Your regular weekly update is back, and we’ve got plenty to catch up on – it’s been a pretty good couple of weeks all things considered, with some interesting new releases and game updates, as well as a healthy amount of sale action to see you into the weekend. For some of you in the UK it’ll be school holidays next week, so you may want to read this week’s update with interest.

Highlights from this week include catch-up reviews on The Escapists 2 (which is pretty good) and Invaders from Dimension X! (which is a bit rough around the edges, but a neat war game that we’re glad to see exist).

Meanwhile, in mobile games…

Out Now

Evolution (iOS Universal & Android) (Review)

There’s not much more to say about this game beyond what we stated in our review, so go give that a read. Suffice to say, if you like board games, there’s a high chance you’ll like this game. Better yet, you can try it out for yourself for free!

Knights of the Card Table (iOS Universal & Android) – Full Review Coming Soon!

The art style on this one reminds me of our 2018 GOTY, Meteorfall and makes me wonder if the same artist was involved. This is a premium card game/dungeon crawler where players can re-arrange the dungeon cards themselves. Plenty of collectables and plenty of replayability by the sounds of things, and we’ll get you a full review as soon as we can.

Rebel Inc. (iOS Universal, Android) (Review)

One of our favourite strategy titles is now on Android! Woot! The pricing model is slightly different to what is on iOS, but it’s basically the same as Plague Inc. – you can try it out for free, and then there’s an IAP to unlock the ‘Premium’ version. There are additional IAPs beyond that, but these are exactly the same as what iOS users have.

From last week there was also text-based strategy game A Few Minutes of Glory (iOS), which we’ll have a full review for next week, as well as Throne Quest (iOS & Android), an action RPG that’s also on our list to take a deeper look at.

Finally, Victory Point Games released one of their solitaire board games in digital format called Gem Rush (iOS, Android). It’s an unfortunate title for the mobile app store, but we’ll get you a full review as soon as we can.

Updates & Pre-Orders

Star Traders: Frontiers (iOS & Android) (Review)
Templar Battleforce (iOS & Android) (Review)

The Trese Brothers have updated two of their catalogue recently – Templar Battleforce continues to get refined with improved iPad Pro support, and recently released Star Traders: Frontiers get a new content drop in the form of a new high-difficulty role and play-style. The link may be from steam, but it’s worth paying attention to the PC page because that’s where they talk about their plans and updates for the game (across all platforms).

Stardew Valley (iOS & Android) (Review)

The iconic farming simulator/RPG is finally making its way to Android. Pre-registration is open right now, so if you click on the above link you can sign up to notified when the game is released. The generally consensus is that it’ll be premium and cost the same as the iOS version, and also have all of the same functionality bar multiplayer. No news yet as to the ‘when’, but I’m sure we’ll find out soon.

Sales

There’s actually quite a lot of games on sale this week, so this section is going to have to be a bit brief:

• Hero Generations (Review) (iOS & Android): $0.99
• Transistor (iOS): $0.99 – cheapest price to date
• Age of Rivals (Review) (iOS & Android): $1.99
• Holy Potatoes! We’re in Space!? (Review) (iOS): $2.99 – only the second time it’s been on sale
• Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop!? (Review) (iOS & Android): $1.99 – only the second time it’s been on sale
• Potion Explosion (Review) (iOS & Android): $2.99 – not the cheapest price

Also available at a discount are Asmodee’s digital ports of Love Letter and Patchwork.

That’s everything in this week’s update – enjoy your weekends and we’ll see you next week. If you’ve seen anything else you think deserves as mention, let us know in the comments!

Linux isn’t just for developers. I know that might come as a surprise for you, but the types of users that work with the open source platform are as varied as the available distributions. Take yours truly for example. Although I once studied programming, I am not a developer.

The creating I do with Linux is with words, sounds, and visuals. I write books, I record audio, and a create digital images and video. And even though I don’t choose to work with distributions geared toward those specific tasks, they do exist. I also listen to a lot of music. I tend to listen to most of my music via vinyl. But sometimes I want to listen to music not available in my format of choice. That’s when I turn to digital music.

Having a Linux distribution geared specifically toward playing music might not be on the radar of the average user, but to an audiophile, it could be a real deal maker.

