Yesterday, we found out Alfonso Ribeiro – who played Carlton Banks in the early ’90s television sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air – would be suing Epic Games for adding his character’s dance move to its popular free-to-play multiplayer title Fortnite.

Ribeiro is not the first famous person to take legal action against the video game company now valued at $15 billion and he seemingly won’t be the last, either. In the latest news, Backpack Kid – the self-proclaimed creator of the “Floss” dance – is the latest individual looking to make some extra money from this recent trend. The 16-year-old’s mother and manager have filed a lawsuit on his behalf because they believe the game’s developers are taking advantage of his success.

Like Ribeiro and the rapper 2 Milly, Backpack Kid is also in the process of copyrighting his dance move. When speaking to TMZ, Backpack Kid said the decision to take legal action wasn’t motivated by money. In a previous interview in June, the boy said he was happy to be represented in the game, even if he wasn’t credited.

What do you think about this? Which side are you supporting? Tell us in the comments.

Earlier this week, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate director Masahiro Sakurai wrote about the new Switch release in Famitsu.

According to the translation – courtesy of Siliconera, Sakurai’s thoughts about how the game should be played are still the same. His belief is there is no correct way to necessarily play Smash Bros. As for his views on the eSports scene, he’s come to accept the way the game is played on a competitive level but noted how a lot of work had gone into the casual play style.

It’s not all that surprising to hear his feelings about the professional scene are still the same. On previous occasions, Sakurai has stated how he’s not concerned about the competitive aspects of the Smash Bros. series and even believes Nintendo’s philosophy does not align with this type of gaming.

Speaking to The Guardian back in August, Sakurai revealed what he regularly thought about when watching professional Smash tournaments online:

“The one thing I always think is that, if only they used more different stages and items, there’d be a lot more variety in the gameplay.”

In terms of how he’s feeling about the series in general following the release of Ultimate, according to his latest column in Famitsu, he said he would always prioritise a new entry in the series if Nintendo was to approach him again, but obviously won’t guarantee he’ll be on the project forever.

In regards to how the series brings together Nintendo’s all-star cast, Sakurai feels it has now evolved well beyond this – thanks to the larger roster featured in the latest game. These collaborations stem from the Spirit mode, which became an essential way of incorporating other franchises into the game.

What do you make of Sakurai’s comments about the competitive Smash scene? Tell us below.

Project Hospital is the latest entry into the field of medical center simulations, which is usually covered in a tongue-in-cheek way, such as with both Bulfrog and Krisalis’ Theme Park Hospital and Two Point and Sega’s upcoming Two Point Hospital.

Oxymoron Games’ Project Hospital takes a more realistic approach in terms of the medicine involved, although some side aspects are simplified or even fictionalized for a better play experience. Lead programmer Jan Beneš kindly answered some questions about its development for us.

The origin of Oxymoron Games can be tracked some years back, when most of the team members were still employees in different bigger studios in Prague or Helsinki, thinking (and talking) about working on our own games one day. The experience with a variety of games from third-person action games, like Mafia II and III or Quantum Break, to different genres like sports or simulation games turned out to be really useful when starting a new project from scratch.

Reality and depth seems to have worked really well for us. Most of the recent games tackling the hospital theme are very casual and simple, their content has mostly nothing in common with real hospitals. On the other hand Project Hospital is focused on players who want a challenging approach and who want real medicine. The complexity gives you a plenty of options what to play with and what to build and a long learning curve gives you small challenges in many aspects of gameplay (easy to learn, hard to master). And all of this has a basis in real world medicine with a slight educational potential. I think this is where Project Hospital excels.

I admit that balancing this game between gameplay and reality was quite tricky, but overall gameplay should always come first. I could say that Project Hospital is as real as possible, but still just a game – and a game must be fun to play. That’s why there are no STDs or dying children, that would be just too depressing, or too specific details like vital functions where you would have to consider the values of heartbeat, blood pressure, temperature and others, because that would make the game unplayable for people without medical background (and for some of us devs as well).

Taking in account how complex the game is and how small a team we are (smaller than for example the team behind Prison Architect), it’s true that there have been some hard decisions and some originally planned features had to be simplified or postponed after release – typically variations of the same system (ambulances vs. helicopters, elevators vs. stairs).

