“The Blue Shell is everything that’s wrong with America.”

Ok, nobody said that, but you can imagine someone having done. The Blue Shell steals progress from a rightfully earned win on behalf of the lazy and the incompetent. The Blue Shell wrests spoils from leaders’ fingers just as they reach for the laurel. The Blue Shell is the cruel tax of gaming, the welfare queen of kart racing. God damn you kids today. We used to have to win a race to win it.

I’m talking about Mario Kart, of course, whose Spiny Blue Shell power-up has taunted players since its second iteration in 1996-7. It’s the pickup sometimes given to players far behind in a race, which homes in on the leader, bringing delight to the inferior player and torment to the superior one. Just as you were about to cross the finish, there’s a Blue Shell, spinning you out so that Mario or Donkey Kong crosses the finish just ahead of you. And, conversely, just as you thought yourself too far behind to catch up, there’s a Blue Shell to help put you on the winners’ podium.

1996 is a long time ago – 18 years, to be exact. In some sense, metaphorical though it may be, that makes the Blue Shell an adult. A lot has changed in those 18 years. When Mario Kart 64 first appeared, the Amazon.com IPO hadn’t yet taken place. Bill Clinton was starting his second term as President. Mark Zuckerberg was planning his Bar Mitzvah. You probably didn’t have a mobile phone, but you might have had an AOL account. The Macarena was a thing, as was the Sega Saturn. It’s easy to forget, to lump today’s Blue Shell in with yesterday’s like you’d lump today’s internet in with yesterday’s, forgetting that yesterday was an entire lifetime ago.

While all of us refer to the Blue Shell as such, it’s actually called “Spiny’s Shell” in the Mario Kart 64 manual. This difference makes a difference, because it re-connects the shell’s name to its origins and its function. A Spiny is a quadrupedal Koopa with a spiked shell. They’ve been around as long as the original NES Super Mario Bros. Back then, they served as the ammunition of Lakitu – that begoggled, cloud riding Koopa who hurls them from the air in some overworld levels. Spiny shells are red, and thanks to their spikes they cannot be jumped atop to defeat, nor can they be bumped from below to flip on their backs as can an ordinary Koopa. Only a fireball wrought by a Fire Flower-emblazoned Mario brother can defeat the Spinies – or a hero emboldened by the temporary immunity of an invincibility Star (or maybe a kicked Koopa shell, but such a resource is unlikely in the barren wastelands where Lakitu rears his head, at least in the original SMB).

The Spiny Shell is the most profoundly existentialist element of the Mario canon. It disrupts the entire logic of this familiar fantasy universe. We were told we could jump on things to destroy them! We were told we could flip them asunder! But no – all promises are tentative, even in the Mushroom Kingdom. Spiny Shells are chaos, unfairness, injustice. For those of us who were kids when Super Mario Bros. arrived, the Spiny Shell taught a lesson, and the lesson was: you are alone in the universe. Enough with your childish expectations. This is the real world, and just when you think you’ve mastered it, it’ll pull the rug out from under you. You have to find your own way.

The blueness of Blue Shells comes from elsewhere – half a decade but an entire generation later. A Koopa Troopa with a blue shell first appeared in Super Mario World, the launch title for the Super Nintendo in 1990-1. Blue-backed Koopas move faster than their blue or green-clad brethren. Super Mario World also marks the introduction of Yoshi, and ingesting a Blue Shell immediately causes the dinosaur steed to sprout wings and fly. Some things come easy.

“The Spiny Shell is the most profoundly existentialist element of the Mario canon.”

The Blue Shell didn’t appear again in a traditional Nintendo platformer until the triumphant return 2006 of 2D Mario, in New Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo DS. Here, the Blue Shell takes the same form as it had sixteen years earlier, but as a power-up for the benefit of our heroes. Collecting the Blue Shell turns Mario into Shell Mario. By ducking, he becomes invulnerable under his azure armor. Shell Mario can also perform a “shell dash,” enacting the familiar destructive power of a Koopaless shell sent flying by foot, but under the control of the player via his plumberly counterpart.

In contrast to the Spiny Shell – a hazard that strips certainty and authority from the player – the Blue Shell has always been associated with speed, power, and security. Despite its rarity, the Blue Shell is a conservative bonus, a feature that entrenches the comforts of Mario, Luigi, and their human pilots rather than wresting it away. Would it be too much to say that Spiny Shell was a Gen X’ers lament, an NES-bred slacker’s plaid, tortugal sigh, while Blue Shell was a Gen Y transitional object, a comfort blanket – blue with calm like Linus van Pelt’s – that proffers assurance to the SNES milksop every time, no matter how infrequently it might appear? Probably so.