This bring us to Audiophile Linux. Audiophile Linux is an Arch Linux-based distribution geared toward, as the name suggests, audiophiles. What makes Audiophile Linux special? First and foremost, it’s optimized for high quality audio reproduction. To make this possible, Audiophile Linux features:

• System and memory optimized for quality audio

• Custom Real-Time kernel

• Latency under 5ms

• Direct Stream Digital support

• Lightweight window manager (Fluxbox)

• Pre installed audio and video programs

• Lightweight OS, free of unnecessary daemons and services

Although Audiophile Linux claims the distribution is easily installed, it’s very much based on Arch Linux, so the installation is nowhere near as easy as, say, Ubuntu. At this point, you might be thinking, “But there’s already Ubuntu Studio, which is as easy to install as Ubuntu, and contains some of the same features!” That may be true, but there are users out there (even those of a more artistic bent) who prefer a decidedly un-Ubuntu distribution. On top of which, Ubuntu Studio would be serious overkill for anyone just looking for high-quality music reproduction. For that, there’s Audiophile Linux.
Let’s install it and see what’s what.

Installation

As I mentioned, Audiophile is based on Arch Linux. Unlike some distributions based on Arch, however, Audiophile Linux doesn’t include a pretty, user-friendly GUI installer. Instead, what you must do is download the ISO image, burn the ISO to either a USB or CD/DVD, and boot from the device. Once booted, you’ll find yourself at a command prompt. Once at that prompt, here are the steps to install.

Create the necessary partition by issuing the command:

fdisk /dev/sdX

where X is the drive letter (discovered with the command fdisk -l).

Type n to create a new partition and then type p to make the partition a primary. When that completes, type w to write the changes. Format the new partition with the command:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1

Mount the new partition with the command:

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

Finish up the partition with the following commands;

time cp -ax / /mnt arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash cd /etc/apl-files

Install the base packages (and create a username/password with the command:

./runme.sh

Take care of the GRUB boot loader with the following commands:

grub-install --target=i386-pc /dev/sda grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Give the root user a password with the following command:

passwd root

Set your timezone like so (substituting your location):

ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Kentucky/Louisville /etc/localtime

Set the hardware clock and autologin with the following commands:

hwclock --systohc --utc ./autologin.sh

Reboot the system with the command:

reboot

It Gets a Bit Dicey Now

There’s a problem to be found, which is related to the pacman update process. If you immediately go to update the system with the pacman -Suy command, you’ll find Xorg broken and seemingly no way to repair it. This problem has been around for some time now and has yet to be fixed. How do you get around it? First, you need to remove the libxfont package with the command:

sudo pacman -Rc libxfont

That’s not all. There’s another package that must be removed (Cantata – the Audiophile music player). Issue the command:

sudo pacman -Rc ffmpeg2.8

Now, you can update Audiophile Linux with the command:

sudo pacman -Suy

Once updated, you can finish up the installation with the command:

sudo pacman -S terminus-font pacman -S xorg-server pacman -S firefox

You can then reinstall Cantata with the command:

sudo pacman -S cantata

When this completes, reboot and log into your desktop.

The Desktop

As mentioned earlier, Audiophile Linux opts for lightweight desktop environment, Fluxbox. Although I understand why the developers would want to make use of this desktop (because it’s incredibly lightweight), many users might not enjoy working with such a minimal desktop. And since most audiophiles are going to be working with hardware that can tolerate a more feature-rich desktop. If you want to opt to go that route, you can install a desktop like GNOME with the command:

sudo pacman -S gnome

However, if you want to be a purist (and get the absolute most out of this hardware/software combination), stick with the default Fluxbox. I recommend sticking with Fluxbox especially since you’ll only be using Audiophile Linux for one purpose (listening to music).

Fluxbox uses an incredibly basic interface. Right-click anywhere on the desktop and a menu will appear (Figure 1).

From that menu, you won’t find a lot of applications (Figure 2).

That’s okay, because you only need one—Cantata (listed in the menu as Play music). However, after the installation, Cantata won’t run. Why? Because of a QT5 problem. To get around this, you need to issue the following commands:

sudo pacman -S binutils sudo strip --remove-section=.note.ABI-tag /usr/lib64/libQt5Core.so.5

Once you’ve taken care of the above, Cantata will run and you can start playing all of the music you’ve added to the library (Figure 3).

Worth The Hassle?

I have to confess, at first I was fairly certain Audiophile Linux wouldn’t be worth the trouble of getting it up and running … for the singular purpose of listening to music. However, once those tunes started spilling from my speakers, I was sold.

