During the latest Nindies Showcase it was revealed that Blaster Master Zero 2 – the sequel to the much-liked original – will land on the Switch eShop today for just $9.99.

The first game was a Switch launch title, but it seems that this follow-up is both bigger and better, with the protagonist Jason blasting off into space with his buggy chum. With exciting new weapons and boss battles, this looks like a winner.

Check out the trailer above and let us know if you plan to pick this up today with a comment below. We’ll be reviewing it in the not-too-distant future!

Veteran developer Double Fine today announced an all-new game coming to Switch this summer. RAD is a 3D action game set in the Fallow, a wasteland of a world that has been ravaged by not one, but two apocalypses.

Players will have to battle all sorts of creatures and work to heal the cracked and barren land you can see the the trailer and the screenshots below. It appears that your teenage protagonist doesn’t react very well to the toxic radioactivity he encounters, with various mutations that will help, and we assume hinder, your progress.

From the official blurb:

The fate of the world depends on the player, a sweet bat, and whatever new abilities they gain as the world around them ravages their body, twisting and mutating them into something far less than human, but far more powerful.

The old favourite term ‘roguelike’ got rolled out again for this one, but Double Fine’s trademark humour (glimpsed in the trailer reveal as studio head Tim Schafer put in a cameo appearance) should help stop this particular apocalypse from getting stodgy – we’ll find out more this summer.

Are you a fan of Double Fine’s games? Let us know if this catches your eye in the comments below.

The Game Developers Conference is here again and I’m hecka stoked to join the ID@Xbox team in our annual trip to the San Francisco Bay Area. GDC is an amazing time to highlight new games, catch-up with other developers and friends in the industry and listen to their feedback to continue driving innovation forward for Xbox.

2018 was a fantastic year for developers in the ID@Xbox program and we can’t be more excited to share what we have planned for 2019 with our fans in the coming days and months. Nearly 400 titles were released through the program last year, helping us reach a milestone of over 1,000 titles launched via ID@Xbox. We sent out developer kits to nearly 500 new studios in 2018, which means that over 3,000 studios across 67 countries now have Xbox One developer kits. With over 1,600 games in active development, we’re excited to see the variety of new experiences that teams are bringing to fans. Finally, games coming through the program have generated more than $1.2 billion in revenue since the program’s inception.

Xbox Game Pass has been and continues to be a great way for independent developers to get their games discovered while also enabling members to find their next favorite game. To date, we’ve worked with over 125 developers who have brought their games to Xbox Game Pass. Xbox Game Pass has also helped give independent developers more exposure with audiences that they wouldn’t have normally been able to reach. For example, of all the Xbox Game Pass members who played “Human: Fall Flat,” more than 40% had never played a puzzle game on Xbox before.

Looking ahead, 2019 will be another great year with a stellar lineup of games slated to release through the ID@Xbox program. Folks can once again try out a number of these titles at the Microsoft Booth in the Moscone Center or at our Developer Showcase Event for press. Among these games, titles from acclaimed creators like Night School Studios, Blue Manchu Games and Zen Studios will launch Afterparty, Void Bastards and Operencia: The Stolen Sun day-and-date into Xbox Game Pass, bringing their games to millions of members upon release. We’re also excited to see games like The Artful Escape, Sable and Tunic from our friends at Beethoven & Dinosaur, Shedworks and Dicey respectively continue their development path through the program.

While Xbox Game Pass has created amazing opportunities for developers to have their games discovered by an established player base, Xbox Live continues to be an amazing social tool for players and developers alike. Whether it’s Gamerscore, achievements, cloud saves, multiplayer, leaderboards or just seeing if your friends are online (and what they’re playing), Xbox Live makes playing games better for fans, and implementation of key social features easier for devs.

We’re super excited this week to start talking to developers about how they can use Xbox Live on platforms other than Xbox and Windows 10 PCs, starting with iOS and Android! This has been a big request from players and developers over the years and while we’ve done a lot of work to implement Xbox Live in some of our Xbox Game Studios games on other platforms (such as Microsoft Solitaire and Wordament), and as part of the foundational technology for the Bedrock Edition of Minecraft, we’re excited to open up this functionality to more developers soon via easy-to-use SDKs! You can learn a lot more in Kareem Choudhry’s blog posts. If you’re a developer interested in implementing Xbox Live in your iOS and Android titles, please reach out to us at www.xbox.com/id and we’d be happy to help get you started!