The VR game Trover Saves the Universe was created by Rick and Morty creator Justin Roiland and shows off much of the show’s trademark bizarre humor: for example, the game’s villain gains cosmic power by plugging your characters’ two dogs into its empty eye sockets, a development that is best described as “only the beginning.”

Developed and published by Squanch Games, Trover Saves the Universe invents in-universe explanations to get around many of the issues with VR play: your perspective doesn’t move around smoothly, but discretely, jumping from place to place, because your character is a “Chairoipian,” naturally spending their whole lives seated, and getting around by teleporting between specific locations in the landscape.

Erich Meyr, design director at Squanch, Tanya Watson, Squanch co-founder, and Mikey Spano, art director, answered our questions about the development of this unique game.

Erich Meyr: I’m the design director at Squanch Games. I started in the games industry in 2007 at Insomniac Games and worked as a UI designer on titles in the Ratchet and Clank and Resistance franchises. I moved into a design role on Sunset Overdrive and realized how much I enjoyed making funny, irreverent games. After eight and a half years I left Insomniac with a desire to work on a game from the ground up with a small team, and serendipitously was pointed towards Squanch Games!

Tanya Watson: I have been making games since 2003, when I first got my start as a software test engineer at Microsoft. Over the five years there, I worked on sports games, then moved to the RPG group, then to shooters – which had me working closely with Epic Games on Gears of War as the on-site QA lead. I loved working there with production so much that I asked to be hired as an associate producer. Thankfully, they said yes, and I was given the opportunity to grow from an AP, to a producer, and eventually to executive producer on some incredible games: Gears of War, Unreal Tournament, Bulletstorm, and Fortnite. In 2015, I left after almost 10 years there, and formed Squanch Games with Justin Roiland, and we’ve just celebrated our three year anniversary.

Mikey Spano: I’m the Art Director here at Squanch Games. I’ve been making games for almost 20 years, and I’ve shipped over a dozen titles including the original Gears of War trilogy and Fortnite.

Watson: When starting the company, I knew working with Justin was going to be interesting because he had this completely new perspective on games, and how to tell stories within them. He could easily draw on his experiences from animation, and describe or draw how that may work out in a “game way.” He wouldn’t necessarily understand all of the steps needed to get there, but the vision and ideas conveyed were really interesting. We had tons of scope and development conversations; they were on-going throughout the development process. Probably 50 percent of the overall scope of Trover was re-cut or re-scoped in some way in order to get what we wanted done, to the quality bar that we had set out to achieve.

Meyr: Justin is a huge gamer and we quickly were able to speak the same language and dig into how we could create comedy through gameplay in Trover. Over the years we’ve developed a good push and pull about what makes good design vs. what makes a good joke. There were many times in Trover where he’d throw out a pitch and say, “what game in their right mind would do this?” and just the idea alone would make us laugh so hard we knew we were on to something. Justin is a font of ridiculously funny ideas and part of our job is working with him to fit them into the game’s design.

Meyr: We iterated a lot on our dialog process and (like most new games) it wasn’t until the end of the project that we really figured out our pipeline. We started by laying out rough level beats and then we’d go into the recording booth and improv them without a script. This was initially intended as a temporary pass, but some of it was so hilarious we kept it!

As we got further in production we kept mapping out narrative beats and began to make them more granular based on varying player interactions in a given scene. Between design, programming, and animation we built out a framework we call Squanch Theater to enable us to quickly script dynamic dialog that could branch, be interrupted and return to where it left off, dynamically pick a line based on multiple factors, and all sound as natural as possible.

We wrote jokes and some specific dialog to make sure our character arcs were tracking, but would let many of our actors improv in the booth to keep things as loose and playful as the early scratch dialog. For animating this crazy amount of dialog, we build an automated lip-syncing system but still hand authored expressions and look-ats.

The character performances were animated by creating sets of smaller animations then layering them against the dialog track to create lots of well-timed performances. The benefit of this method was that it allowed other team members to pile on and help ‘tag’ dialog with animations as we closed out the project. A lot of larger games use this same technique but I think we achieved a very high quality bar across the whole game by using UE4’s sequencer tool for every line of dialog and having some amazing animators.

Watson: No, not really. We always knew that we were going to be a Mature-rated title, we just wanted to make sure that we didn’t tip the scale over into AO territory, hah. With the way that we did the recording pipeline, we really gave him free run to explore what was funny or might work for these sequences, and then the narrative team did a lot of editing in the game itself to help direct what may work for the pacing of that section, or what told the funniest story.

