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.

Desert Child is available now on Xbox One via the Microsoft Store and is part of the ID@Xbox Winter of Arcade event.

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.

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.

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.

Can you seriously believe it’s been a year since the 2017 Game of the Year awards? That’s right – it’s time for everyone to come together yet again and decide on their favourite games of 2018.

This year we’ll be doing things a little differently; instead of providing you with a limited shortlist we’ve opened things up so you can vote for any game in our database, which should include everything released in 2018. Remember, only games that were released in the UK or US first in 2018 are eligible. If you can’t find the game you want to vote for, please contact us so we can investigate.

Rules: You must be logged in to vote. You can only vote once per category but can vote for up to three games. Your first choice will receive 3 points, second choice 2 points and third choice 1 point. Votes will then be tallied and revealed on the 31st Dec. Voting will close at midnight, Sunday 30th Dec 2018.

Switch Retail Game Of The Year – 2018

Switch eShop Game Of The Year – 2018

3DS Game Of The Year – 2018

eShop Developer Of The Year – 2018

Please search for your favourite developer(s) by searching by the game title they released this year.

Art Style Game Of The Year – 2018

Multiplayer Game Of The Year – 2018

Overall Game Of The Year – 2018

If you have any issues voting for the game you want, simply contact us so we can investigate. Otherwise, get voting and let us know in the comments below your predictions on the results.

Results will be revealed on 31st Dec 2018.