As with most new technologies, we love to work with partners to help us explore new innovations we’re bringing to developers. That brings us to Cuphead! Our friends at StudioMDHR already have experience with Xbox Live beyond the console – Cuphead is available on Windows 10 with Xbox Live as well. We’ve had some good conversations with them about Xbox Live and the gaming community, especially after we saw what Mojang had done with Minecraft and the Bedrock Edition.

Growing out of these recent discussions, we are partnering with StudioMDHR to investigate bringing Xbox Live features beyond Xbox and PC to Nintendo Switch. Yes, this means that fans will now have the opportunity to experience StudioMDHR’s award-winning debut game on Nintendo Switch with Xbox Live! We’ll be working with StudioMDHR to implement Xbox Live features into Cuphead on the Nintendo Switch in the coming months. Given the early stage of our work with StudioMDHR, the Xbox Live features will appear in a post-launch update to Cuphead on Nintendo Switch. We’d like to thank Studio MDHR and Nintendo for their help in this investigation!

To both players and developers – thanks again for playing and supporting the amazing work showcased through ID@Xbox! We can’t wait for what’s to come this week at GDC!

Coming from Timberline Studios, The Red Lantern is confirmed to be coming to Switch sometime this year. Lindsay Rostal, the game’s director, presented game footage in today’s Nindie Direct detailing some of the things you’ll be getting up to in this story-driven dog sled sim.

Featuring roguelike elements and ‘hundreds’ of possible unique events, the game follows a woman as she takes part in real life annual Iditarod dog race. From the trailer, it looks very much like a journey of self-discovery along the lines of Firewatch.

In handheld mode, gyro controls will enable you to look around without using the right stick, and it looks like you’ll be facing some predicaments as you struggle with yourself and your dogs as much as the environment and the dangers it presents.

Strong Firewatch vibes, no? Have you ever fancied riding a digital dog sled? Let us know in the comments below.

Publisher Devolver Digital has had a good track record of bringing quality games to the Switch eShop, and My Friend Pedro from Deadtoast Entertainment looks like no exception.

The game bio alone has us sold:

My Friend Pedro is a violent ballet about friendship, imagination, and one man’s struggle to obliterate anyone in his path at the behest of a sentient banana. The strategic use of split aiming, slow motion, and the ol’ stylish window breach create one sensational action sequence after another in an explosive battle through the violent underworld.

Check out the trailer above and let us know if you plan on picking this up when it comes to the Switch eShop in June.

Following on the heels of Google GDC reveal of the Stadia platform, both Unreal and Unity Technologies have announced their support for Stadia game development.  Stadia is a new server side platform for hosting and streaming games to any Chrome supported device.  Below are details from both game engine manufacturer.

First the Unreal Engine announcement from their blog:

“We’ve been building our support for Stadia to ensure that developers using Unreal Engine can hit the ground running and be successful on the platform,” said Arciel Rekman, Senior Platform Engineer at Epic Games. “Today we’re releasing a fully-featured integration with Stadia to help developers bring their games to an even broader spectrum of players.”

Designed with cross-platform support in mind, Unreal Engine leverages Stadia features through familiar interfaces, resulting in an easy setup, with visual quality and workflows that are consistent across all target devices.

Thanks to Unreal Engine’s cross-platform capabilities, developers can iterate on their game code locally on their Windows PC for Stadia, a Linux and Vulkan-based platform, before deploying to the cloud.

While Unity announced the following:

One of our core missions is democratizing game development. That means enabling developers to build for the platforms of their choice with accessible tools and workflows that make the process of creating easier.

Though we still have technical and engineering work ahead to ensure Unity developers have a smooth experience building for Stadia, here’s what our community needs to know.

What can I expect in building Unity games for Stadia?

Developers familiar with Unity today can expect recognizable tools and a very similar development process when building for Stadia.

What unique Stadia or Google features will be supported by Unity?

We expect to support all native features unique to Stadia that are required to publish your game and make use of platform capabilities. Stay tuned for more details on feature support later this year.

