Video: How some early MUDs compare to today’s games
In this GDC 2010 Online session Richard Bartle, co-creator of MUD, explains the concept behind its original design and corrects some of the misconceptions about what it must have been like to play.
Bartle also goes into detail about how MMO development has advanced dramatically since 1978, and how there are still some areas where early MUDs were more capable than today’s behemoths.
In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its accompanying YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.
Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or VRDC already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.
Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent company Informa
Q& A: Developing the stylish indie hit fighting game Lethal League Blaze
Indie success story and gonzo projectile beatdown sensation Lethal League recently got a sequel in Lethal League Blaze. The games combine a fighting game setup with play that involves manipulating a third entity, a ball that floats around the playfield and bounces off of walls like the ball in Breakout. When smacked by a player, it gains gratifyingly greater speeds and becomes able to do huge damage to opponents.
One of the game’s creators, Dion Koster of Team Reptile, agreed to answer out questions about this engaging and kinetic take on fighting games.
This interview has been slightly edited for publication.
[…] I’m Dion Koster, I like dancing and making things. Me and Tim Remmers are the two bosses of Team Reptile. We’re a concentrated team of about five people. We also bring in lots of artists for specific things so the credits roll a bit longer than that. My own role is that of a game director. Determining the style and vision both visual and gameplay-wise are the things on my plate. Tim is on the business and management side, but both of us still spend most of our time hands-on with the game. We released our first game, called Megabyte Punch, in 2013 and then our first heavy hitter, Lethal League, in 2014.
Lethal League did really well, both of us moved out and from that point on we were truly self sufficient. We never worked with a publisher or received any funds for development either, mostly because we can’t work without full creative control. Lethal League Blaze is our latest release and it did even better for us than the original Lethal League. All of our games made their investment back and a bunch more for the Lethal League series. So as an independent studio we’re pretty well off. Of course, we don’t want to sit back too much. We do our best to challenge ourselves in new ways for every new game and if the fans can see our sincerity with that then I’m as happy as can be.
Sure! While we were making Megabyte Punch, there was a mechanic that reflected projectiles. There were projectiles that were one-hit-kill in that game which made it really exciting to reflect them back and forth. We decided to make this into a mini game, which became the Lethal League prototype.
I made it in flash in a space of two weeks, put it on our site for free and we sent it off to a few websites (you can actually still play it over here). It appeared on the radar of Adam Heart, who people might know from Divekick, who was at Shoryuken.com at the time. He featured it at the Ultimate Fighting Game Tournament 9 as the grand final mystery game and that really boosted our popularity early on.
We finished Megabyte Punch and it was clear we should just head straight into making Lethal League into a proper full game. A year later, in 2014, we showcased the game on EVO and released it on Steam. Before the release we didn’t get a lot of attention outside of the FGC. Thereafter however, Youtubers jumped on it one by one. TotalBiscuit, Game Grumps, PewDiePie, Markiplier, it probably was the extremity and big anticipation moments that attracted them. We kept updating the game for a while and we managed to port it to PS4 and Xbox One in-house.
While that was going on we decided to do a sequel with 3D graphics, since we ported the thing to Unity anyway. It was also a good way to up our ‘game dev game,’ to scale up a bit without taking that big of a risk. I didn’t want to name it Lethal League 2 because it implies that you’d had to have played the original. So we went with Lethal League Blaze instead.
The Blaze is actually the get-up move you can do in this version after being knocked down, signifying the fact that you won’t die in one hit anymore. On high speeds you still have the one-hit-kill shots so the hype is not lost. We added more moves, like pitching and spiking. The pitch is especially important because it directly counters parrying (which is like blocking in Lethal League).
Of course the main attraction are the new characters, stages, modes and music. We have double the characters that the original had at launch. One of the modes you can unlock is called Lethal Volley, we had a lot of 2v2 fun with that one. We also made a story mode in this iteration. Even though Lethal League doesn’t really shine in singleplayer, most people will be buying this game by themselves and I want them to get some fun out of it even before finding a homie to play against.
