Although Sony is clamping down on saucy content in PlayStation games, Nintendo appears to be quite happy to leave any censorship decisions to rating systems.

The Japanese company recently reaffirmed this during its 79th Shareholders meeting, when president Shuntaro Furukawa was reminded about “other platforms” applying restrictions independently of CERO (Japan’s rating organisation). This was his response on behalf of Nintendo (thanks, Censored Gaming):

Nintendo, as do 3rd-parties and their software, applies for an objective rating from 3rd-party organizations prior to release. If platform-holding companies choose arbitrarily, the diversity and fairness in game software would be significantly inhibited. We provide parental controls that can be used to apply limits.

As noted, parental controls can also be used to restrict younger players from accessing mature-themed content.

Do you agree with Nintendo’s current stance on censorship? Tell us down below.

Now that Super Mario Maker 2 has been released, our lovely senior video producer, Alex Olney, has uploaded a video about two particularly interesting items you eventually unlock in story mode.

The first is the Super Hammer, which is exclusive to the Super Mario 3D World extra theme. It allows you to use a hammer to destroy a variety of blocks and oddly spawn crates. You can even place up to five of these crates at once.

The other power-up is the Superball Flower. This item first appeared in Super Mario Land on the Game Boy and will give your character a retro look in Mario Maker 2. It’s a variant of the Fire Flower and shoots a projectile at a weird trajectory. You’ll also hear the classic Mario Land music when you pick it up.

Have you unlocked either of these items in Super Mario Maker 2 yet? Discovered any other cool secrets? Leave a comment below.

When we last checked up on Kamiko Switch eShop sales in the first half of 2018, we found out the Skipmore-developed game had sold more than 200,000 copies.

Now, in the latest sales update, Flyhigh Works has revealed the game has now sold “well over” 250,000 copies on the eShop.

Kamiko was one of the earliest indie titles released on the Switch and is definitely worth a look if you haven’t already picked it up. We gave it nine out of ten stars in our review and said it was stunningly stylish and action-packed. The title is currently on sale for $1.99 / £1.77.

Have you downloaded this game yet? Tell us below.

At Ubisoft’s E3 conference this year, the company announced its latest entry in the Watch Dogs series would be a significant leap forward for the series—instead of creating a game centered around one central hero, Watch Dogs: Legion will let players recruit any NPC in the game to the hacking revolutionary group DeadSec.

Legion’s announcement also came with the revelation that this has been Far Cry 2 creative director, Clint Hocking’s latest project since he rejoined Ubisoft in 2015. Hocking’s penchant for game systems that respond to one another and interact with artificial intelligence is on clear display in Legion, where NPCs are given a backstory and set of behaviors that respond to player choices and decisions.

In one jaw-dropping instance, a low-level NPC goon began hitting on another NPC on the street as the player character passed. After an Ubisoft attendant advised us to check their backstories, we both shouted in surprise when the second NPC yanked the first over her shoulder and kicked him right in the throat, ending his life.

According to the demo attendant (a member of the game design team), though she knew that particular interaction was built into the game, she hadn’t seen it in action yet. Were this particular demo to continue, that character’s surprise death would mean he wouldn’t be present at another setpiece, and anyone he had any relationship with would respond in kind.

After the demo, we were lucky enough to sit with Clint Hocking for a quick chat about what it’s been like designing a near-infinite NPC ecosystem that turns the NPCs’ various micro-backstories into an emergent, responsive system.

Could you really quickly start off explaining how you got started working on Watch Dogs?

About four years ago Alex Parizeau the managing director of the studio reached out to me. They wanted to work with Montreal, who made Watch Dogs 1 and 2, to move the lead team to Toronto for this game, give the Toronto team a chance to lead it.

Most of the guys who made Watch Dogs 1 and 2 were part of my team when we made Far Cry 2 back in the day in Montreal. So it was a good way for me to come back to Ubisoft from Montreal, to be able to give up ownership of their baby to one of their partners and for us to be able to sort of have good relationships and learn from each other while we did that.