With either platform, before you can start developing for Stadia you need to be a registered Stadia developer, you can apply here.   You need to have a Employer Tax ID if American, and an email with a custom domain address (ie, not Hotmail or Gmail).  Once registered with Stadia, you can then confirm your credentials with Unreal here, while Unity developers have no additional steps to perform.  The Unity Stadia SDK is expected to ship toward the end of 2019.

GameDev News Unity Unreal

Today at GDC some of the folks from Wizards of the Coast gave a brief talk about how to build and support vibrant player communities around your game, using examples from their work stewarding long-lived games like Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons.

Together, Wizards of the Coast’s Aland Failde (VP of user acquisition and digital marketing) and Michelle Sutterfield (community manager) tried to share useful advice specifically for small- to mid-size devs (and influencers) who want community-building tips.

“From the beginning we’ve been about community and fellowship,” said Failde. “Historically, our big products have brought people around a table to play a game together.”

He reminded folks in the audience that while Wizards has been managing Magic for 25+ years and D&D for over 20, the company just last year released a big, free-to-play video game: Magic: The Gathering Arena.

The meat of the talk was how Wizards has expanded its community by growing the number of streamers and other influencers playing Arena, but Failde first took a minute to hype the company’s history of trying to support unique playstyles and communities.

“From the very beginning, we had a sort of homebrew culture develop among our players,” he said. “Homebrew has been around in the PC world for a long time, with modding cultures, and with our physical card game we saw that very early on.”

Failde thinks one of WotC’s smart community-building moves early on was to invest in tournaments and pro leagues, as well as more casual community events like Friday Night Magic, a formalized system for novice-to-intermediate players to play together at local game shops or other spaces.

Physical game shops have always been key to Wizards’ success, and Failde thinks that’s because they create unique “hubs” where players can check out new games, participate in special events, and (hopefully) offer unique cultures and vibes that make players feel welcome.

“A lot of the things that make game shops successful make influencers successful”

Now, he suggests that big Twitch streamers and YouTubers can offer something similar to their audiences, albeit at a distance: the feeling of being part of a community, and of sharing your passion for a game and its systems with a bunch of other people.

“A lot of the things that make game shops successful make influencers successful,” said Failde. “Having a variety of programming, having programming of different skill levels…and this sense of homebrew culture.”

Sutterfield then took the stage to talk a bit about how she chooses which influencers to work with on a game like Arena, and what other devs can learn from Wizards’ experience.

“When we look for influencers, we don’t just look for people with the most views on Twitch,” she said. “Those things are great and we still look for them, but…our deciding factor is, which influencers can we work with that will influence our community to be a better place? And to be more involved?”

“You need to care more about your streamers”

She says they look for passionate players, who are passionate not just about the game but about the brand and the community around it. Often this means working with what she calls “micro-influencers” — basically just up-and-coming streamers or other content creators who haven’t built a big audience yet.

“When we use micro-influencers, we get so much more than just using top-tier influencers alone,” Sutterfield said, noting that a good mix of such “micro-influencers” can bring you just as much (if not more) attention as if you’d just talked to the people with big audiences — and the smaller streamers can often inject their own beneficial mix of personality and community.

According to Sutterfield, these smaller influencers can also be a boon for small- to mid-size developers because they’re often more invested in your game than a big-time streamer, so much so they may even (if you’re comfortable with it) be willing to stream it without being paid.

“I work with like thousands of streamers, you know, and building those relationships is very important because we can get so much more out of [our events],” Sutterfield added. “We had 400 streamers be part of [a recent early access event to promote new content], and none of them were paid. They did it because they love the game, they love the event, and they love the community.”

Sutterfield said she was able to create a Discord for these streamers and let them loose to share stories, network, and get excited about the game — and that in turn led to more excited streams.

Above all, Sutterfield’s advice for devs looking to build healthy relationships with streamers and influencers is to treat them like human beings, rather than paid marketing megaphones.

“If there’s one thing you should take away from this talk, it’s this: You need to care more about your streamers,” she said. “When you have happy streamers, you have those happy relationships, you will get so much more than you could ever imagine.”

But just to be thorough, she summed up her advice for fellow game makers in five points

• Understand your goals
• Find influencers that represent your brand values
• Feature influencers large and small, often together
• ‘Micro-influencers’ benefit most from your support
• Encourage community building

“The data shows it works,” she said, in closing. “We grew [Arena] over 400 percent in a year, in terms of unique streamers, and they grew with us.”