the halt to global reviews until Friday.

Amazon is also taking steps to temper negative press about its privacy practices and on Friday rolled out a new Alexa option that allows users to opt out of human reviews of audio recordings, Bloomberg reports. Enabling the feature in the Alexa app excludes recorded audio snippets from analysis.

“We take customer privacy seriously and continuously review our practices and procedures,” an Amazon spokeswoman said. “We’ll also be updating information we provide to customers to make our practices more clear.”

Amazon came under fire in April after a report revealed the company records, transcribes and annotates audio clips recorded by Echo devices in an effort to train its Alexa assistant.

While it may come as a surprise to some, human analysis of voice assistant accuracy is common practice in the industry; it is up to tech companies to anonymize and protect that data to preserve customer privacy.

Apple’s method is outlined in a security white paper (PDF link) that notes the company ingests voice recordings, strips them of identifiable information, assigns a random device identifier and saves the data for six months, over which time the system can tap into the information for learning purposes. Following the six-month period, the identifier is erased and the clip is saved “for use by Apple in improving and developing Siri for up to two years.”

Apple does not explicitly mention the possibility of manual review by human contractors or employees, nor does it currently offer an option for Siri users to opt out of the program. The company will address the latter issue in a future software update.

The first day of every month Epic Games make several assets available for free on the Unreal Engine marketplace.  Some of the assets are free forever, while others have to be “purchased” during the month, although once purchased they are yours forever.  August 2019 is no exception.  Let’s take a look at the free stuff for August announced on the Unreal Engine blog.

Free For August

Free Forever

Be sure to watch the video below for more details on this months free Unreal assets.

GameDev News Unreal

Indie dev Le Cartel and publishing label Devolver Digital have announced that Heave Ho will be throwing itself onto Nintendo Switch later this month.

The game has up to four players attempting to simply reach a goal without falling to their deaths. Of course, as you can see in the trailer above, it’s not really as simple as it sounds. Players use outstretched hands to grip onto surfaces and their friends, grappling themselves around each level. You can hold hands, climb across dangling bodies and generally cause absolute chaos.

You can also customise your character with stylish accessories to add a bit of personality to proceedings should you want to, which would probably also help you to keep track of which character you’re controlling in the mayhem. We’ve got some screenshots for you to check out below.

The game arrives on Switch on 29th August and will be priced at £7.19 / $9.99.

Liking the look of this one? Fling a comment our way down below.