What was the first sort of structure that you approach when building a game full of playable NPCs?

Right, so when we first had the idea that you’d be able to play as anyone in the game, we had to of course bring in a bunch of major stakeholders, you know the lead animators, the lead programmers, the lead sort of engine architects…the lead audio guys, sound guys, and the lead writers and start talking about you know, breaking the problem down.

Like how are we gonna cover all the pieces that we need to cover and make them all work together. I think the most important think that we started working on pretty early was something we call “census”, which is a massive relational database that lives at the heart of the simulation.

The most important thing about census is that it allows us to spawn NPCs in the world just like you do in many other games, but then when you profile those NPCs the relational database is able to fill in the blanks on who they are and sort of generate them in real time and then make them persistent and keep them in the world.

So if you see a groundskeeper trimming hedges in a park, and he has a certain ethnicity, when you lock on to that person and profile them, he’s going to have a name that reflects the ethnicity that you saw and he’s going to have an animation set based on how he was animating, he’s gonna have a job that says groundskeeper and it’s going to be at a certain time.

And then because he’s a groundskeeper, he’s going to make a certain amount of money which means he’s gonna be allowed to live in certain neighborhoods, and because of his ethnicity will navigate to a different part of those neighborhoods depending on where the different communities live within London. Then he’s going to have certain friends and activities maybe he’s an outdoorsy guy. He has an outdoor job so he may be more fit and have a gameplay trait that reflects higher health or higher agility or something like that.

All of these things are internally in sync and coherent so that every NPC feels real and credible. Then when you recruit them, they get their own narrative persona, their own voice, their own animations, their own fighting style if they do melee…all of those things are again, coherent with that guy that you first saw trimming a hedge in the park when you were walking by and caught your eye for whatever reason.

What is a way to work in a procedural design space without finding yourself deep in the weeds trimming each individual procedural experience? What lets you work at the core of it and intentionally design things for the player to see?

So…that’s a great question and difficult. It’s a couple of things. Because it took a long time to develop this innovation, there were a lot of iterations and a lot of experiments and a lot of ways of making things work and so we kind of…I guess probably accidentally created interesting things that tend to be emerging from the simulations in previous iterations.

As we took major decisions or made different pivots in order to move forward we were persistent in trying to keep those interesting pieces alive. And so it got more robust through the natural process of iteration. I think that was an important part of it. And now, especially now that it’s in the hands of real players we’re starting to see, fortunately, that we made a lot of good choices it looks like.

And also it’s also inspiring us now that we’re getting feedback on the game of like “OK, what are the things we need to focus on and really polish and really bring up to that highest level for everyone.”

One interesting overarching thing that designers can do when making these layered systems that makes them like— layered procedural systems can either feel great or sort of feel like nothing is happening.

Hocking: Sure, yeah.

There’s a bunch of data being spewed out and you’re like “OK, I did something I really don’t understand what happened there.” What do you think is something interesting that another designer might benefit from?

An actual, practical tip? Here’s a good practical tip for other designers. I was working on this game for 4 years and about a year and a half ago— so I’m the creative director, but about a year and a half ago we brought in Kent Hudson, Kent’s the game design director. Obviously, when you bring one big creative powerhouse into another thing where there’s another creative guy who’s been owning a thing with this team for a long time it’s a bit rocky.

But the good thing was you know, Kent’s super smart. Great designer. He was able to take ownership of a lot of the design from me so that I could focus on other things. My practical advice here is…know when you need to hand the thing off for someone else to tell you what’s good and not good, and polish it and close it because you can very easily get blinded by all of the systems.

Kent actually talks about making design nerd games. We don’t want to make a design nerd game, we want to make a game for players, and he was really helpful in helping me cut the branches off that were just too design nerd-y and weren’t meaningful. Cause he could see the game with fresh eyes and understand it as a working designer what we needed to do better and help us make the right calls to focus the thing.