In all, we ended up not using almost 40 percent of the total amount of dialogue recorded! Pretty intense, but it really allowed us to be flexible and err on the side of funny, and not be too pigeonholed into a script.

There were maybe two areas where we really considered language as a factor and did some bleeping (even for the non-censored version), but in a way, it made it funnier, so we were OK with it.

Meyr: It was absolutely a challenge! Early on we tried many experiments to see how far we could push platforming difficulty and realized we couldn’t make a super skill-based platformer using a fixed camera. We really did not want to induce motion sickness so having a moving camera was not an option.

Instead, we added the ability for the player to “pop up” and get a better vantage point to combat poor depth perception. We ended up being very strict about our distance metrics and made rules like “never put a platform at a height within 2m of our three camera pop-up heights” to try and help depth perception as much as possible.

Adding a permanent 3D jump helper on the ground below Trover, instead of just a shadow on the ground, probably helped depth issues the most. Knowing difficult platforming wasn’t a core pillar of the game, we toned it down for the critical path but still wanted some harder jumps and challenges for finding hidden power babies.

Meyr: Trover began as a VR game and our main goal was to create complete immersion for the player and a locomotion system that reduced motion sickness as much as possible. Those are pretty common goals for a VR game and we embraced them full on by creating fiction and jokes around them. Justin came up with the concept of the player being stuck in a chair looking for warp nodes that you have to reach with Trover in order to then move yourself to that location.

We took that initial pitch and worked out moving and rotating the player at speeds that didn’t induce sickness in the majority of our playtesters. The upside of grounding our locomotion system into our narrative was when we decided to make the game also in non-VR the constraints still make sense in the narrative and the player’s immersion is still very much intact.

Spano: Justin, Erich, and I are like a little hive mind of weird ideas. We are super passionate about creating unique experiences, and we are constantly riffing off of each other’s ideas. After the initial idea is conceived, we always try to get tons of ideas flowing from everyone on the team, and we encourage the ideas to come in as raw as possible with no judgment. We really take a ‘no wrong answers’ approach to everything, and we encourage people to communicate in whatever way gets their idea across, which means we get everything from stick figure doodles, to fleshed out design documents.

Once we have all the ideas we want to try figured out on paper, the world then gets its own art direction guide, which includes reference images from cartoons, toys, movies, games, reality, etc. As the idea gets fleshed out, concept art and guidelines are added to keep everyone from level designers to artists on track. Guidelines typically include things like color schemes, silhouettes, atmospherics, lighting, etc.

Sometimes little jokes can lead to an entire world-building scenario; like how Chairorpean culture was formed around their reliance on chairs. Justin pitched the chair-obsession as a funny one-off note, and then we just kept pushing the idea forward: what about chair mailboxes? Chair Houses? Foliage shaped like cushions? We pushed until it was too far, and then we realized ‘too far’ was even funnier so we pushed it more. 

A planet made of flesh was a dream for a lot of the artists on the team, so when we started designing Flesh World we had a lot of ideas flowing. The hardest question was how do we keep Flesh World ‘funny/gross’ and not ‘gore/gross’. On the art side, I pushed the team into more bulbous fun shapes and simpler color schemes to keep things feeling fleshy without feeling like you were inside someone’s guts; and on the design side, Erich and Justin kept everything themed more towards what was happening in this world, and less on the world itself. The less the characters talked about Flesh World, the less of a gimmick it was, and it really helped sell the absurdity of a prison/zoo/apartment all tangled together on a fleshy planet.

My biggest piece of advice for any team that’s trying to do unique world-building is to just stop worrying if your idea is good or not. If you have an idea, write it down, draw it, sing it, whatever works for you; then share it with people who are willing and able to riff on the idea. In the end the best idea should always win, regardless of where the idea came from. And take tons of notes! Write it all down as you go, draw doodles in meetings if they come to you, don’t be afraid to look distracted. My notes are always 50 percent words, 50 percent doodles, as a result tons of designs were figured out right in the middle of a pitch meeting.

Watson: We are an indie team, with a small game budget (and even smaller marketing budget). We thought, instead of spending the marketing money on ads and stuff, we should instead use that money on creating content. Idea being that word of mouth will drive awareness and get people to buy the game. Additionally, we knew that the game was fairly short, hence the price point – and we wanted ways to show fans that we plan to extend the experience over time.

So far, we don’t have a ton of data from this experiment because we’re still in the middle of it. Happy to report back once we release our first DLC :).