Although the average listener might not notice the difference with this distribution, audiophiles will. The clarity and playback of digital music on Audiophile Linux far exceeded that on both Elementary OS and Ubuntu Linux. So if that appeals to you, I highly recommend giving Audiophile Linux a spin.

Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.

Microsoft has always had to straddle an arguably difficult position in the software trade. The company has always needed to appear technically intricate, granular and powerful in the eyes of hard-core software developers. At the same time, the company has always had to present its software to market with a user-friendly ‘anyone can use it’ out-of-the-box style and approach.

There’s a little of that duality in the firm’s latest power play, which is a combination pack of technologies wrapped up under the Microsoft Power Platform brand.

This is all about presenting a selection of heavyweight backend technologies to hard-core developers and data scientists, but also to would-be so-called citizen developers who are typically businesspeople with an interest in getting applications and data to work the way they want them to work.

CEO Satya: be cool (to others)

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has tried to explain to his developer team that it’s not always about being the most amazing software engineer that creates the next big thing. Instead, it’s about creating amazing software power and putting that power in the hands of people who need it.

“You join here [Microsoft, the company itself], not to be cool, but to make others cool,” said Nadella, in a comment that has been widely reported internally and officially referenced here on c|net.

What Nadella meant was: build something so amazing that it empowers other people. This, of course, is a platform play, not a product play i.e. he wants people to use Microsoft technologies to create something great, rather than use an existing Microsoft technology to be great per se. It’s a logical enough strategy i.e. software products come and go, but platforms are more foundational and expansive… and so (typically) form a better long term business bet.

Microsoft Power Platform

The component parts of the Microsoft Power Platform have all previously existed as more distinct entities. This is essentially a coming together of Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow as a more unified offering available on top of Microsoft Azure cloud services.

“Our Power Platform – spanning Power BI, PowerApps and Flow – enables anyone in an organization to start building an intelligent app or workflow where none exists. It is the only solution of its kind in the industry – bringing together no-code/low-code app development, robotic process automation and self-service analytics into a single, comprehensive platform. And it enables extensibility across Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 as well as the leading third-party SaaS business applications,” said Microsoft CEO Nadella, in a press statement.

So just looking at the component parts again and explaining their functions, we have Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow.

Microsoft Power BI is self-service Business Intelligence (BI) app that works to connect and analyze business data and present a graphical visualization of it on screen. It supports 43 languages and the data it ingests can come from an Excel spreadsheet or SharePoint list, an Oracle database or from an SAP or Salesforce application. Nearly 10 petabytes of data are uploaded to the service each month with more than 10 million report and dashboard queries executed against that data every hour.

Microsoft PowerApps forms the company’s citizen application development platform. Theoretically ‘anyone’ (says Microsoft) can use PowerApps to build web and mobile applications without writing code. There’s also a natural connection between Power BI and PowerApps so that users can put insights (from Power BI) in the hands of maintenance workers and others on the frontline in apps built using PowerApps.

Lastly here there is Flow. This is Microsoft’s user interface that allows users to work with Robotic Process Automation (RPA), a technology designed to help automate simple tasks (and reduce operational errors) through automated workflows.

Data flows, everywhere

Corporate vice president in Microsoft’s business applications group James Phillips explains that the team’s vision for Microsoft Power Platform started from the recognition that data is increasingly flowing from everything, and a belief that organizations that harness their data – to gain insights then used to drive intelligent business processes – will outperform those that don’t.

“We also recognize there aren’t enough programmers, data scientists and tech professionals to go around. So our goal was to build a platform not targeting these technology experts but for [ordinary] people – and the millions of other frontline workers who see opportunities every day to create something better than the status quo, but who’ve never been empowered to do anything about it,” wrote Philips, in a lengthy Microsoft cloud blog.

Philips and team say that the guiding vision for Microsoft Power Platform was a framework they called the ‘Triple-A Loop’ i.e. a closed-loop system allowing users to gain insights from data (Analyze) used to drive intelligent business processes via apps they build (Act) and processes they automate (Automate).

Why play platform games?

We might stand back and ask why Microsoft is so focused on its new and wider approach to platform games of this kind — and there are three fairly reasonable suggestions we can make here.

First, Microsoft has always done platforms i.e. Windows was and still is a platform and you run other things (apps, databases and other computing services) upon it.