So, get help. That’s the two-word answer. Get help.

Procedural systems can be a great way to let players get super expressive about who they are, what kind of philosophy they want to see in the world.

Is there anything you particularly think you’ve enjoyed about making Watch Dogs an expression-filled game?

Absolutely, I think one of the most powerful things that I experience when I play the game, I’m not talking about something theoretical…when I play the game myself, I see emergent things happening at a different level than they happen in most games, so I worked on Far Cry and Far Cry 2 and uh…the kinds of emergent behaviors and actions that you see tend to be in the moment to moment.

We have that as well, but now we’re seeing emergent behaviors happening across the timeline of like a story of a character arc of someone’s life. You’ll see— just a really great example you know, one of my favorite operatives in the build that I’m currently playing the last 30-40 hours, is named Lionel Galant.

I made him an infiltrator, he’s really cool, but I recruited him by rescuing his dad where he was being held by Albion in a cage somewhere and they were gonna disappear. I rescued his dad, and then you know Lionel leveled up and he’s one of my favorite guys and have done a bunch of great missions with him and I love him.

And then 12 hours later I was playing a different character walking down the street and I see two people in the street that are lit up and I know them and I go “that’s Lionel, who’s that that he’s with? Oh that’s Andrew Galant, Lionel’s father. Shopping with his son, Lionel. That’s Lionel shopping with his dad, Andrew Galant.”

And I was like “Awh, shit.” And then they stopped their conversation and they walked into a store, like a clothing store. And I was like “That’s that guy. That guy just came to life because the reason he joined DedSec is because we saved his dad, and there’s his relationship proof that it’s real. And that’s why he cares about us.”

And you just get these— you get feels that you don’t get in other games, right? It’s amazing, and this is just one example. There are dozens of them. People come out of these demos all day every day and they tell us amazing stories about what happened to the person they were demoing to. It’s super, super, awesome.

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.

In this article, I want to talk about our experience of porting our game “Graveyard Keeper” to mobiles and consoles.

Some basic information: Graveyard Keeper was developed by our team (Lazy Bear Games) in Unity and then ported to XBox One / PS4 / Nintendo Switch by our publisher, tinyBuild. The mobile ports (iOS and Android) were made in-house, by us. Also, a few months after the initial game release, we made a DLC “Breaking Dead” which was also ported to all platforms. In addition to this, the game was constantly being patched and improved.

As you can see, the setup containing two dev teams is not an easy one. Mix it up with the project in the phase of dynamic development that needs to be deeply optimized for some platforms and you’ll get a pretty challenging process.

Time to get technical.

Looking at our game you can probably think that it is a simple game to port, as it is 2D with pixel art. And if consoles are powerful enough to process 4K/60fps, the pixel 2D graphics wouldn’t be a problem. Theoretically, that’s true. But practically we used a lot of very complex solutions that were not optimized for consoles and totally unoptimized for mobiles.

Think of HDD speed.

You probably heard that the current gen consoles architecture is very similar to the PC. That’s true, but technically the hardware differs from the PC. First of all, Xbox One and PS4 use hard disk drives while most of modern PCs use SSD or hybrid drives. So, you have to keep in mind the loading times.

Imagine our surprise, when the first build was loading for during almost 5 minutes.

So, we had to rethink the whole loading and asset storage systems. For example, we began storing not the whole game objects on the scene, but only the information about them in simple (fake) objects. And after the loading is complete we started replacing these fake objects with the real ones on the fly.

Think of multi-core.

Also, in our experience writing for the consoles requires using all CPU cores at maximum making the code to work in parallel. By default, Unity games are very dependent on a single core performance. And running the game “as is” could give you very sensitive performance bottleneck when all other cores are idle while the only single core is under load.