Summer is heating up and Rocket League‘s ’80s-themed event Radical Summer is keeping the party going in its third phase: a celebration of ’80s Television. Leading that celebration is none other than the iconic Knight Industries Two Thousand (more popularly known as K.I.T.T.) from the hit ’80s show “Knight Rider.”

The Knight Rider Car Pack DLC is available now on the Microsoft Store and it includes the K.I.T.T Battle-Car, K.I.T.T Wheels, and Gullwing Topper. Sorry, self-driving capabilities not included.

K.I.T.T isn’t the only thing repping this totally tubular decade. Enjoy ’80s-themed, in-game items throughout Radical Summer, which is live through August 12. Earn Cassettes from playing Online Matches, which can be redeemed in the Event Store for in-game items inspired by ’80s television. In addition to “Knight Rider,” check out battle-car customization items from DreamWorks “Voltron Legendary Defender” and WWE.

Also, Xbox Game Pass members can play Rocket League or if you already own the hit sports/action hybrid where soccer meets driving, team up with your friends and jump into Radical Summer today. Good luck, have fun, and stay radical!

July 20th marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and to celebrate we are running a Space Exploration Sale this weekend.

Come and browse our stellar deals on space themed games with discounts of up to 90% off until 10:00am PDT Monday July 22nd.

Today we’re releasing 1.14.4,  a release that addresses left over issues from 1.14. We plan on this being the final release for 1.14 and we’ll continue our efforts on 1.15. Aside from new features, 1.15 will also focus on quality and performance improvements.

The full changelog can be found on https://minecraft.net

• Fixed bugs
• Performance improvements
• Suspicious stew made from poppies now gives you night vision instead of speed
• Added /debug report for getting more detailed information. Please include this while making bug reports about performance!
• Fixed a memory leak
• Removed camera pivot offset in first-person
• Improved chunk loading when travelling at high speed
• Fixed incorrect Pillager texture
• /reload and /forceload is now available to gamemasters
• function-permission-level is a new setting in server.properties that controls which commands functions have access to
• Villagers now stock more items
• Villagers will now remember their gossip after becoming a Zombie Villager
• Improved performance of Villager pathfinding
• Villagers can now work without also restocking at the same time
• Gossip about players who converted a zombie villager will now last longer
• The Player Activity button on the Realm screen has been removed
• Villagers now wait with restocking until they have trades that need restocking
• Village sieges no longer occur on mushroom islands
• Mobs will no longer try to pathfind their way through bamboo
• Pinged the human

• MC-150623 – The game crashed whilst rendering overlay: Unable to fit texture
• MC-156389 – Game Crashes when Shift + Command + Delete 18 characters at once on Anvil
• MC-156407 – Unobtainable (speed) suspicious stew can be obtained from villagers
• MC-156574 – Villager demand values increase/decrease indefinitely
• MC-149018 – High Idle CPU usage on Server Edition (Minecraft 1.14 Release)
• MC-154271 – Rolling shutter issue on MacOS since 1.14.3 Pre-Release 2
• MC-149880 – Villager trades wrong book
• MC-151282 – Villager trade GUI doesn’t show the correct price on servers if trade demand is high
• MC-156042 – Villager demand never goes down over time unless traded with
• MC-156349 – Cannot press Enter on Direct Connect
• Fixed debug reports in worlds with a dot in their name
• Fixed server freeze when Villagers fell into the void
• MC-145769 – Villagers aren’t shutting doors behind them
• MC-148613 – Aquatic mobs are not spawning / Fish spawned from buckets count towards the aquatic mob cap again
• MC-152908 – When a player joins a server, everything that happened during the time offline queued on connecting to the server
• MC-153406 – Score JSON Component Crash in items
• MC-153749 – Trusting Foxes attack player when self-injured
• MC-153852 – Concrete powder deleting waterlogged blocks when falling
• MC-155711 – Functions capable of running commands they shouldn’t be able to (publish, debug …)
• MC-156013 – Breaking Blocks “re-appear” to nudge player
• MC-136318 – Floatable mobs are unable to walk when in waterlogged blocks
• MC-151150 – Entities (Villagers) cause massive lag when attempting to pathfind
• MC-151376 – Villagers are not pathfinding towards their POI; POI detection range is too small
• MC-151810 – Mobs don’t try to avoid fall damage anymore
• MC-154214 – Chunks refusing to unload due to incorrect player ticket additions
• MC-155147 – Mouse acceleration with the new 1.14.3 update
• MC-155906 – Failed to save debug dump if the destination location contains a space
• MC-100946 – Bow with mending undraws when receiving XP while drawed
• MC-113968 – Zombies of village siege spawn despite gamerule doMobSpawning being false
• MC-113970 – Zombies of village siege do not spawn centered on a block
• MC-134964 – Unexpected error: java.util.NoSuchElementException
• MC-142037 – java.lang.NullPointerException: Initializing game
• MC-143755 – Arbitrary score/selector/NBT resolution using lectern without operator rights
• MC-143886 – Acacia leaves render improprly from a distance
• MC-146289 – Farmer villagers don’t stop to pick up their crops
• MC-147844 – Pillagers don’t pathfind around obstacles & out of water
• MC-152094 – End city/end ship generation gets cut at chunk borders sometimes
• MC-152636 – Killing a zombie right as it converts into a Drowned will drop the loot from zombie while still converting into a Drowned
• MC-153498 – Cyrillic letter Є is not included in the Minecraft font
• MC-153665 – Full villager inventory creates invisible items
• MC-153712 – Java using 100-200% CPU (MacOS)
• MC-153766 – Rabbits no longer need sand/grass in order to spawn in deserts/tundras
• MC-153892 – Mending slows down breaking blocks
• MC-154019 – Beacon deactivate sound not sounds when you break the base
• MC-154031 – villagers give away all food if they want to share it
• MC-154068 – parrots occasionally disappearing when you take them from a boat
• MC-154201 – Trying to trade with villager immediately closes trading menu for some villagers
• MC-154362 – Crossbow has to re-load when mending takes place
• MC-154509 – Bashkir letters Ҙ, ҙ, Ҡ, ҡ, Ҫ, and ҫ are not included in the Minecraft font
• MC-154668 – Invalid characters crash the game in jigsaw block input upon pressing enter
• MC-154830 – All wall signs use oak color on maps
• MC-155092 – Zombie sieges can happen on mushroom islands
• MC-155104 – when closing a menu while moving the mouse, the screen will move in that direction
• MC-155172 – Hostile Wolf AI has been broken. Wolves can no longer attack enemies efficiently.
• MC-155238 – Villagers picking up workstation through wall
• MC-155345 – ConcurrentModificationException when a player leaves an active raid
• MC-155571 – Silverfish & Endermite spawners no longer functioning