The style comes from my experiences in street culture and hip hop with the skating, b-boying and graffiti I was doing. This is what drew me to Jet Set Radio Future at the time, which blew my mind with near-future versions of the styles I was familiar with.
Hip hop originated in America of course, but what they had done was use inspiration from the French sci-fi artist Moebius and the backdrop of Tokyo to advance it into new territory. Although I admit it hit me more than others because I saw where it was coming from; this mix between west and east influenced my personal style heavily. So yeah I’m a fan of Ryuta Ueda, the art director for Jet Set Radio. Looking for similar Japanese artists, I also came across Ippei Gyoubu and Daisuke Nakayama. Add to that my friends in the European underground dance scene and graffiti writers from all over the world and you get something that looks like Lethal League Blaze.
It wasn’t really tempting to add more elements perse. When looking at people picking up the games we make, they usually seem to have more fun with something deep instead of something complex, if you get what I mean. There are still not that many elements compared to most top of the bill fighting games, but the interactions in certain contexts or with certain additional inputs actually number quite a few.
It’s true that I like to hide extra mechanics inside others. Some definitely disagree with me here, but I believe the fun of discovering and sharing these is a big part of enjoying the game. It’s also a way to keep it interesting for both beginners and experienced players. There’s many techniques to learn, but they won’t get in the way when you’re playing free-for-all at a house party.
In action games there’s an old trick to give more impact to any hit, be it fighting games, beat ’em ups or sports. You would pause the animation at the moment of impact to give the feel that the thing you’re hitting has more resistance. I added this (hitpause as we call it) without a thought to the prototype and when I had the ball speed up it made sense to increase this pause along with it. Of course, the speed of the ball can be increased exponentially so you would be hanging there for multiple seconds after a while. This upped the hype by a ton so it felt like it was the right direction.
We really wanted to show the characters close up, but the gameplay doesn’t really allow for that. Although it was very late in development we still needed a K.O. moment anyway, so I went ahead and tried a few camera movements. It turned out it didn’t take much to look dope, because with the way we handle animation the characters are in poses that work by themselves pretty much all the time. You see, sometime during development we switched to limited animation instead of 60fps full animation for the characters for better readability and a more stylized appeal. [This tweet from Team Reptile’s Twitter account demonstrates the animation.]
This means that almost all animation frames are handpicked poses. We did, however, have trouble with the backgrounds not supporting all the new angles and positions of the camera, you could see through all the smoke and mirrors so to speak. In the end, the teaser we made to announce the game a year before inspired the solution to this problem. In that teaser we used hard opaque colors to save time and have it stand out. We did the same with the K.O. camera and turned the background into a big red canvas. I’m sure everyone thought we planned it all along!
So I have a kind of backwards way to do that. What is important to me is that the visual design sort of activates your mind by surprising you with a big contrast or extremity that still makes sense. I’ll refrain from going really deep into this, but the characters’ appearance is really important to me because they embody the style of the game not only to those who are playing the game, but also the ones who haven’t seen any gameplay yet at all.
So I design the visuals first and then think about how they would play in the game. I’ll test out ideas for their movement and actions on existing characters. Having the special ability be fun and work even for beginners is the most important thing in that phase. Sometimes I’ll go back and forth a bit with the design at this point to better fit with the gameplay. Of course, I’ll only know if it’s fun for real once I let others try it, so I make sure to let my critical friends try it out.
As I explained earlier I always feel like improving upon our previous work in a big or different way. So I set a couple of goals for myself. These just came from seeing beginners picking it up at conventions and the hardcore players doing the online tournaments every other week. First was to have the game not be as punishing for new players, but to retain its hype play. Second was to add a few new moves to make it a game that you could play for longer, with the requirement that each action has a proper place and time to use. Thirdly, we one-up the game in every other way. Graphics, characters, stages, modes, music, outfits and so on.