We had to move different math and calculations to a different thread running in a parallel to free as much core-#1 power as we can. Basically, that’s a good point to keep in mind if you’re not planning to port to consoles also as it will give you a better performance anyway.

So, next time we will plan everything we can to run in a separate thread/job. Luckily, Unity had improved multi-threading a lot during the last year implementing job system and ECS.

Think of graphics optimization (even for 2D games!).

Another heavy issue for us was the graphics. We had no previous experience optimizing anything for consoles or mobiles. Therefore we were OK to make a tree combined of 20 separate sprites just to make it easier to design. There was no need for such amount of sprites for a single tree in the game itself.

Of course, we needed to merge sprites to reduce the amount of layers. You can see the amount of initial geometry on the scene here:

The rightmost picture shows the “overdraw amount”. That means each time one sprite is drawn over another, the color on that picture becomes brighter. So, you can see that despite the simplicity of the look, there are really a lot of polygons drawn over each other.

Also, all sprites of the game are lit by a complex shader that not only uses the normal-maps, but calculates the pseudo 3D-depth of the picture.

We had to make different versions of visual optimization for different platforms. For example, we had to completely change the lighting shader and its behavior for mobiles.

Think of platform-specific issues.

Also, there is a lot of platform-specific work (especially for consoles). For example, you not only need to support the gamepad, but need to deal with different uncommon situations like when a user plays the game, the gamepad turns off, user connects another controller and logs in to a different profile. And that’s in the middle of the game. There are different large lists of such cases that your game needs to deal with.

Another issue you have to think about is the saving system. Your game had to work with asynchronous saving routines and treat any file corruption could happen.

Patches and DLCs.

As mentioned above, we worked with an external porting team on the side of our publisher and pushing all new content, fixes and patches became a difficult task. You need to plan everything ahead. You can’t just tell the guys to push your last fix to Xbox if they are making a Switch port and everybody is busy with that.

And keeping in mind that we’re a small team that likes to develop games with a high passion, that doesn’t go well with planning ahead. That’s the reason we couldn’t easily port the first “Breaking Dead” DLC to the Xbox. We didn’t plan it very well. One day we just woke up and decided to make zombies and put them in the first DLC. But guys at tinyBuild were busy deeply optimizing and porting the game to Nintendo Switch. They couldn’t drop that process and begin to port this DLC right away. They needed to finish their port first.

That was the downside of the idea of making a simultaneous release on PC and Xbox. Ideally we should release a PC build, fix all bugs were found and only then start porting it to consoles — or spend months in isolated QA beforehand, without real player feedback. And only after the port is done, start making a DLC. But we couldn’t afford spending so much time on that. We had to do everything right away.

That’s the reason we couldn’t release the first Breaking Dead DLC for free on other platforms (as it was on the PC). When you develop on multiple platforms, the costs and timelines ramp up pretty quickly. Even porting and releasing a patch eats up a lot of resources.

Releasing titles, DLCs and updates always require passing platform compliance requirements, which means certification by platform holders. The more complicated your game mechanics and the bigger the amount of the APIs you are using the more requirements you will need to surpass. This means that you need to test your content against these requirements before submitting it for certification to make sure that the chances of passing it are good. Otherwise you may encounter a big list of issues to fix and might not pass it (probably you just won’t) within first submission. Additional submissions might also lead to additional costs. But the most risky thing about not passing the certification in time is delaying the announced release dates.

This is extremely difficult with fast iteration cycles we had on PC. It would be impossible to real-time merge new content into the console builds, as shown in the diagram in the beginning of the article. Having in-house resources will require at least one programmer dedicated to each platform and a proficient QA team that is constantly testing the title being ported and report the issues that fail the requirements so the porting developers can fix them before being found by the certification team on the platform holder side. It requires building the whole porting structure within the studio. And this is not only the resources, but the specific knowledge and skill set involved in it.