Second, Microsoft has invested heavily in its own Azure cloud platform (which features as a key element of Microsoft Power Platform) and, over and above that, the firm has for a long time now been working to make large portions of its stack (such as Office as a platform, which we detailed here in 2015) big enough to be considered platforms in their own right.

Third, Microsoft (under CEO Nadella at least) appears to understand the power of platforms both inside the Microsoft universe and outside of it. Be that other platform Linux, be it Android or be it a major vendor’s data platform suite from the likes of SAP, Salesforce, Oracle and so on.

This is a world where data comes first — sometimes from databases, sometimes from AI computations, sometimes from the Internet of Things (IoT) and its devices and sometimes from actual users — even before the actual software applications that will feed on that data. That core fact very arguably makes any platform play strategically smarter for long term success… if perhaps not just a little cool too.

The 2019 Game Developers Conference will feature an exhibition called Alt.Ctrl.GDC dedicated to games that use alternative control schemes and interactions.

Gamasutra will be talking to the developers of each of the games that have been selected for the showcase.

Ruins Climber has players rapidly tugging on a circular rope to climb a wall, hopping from side to side to avoid hazards that dangle along their path.

Gamasutra spoke with Takahiro Miyazawa, developer of Ruins Climber, to talk about designing a controller and then creating a game around it, the difficulties of making a controller with rope, and the appeal of creating games that are as fun to spectate as they are to play.

Born from a pulling motion

I’m Takahiro Miyazawa. I made this project alone. For about 20 years, I have been making browser games.

I wanted to make a game about pulling something. When I thought about something fun to pull, I thought of a rope. The rope made into a ring shape, so it can be pulled endlessly.

Creating controllers players will instantly understand

I don’t want to provide a description about how to play my games at game shows because it’s so busy.

So, I always design games that don’t need a description. If the game character makes the same gesture as the player, explanation is not necessary.

The mechanisms of climbing ruins

Ruins Climber was made with Unity and Arduino. The rope was made by rolling a towel. The frame uses a water pipe.

The challenges of making a controller from rope

The rope had to pull freely with a light force. And it had to be durable. I made 4 prototypes.

Creating the controller, then a game for it

I always make a controller at first. Next, I make a game for this controller. So, the game design is determined naturally.

Fun for more than just the player

I think that unique controllers can entertain not only the players, but also the audience. It is very important for the audience to have fun.

The appeal of designing unique controllers

I like to watch everyone’s reaction at the event. And it is fun to provide play that you have never experienced yet.

Today’s game makers are doing mind-blowing things with graphics, and at the 2019 Game Developers Conference you’ll have a unique opportunity to see how some of the industry’s most jaw-dropping games are built.

Notably, as part of GDC 2019’s Advanced Graphics Techniques Tutorial, AMD and Ubisoft will present a Programming track talk on “Efficient Rendering in ‘The Division 2‘” that you won’t want to miss!

Together, Ubisoft Massive technical director Calle Lejdfors and AMD developer tech engineer Raul Aguaviva will walk you through how Ubisoft’s upcoming online action-RPG is built to run efficiently on the company’s powerful Snowdrop engine.

You’ll get a full, frank look at the tech, as though you were being brought onboard to join the Snowdrop team right after GDC wraps up. You’ll also learn some of the tricks and techniques The Division 2 team uses to achieve maximum performance on both PC and console, like how to structure a frame so asynchronous compute can get the most out of the GPU.

You’ll also walk away with unique insight into how Snowdrop devs use multi-threading, intrinsics and even a trick to submit command lists faster than usual. It promises to be a fast-paced talk, so come caffeinated and ready to learn!

It’s a great example of the kind of technical, in-depth talks you’ll find in the Advanced Graphics Techniques Tutorial, a focused day-long look at how to create cutting-edge game graphics for game developers targeting the PC platform. For a full list of what to expect, including talks from Nvidia, AMD, and developers like Wildcard (Ark, Oasis) and Ready at Dawn (The Order: 1886), check out the Tutorial’s full talk lineup!

Further details on these talks and many more are available now on the GDC 2019 Session Scheduler. There you can begin to lay out your GDC 2019, which takes place March 18th through the 22nd at the (newly renovated!) Moscone Center in San Francisco. 

Bring your team to GDC! Register a group of 10 or more and save 10 percent on conference passes. Learn more here.​

For more details on GDC 2019 visit the show’s official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent company Informa