My name’s Oscar Brittain. I’m from this place called Fremantle. It’s a satellite city south of Perth in Western Australia. At first glance it seems entirely insignificant and non-unique. Just another West Coast town with old buildings ranging from the 1870s to 1970s, and with a shipping port accounting for half its area. People are nice, but that’s just WA tor you.
You might mistakenly think it only exists for the port. You might see the ancient football ground in the centre of town, with a statue of local legends battling it out mid-game. But if you don’t stop the car and have a look around, you’d never know what a beautiful place you’d missed out on experiencing.
When I started making my game, Desert Child, I was studying architecture at university at the time, and, inspired by this and the work of artists like 1041uuu and waneella, thought to do some 2-point perspective backgrounds for the game. This is a decision that took up the next two years of my life.
The first scene I drew was a big amalgam of things from Fremantle. None were really, directly referencing buildings or locations, but just a first attempt at transferring that Freo feeling into a sci-fi setting. I really liked it and set about drawing more and more local landmarks into the game.
This is sort of my reimagining of the Fremantle Bridge, repurposed as a footbridge. I took a bit of inspiration also from the New York Highline, with the ground having a bunch of greenery, since cars just fly in this future.
At the end of the real Fremantle Bridge, there is an old radio navigation tower. It was abandoned until very recently. I always thought of this as a cool modern lighthouse, and what Aussie kid doesn’t have a soft spot for lighthouses after growing up watching “Round the Twist.” I wanted it in the game. I integrated it into the bridge itself, and kind of redesigned it for having been used for space ship navigation in the past, whereas now it’s used as a Centrelink office.
Centrelink is the Australian dole agency, but it’s also responsible for giving students their Austudy allowance. It basically forms the bedrock of Bohemian Australia. Let’s just say I’d be a hypocrite if I ever complain about paying taxes in the future.
In reality, any Centrelink branch with this kind of land value would have been sold and relocated to the suburbs years ago, but I still pine for them to return to Packenham St, near the good cafes.
The Fremantle Harbour was at once a dominating presence in the city. The giant dinosaur-like cranes have become these calming creatures that are always visible from the beach, watching over everyone as they work. I actually added them into the game quite late in development, as my friends complained that it didn’t feel like Freo without them.
Fremantle’s High Street has really come back to life in the last 5 years, but for a while, the rent on these beautiful old buildings must have hit rock bottom, since huge old bank buildings were being rented for things like bookshops and cafes. New Edition Bookshop moved into this massive old place, and instantly gained this sense of quality and culture.
The Broody Hen is a new cafe that just opened around the corner from my house, so I go there often. It’s so cozy, and it’s the first place I’ve ever been to regularly enough for the barista to remember my order. I don’t know if this is a good thing, or it means I go there too much.
East West Design is a furniture warehouse located right on South Beach. When they moved in, they spent a truckload of money painting this enormous mural on the side of the previously ugly building, which has now become a backdrop for several cafes and restaurants. This image doesn’t do it justice; the mural is about 70 meters long and is something I’ve tried and failed to post to Instagram on numerous occasions.
Speaking of murals, Fremantle has a weird bend towards paining insanely massive paintings on the sides of buildings. The many old buildings used to have huge images of buffalo, goats, and praying mantis on the side of it, so I tried to include some huge street art pieces in the game as a tribute to this strange local obsession.
One of the first things I put into the game was the tiny late-night deli across the street from my house. I’m looking at it right now; I love it. I put it in the game just because I see it so often, and I made it sell just useless, overpriced items. Then about a week after that, they started selling decent Vietnamese Pho. So now I just look stupid. Also, they own a giant mech.