Long story short it’s very easy to release DLC on PC and keep on iterating on it in real time, while launching the same content on consoles adds a lot of overhead costs and complexity to the whole process.

Sviatoslav Cherkasov
lead programmer
at Lazy Bear Games

Scavengers is a 4-player team-based survival shooter that is billed by developer Midwinter Entertainment as “co-opetition.” That’s a made-up term that actually captures the spirit of the game, even if it doesn’t begin to hint at what makes it unique. Scavengers imagines an Earth that has been plunged into frigid cold thanks to the destruction of the Moon. Much of humanity has taken refuge on a space station, run by a less-than-reliable AI, orbiting our old planet. You’re one of a four-person crew sent down to the surface, with orders to collect materials that might help build a future for humanity.

Sounds easy, right? Unfortunately, there are feral settlers on the planet, and hungry animals, and mutated beasts. Oh, and giant storms whirl through the map. They’ll freeze you to death within a minute. While some competitive shooters allow players to camp in a safe spot for long stretches, that’s not an option in Scavengers. This game is about moving quickly and quick thinking on the run, with a reliance on communication and flexible teamwork.

Scrounge to Survive

Matches progress in three rough phases. While the phases aren’t actually hard-wired into gameplay, they do help communicate how it all works. You arrive on planet with no survival supplies of any kind. So phase one is scavenging and, if possible, leveling up to unlock new crafting options. Phase two occupies the time to scope out the nearby area and seek the supplies that are your specific mission goals.

Along the way, you may encounter local resistance, and/or other teams. Those teams have the same objectives you do. While the developers note that teams could elect to work together to reach their goals more quickly, in practice… that might not be how it will work out. So, you’ve got multiple teams scrambling for limited resources, facing quite a few obstacles. On top of it all, there’s a ticking clock. Matches end with a dropship arriving to carry players and materials back to the station, and you need to be on it. That’s phase three. Maybe you’ll get that far; the dropship arrival zone becomes a chaotic endgame as teams and mobs converge.

Cooperate or Die

Scavengers features several character classes. The E3 demo featured only four — melee, sniper, shotgunner, and healing support — but many more will be available at launch. Each can build a unique weapon, and each has a special with a couple of activation criteria and a cooldown timer. Strategic use of specials can compound their benefits. The shotgunner, for example, can project a dome shield, which protects against incoming fire and offers safety from storms. The healer can project a large healing aura. Together, they create a refuge from many of the game’s dangers, which saved my team more than once.

All the perks specific to each character require crafting. You’ll scrounge basic weapons, break them down for parts, and build new stuff. After leveling up you’ll be able to craft your class-specific weapon. The crafting system is fairly robust, but primarily handled through one well laid-out screen. Since building stuff is technically handled by a small drone that accompanies each player, you can even craft while on the run. Items can be given to teammates from within the inventory screen, even over distance.

Above All Else, Stay Warm

You’ll pretty much always be on the run, too. Between the time limit, the demands of objectives — which generate the points you’ll need to win — and the storms, there’s no chance to just sit around and let most players in the match kill one another. Those storms, by the way, aren’t a simple PUBG or Fortnite concept, where a single dervish shrinks around the players. There can be three or four on the map at once. I got squeezed by two powerful tornados at one point, and with few supplies to fend off the cold, I was a popsicle. But with enough supplies you could also dash right into the storm, to use it as cover or to mask an escape.

Scavengers throws a lot of detail at players very quickly, and very little of it is optional. For every danger, there’s a counter. You’ll need to eat but can stave off hunger by consuming meat scavenged from animals. But that meat might be infected. Cook it first, at one of the fires placed around the map, or inject a craftable remedy to kill the infection. The amount of options is imposing at first, but none of it feels like filler.

The E3 build is still very early, and full launch details are still being determined. The game’s potential is huge, however. My playthrough felt like I barely scratched the surface of the game’s tactical and strategic options.