This week at Bungie, we make way for the Iron Lord.

We have begun to see Shadows lurking about this season. Many of you have been diligently knocking out every challenge and Triumph for Season of Opulence. Most of us still have a good backlog of Triumphs to complete and items to collect. Someone pointed out that this was the first week of Season of Opulence in which there wasn’t something new to do. Consider this week a chance for you to catch your breath if you have Triumphs and pursuits stacking up. If you’re already looking for more challenges, Solstice of Heroes will heap more of them onto your plate. You’ll find more details on the upcoming event next week.

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Cry Wolf

It’s time to let the wolves howl again. Saladin will raise his banners next week when he returns to the Tower on July 23. He brings with him an invitation to a powerful fight and accelerated Valor gains.

Iron Banner and Increased Valor
Start: 10 AM PDT on July 23
End: 10 AM PDT on July 30

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A Guardian Always Pays Their Debts

As part of Season of Opulence, Guardians are paying homage to their previous adventures to earn awesome rewards. Some of us leveraged an exploit in the Tribute Hall, taking advantage of Calus’s generosity with some clever character-switching shenanigans to place that free tribute over and over and over… you get it. This allowed some players to skip the tribute experience entirely, making other players who had done bounties and pledged large amounts of their resource reserves feel a little irked.

We will be fixing this glitch on July 30 as we kick off Solstice of Heroes. As you all know, it not our policy to punish players who discover cheeses, loot caves, or workarounds in the game. If you took advantage of this short cut, you can rest easy. You won’t be marched in front of Calus for sentencing. However, you will not be able to keep using all of your ill-gotten rewards until you square up things with Calus.

The “Tributes Placed” total will now accurately reflect individual tributes placed on your accounts. If you used the exploit, this number will be updated to properly reflect the total number of tributes you’ve actually placed. The activation and equipping of both the Bad Juju catalyst and “X Marks the Spot” emotes are also gated by your total number of tributes placed. Bad Juju will not require you to have 18 tributes placed for it to be used. If you cheesed your way to the catalyst or emote, you have some time to start placing legit tributes before July 30.

Mysterious Benefactors

Monologue

Welcome to Movie of the Week where we pick a few videos we like and give their creators an emblem. This week, we witnessed a truly herculean feat. Check this out.

Movie of the Week: Riven 1v1 me (language warning)

Honorable Mention: Pay it forward

Until then, enjoy your time in the Iron Banner.

<3 Cozmo

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