Finally, you can’t really make a game inspired by Freo without including the Fremantle Markets. It’s not even that it’s a good market, it’s just right in the centre of everything. It’s this giant tourist trap that, very occasionally, you’ll be with someone and they’ll tell you how they got a great donut or bao in there. And so you venture in and finally emerge two hours later with something edible. It probably isn’t what you wanted to eat, but it’ll do. Then you walk across the street to The Up Markets, or Uppies, and get dinner for under $10. It’s a way of life.
And so ends this bizarre tribute to the place where I live. It’s not perfect, and there’s probably way too many cheap sushi joints, but I think it’s worthy of its own video game. Even if I had to pretend it’s on Mars.
The Steam Community has spoken, and we are proud to announce the finalists for The Steam Awards 2018 — but we still need your help choosing the winners!
Voting will open on December 20th, at the start of the 12th annual Steam Winter Sale. Vote in each of our 8 categories to share your top Steam games and developers from 2018 and obtain this year’s set of trading cards.
Voting closes January 3rd and winners will be announced early February 2019. Good luck to all of our nominees!
Nominees for Game of the Year
PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS
MONSTER HUNTER: WORLD
Kingdom Come: Deliverance
HITMAN™ 2
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
Nominees for VR Game of the Year
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR
VRChat
Beat Saber
Fallout 4 VR
SUPERHOT VR
Nominees for Labor of Love
Dota 2
Grand Theft Auto V
No Man’s Sky
Path of Exile
Stardew Valley
Nominees for Best Environment
The Witcher® 3: Wild Hunt
Subnautica
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Far Cry 5
DARK SOULS™ III
Nominees for Better with Friends
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six® Siege
PAYDAY 2
Dead by Daylight
Overcooked! 2
Nominees for Best Alternate History
Wolfeinstein II: The New Colossus
Assassin’s Creed® Odyssey
Hearts of Iron IV
Sid Meier’s Civilization® VI
Fallout 4
Nominees for Most Fun with a Machine
Euro Truck Simulator 2
Rocket League
NieR:Automata
Factorio
Space Engineers
Nominees for Best Developer
CD PROJEKT RED
Ubisoft
Bethesda
Rockstar Games
Digital Extremes Ltd.
Square Enix
Capcom
Paradox Interactive
BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment
Klei
Notes on Best Developer category:
“Best Developer” proved to be a highly-contested category with a lot of close calls among the top nominees. As a result, we expanded the set of nominees to 10. In addition, we’ve excluded ourselves from this category. We appreciate the love you’ve shown us, but we want to honor the other awesome developers on Steam, so we have excluded Valve from the final tally.
Checkmate is the fifth and final episode of The Council?s inaugural season. The Complete Season of The Council grants access to all 5 episodes.
As his assumptions about reality come crashing down around him, Louis de Richet must take the final steps on deciding his path ? and the fate of the world. Democracies, monarchies, and the future of nations hang in the balance.
This finale brings all your decisions, mistakes, and victories to the fore as Louis? alliances, enemies, and family all come together for a climatic confrontation. Who will win, and can the De Richets survive the island in the end?
Finish the adventure in The Council Episode 5: Checkmate as kings fall, pawns rise, and the choice, as always, is yours.
Welcome to Solis, a huge South American world home of conflict, oppression and extreme weather conditions. Just Cause 4 sees rogue hero Rico Rodriguez land in Solis to hunt down the truth about his past, at any costs. Strap into your wingsuit, equip your fully customizable grappling hook, and get ready to bring the thunder. Soar through the skies with your wingsuit - Skydive, Base Jump and Free Dive with no limits. Fight your enemies under extreme weather conditions, including treacherous tornadoes and tropical lightning storms, taking the iconic Just Cause action to insane new heights. Use extreme weather events to your advantage thanks to never seen before in-game physics. Spearhead the rebellion and defeat the Black Hand, a hi-tech private military organisation. Face off against Gabriela Morales ? your most fierce, capable, and unpredictable adversary yet. Uncover the truth of Rico?s father?s past life on Solis? and its extreme weather. Explore the remote South American country of Solis, home of conflict, secrets, and danger. Enjoy 100 square kilometres of exotic playground, from rainforest to desert, via snowy mountain peaks. Discover a plethora of wonders as you explore the world of Solis from bustling cities to rural grasslands. [Square Enix]
For Honor Welcomes Assassin's Creed's Ezio To The Battlefield
For Honor is mingling with another Ubisoft property, with a limited-time Assassin's Creed crossover event. The "For the Creed" event will run from December 20 to January 10 and will feature familiar Assassin's Creed characters with trappings of the animus.
During the duration of the event, you can play a special 4v4 Dominion mode called "Assassini e Templari" in which you capture zones to lure out one of two commanders: Ezio Auditore da Firenze or Cesare Borgia. Defeating either commander gives you 300 points, and reaching 1000 points and defeating the opposing team during the breaking period will win the match.
The maps rotating in the Assassini e Templari mode will feature animus glitches and soldiers will be themed after the factions in the AC series. Your drop attacks will appear as Leap of Faith and air assassination animations, and game modes will be displayed using an animus theme. Some game modes will also be narrated by Warren Vidic of the Animus Project.
You can also earn some new customization items, like the Odyssey of the Misthios mask from Assassin's Creed Odyssey, a Haystack emote, Hidden Blade execution, animus effects and battle outfits, Assassin and Templar outfits, and weapons from the franchise. A special For the Creed bundle will be available for 35,000 Steel per hero.
For Honor and Assassin's Creed seem tonally similar enough that a crossover makes sense. Ubisoft recently played matchmaker for two of its other franchises, with a special event that put Rainbow Six characters and story beats into Ghost Recon Wildlands.
Indie Hit Celeste Sold Over 500,000 Copies In 2018
After being recognised as the indie title of the year at the 2018 Game Awards, Celeste by Matt Makes Games has now sold over 500,000 copies in 2018. This is the first major sales milestone for the retro-inspired indie platformer since it arrived at the start of the year. Although the Switch version was reportedly the most popular on release, exact sale figures for each platform have not been revealed.
In addition to revealing the game had sold this amount, the creator Matt Thorson said the team was working on some farewell levels for the title, which are going to be “very hard” and will be ready early on in 2019. Matt Makes Games will also be announcing what’s next for them in the new year.
Indie success is widespread across the Switch. Yesterday, Thimbleweed Park developer Ron Gilbert shared a sales chart, revealing the Switch was the leading platform in terms of sales. Over the last quarter, the Switch version performed three times better than the Steam version. It’s worth noting how Celeste will also be receiving a Limited Run physical release early on in 2019, which is sure to boost sales.
Are you at all surprised to hear Celeste has sold 500,000 copies? Have you downloaded it from the Switch eShop yet? Tell us below.
Random: Facebook Rejects Super Meat Boy Advertisement Due To “Explicit” Nature
There doesn’t seem to be much balance over on the social media platform Facebook. Often you’ll hear stories about the company censoring images that don’t really need to be and other times it doesn’t do enough to protect its users from graphic content. This particular story is one of those cases where it’s probably gone a tad overboard.
According to Team Meat – the masterminds behind the insanely tough platform game Super Meat Boy, which is available on multiple platforms including the Switch eShop – Facebook recently rejected its ad, deeming it sexually explicit. As can be seen below, it’s Meat Boy and Bandage Girl with their butts on display:
Other than the cracks on show, it’s hard to say why Facebook had such a problem with the artwork for this advertisement. It’s not even that bad when compared to the game itself which contains many violent and bloody scenarios. This was the Team Meat Twitter account response:
“Good thing Facebook is so on top of the content on their site!!! Now if you’ll excuse me I found a very interesting and factual facebook group about how the earth is flat.”
What do you think about this? Has Facebook lost the plot? Do you find this picture offensive? Tell us below.