Sometimes the reasons for going with a simpler solution were both the implementation cost and design decisions, especially when the features would make the game even more demanding for the player to understand and learn.

One of the main design pillars has been to allow the player to focus on any of the main aspects of the game while the rest will work mostly automatically. Another example would be prefabs in building mode.

The option to go hands-on with individual patients is clearly the favorite part of the game for a lot of players and a it definitely got lot of attention during development. The players can control any aspect of what happens with the patient by planning examinations and treatments, figuring out the diagnosis or assigning doctors and departments. Still, when managed correctly, the staff should be able to handle most cases independently and only notify the player if there is a problem or a crisis.

The user interface has definitely been one of two biggest challenges (second one being the complex rules of how the patients flow through the hospital, while the player can intervene at any point).

Nobody in the team had previous experience with UI design, so there has been a lot of ‘learn as you go’ along the way and many parts of the interface underwent quite a few iterations, as also the underlying systems evolved during development.

We’re happy that we managed to implement quite a few quality of life features like different levels of transparency, guides on the floor when placing objects and detailed tooltips for anything in the user interface, the whole management/logistics view turned quite nicely and in a way it presents itself almost like interactive infographics–but there are always some ideas how to improve the interface further.

The management side and especially hiring correct staff has more weight when it comes to running a hospital smoothly, but the layout of course plays an important role as well. In any game with a relatively fast time scale (our day lasts for about an hour) the walking times are really important so both the layout of the hospital, elevator placement and even layout of individual rooms matter. The effect is even more prominent with inpatients, as a nurse needs to go get a stretcher to transport the patient.

The game is built with Unity, which was a reasonable choice, but we’re basically only using the UI system and renderer and no asset store packages at all. The game itself is mostly a standalone codebase written in C# with quite a few custom systems – it’s sometimes a real lifesaver to have direct access to code for both debugging purposes and for easy changes.

For example our animation system allows us to easily create random character variations, change clothes, trigger events and we can develop specific tools as needed. Another example is pathfinding, there’s a lot of rules like access rights or elevator usage which make it impractical to use the Unity navigation system, so a custom (not very fancy) multi-threaded system based on A* is what we went with.

Haha, luckily not. Fun fact: hypochondria was one of the first testing medical conditions in the alpha version of the game and had a specific examination that was uncovering it.

One of the best parts of the experience compared to working on triple-A where everybody has a very specific role and is shielded from the outside world, was working with the community. First people who got in touch were actually professionals in the medical field who did some free consultancy for us and even helped with the medical texts in the game, like descriptions of diagnoses or symptoms.

We ran a closed beta a few months before release with a few hundred people and it really helped us catch a lot of issues early. The game shipped with eight community-translated languages (which has now grown to 13) and more are on the way. Generally this really exceeded our expectations and gave us a nice morale boost along the way.

Game analytics company DeltaDNA has published its ad survey results for 2018, sharing data taken from a survey of 336 developers of free-to-play mobile games over a 12 month period.

The findings could be useful for mobile developers who might want some insight into how they’d like to monetize their game in the future. 

The survey revealed that even though the majority of casual and hardcore games are still earning half or more of their revenue from in-app purchases, ad revenue is finally becoming viable.

A majority of casual game developers make less than 40 percent of their revenue from ads, but 16 percent said they earned 80 percent or more from the same source.

In comparison, 70 percent of hardcore game developers said their games made more than 20 percent of revenue from ads – up from only 50 percent reporting the same amount last year.

• Developers are more confident about integrating ads, with 21 percent showing five or more ads per session.
• The number of developers who classify in-game ads as an ‘important monetization opportunity’ has grown from 39 percent in 2016 to 59 percent in 2018, indicating a cultural shift within the industry.

Hello, I am Aurélien Regard, one half of the team behind Away: Journey to the Unexpected, releasing on Xbox One February 8, 2019. I’d like to quickly go through the creative process behind Away, from 2016 to how it is today.

One thing I love about the first-person shooter (FPS) genre is the power of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. However, between over-the-top action shooters and narrative walking sims, I felt like the genre was missing the concept of action-adventures.

So, came the idea behind Away: Journey to the Unexpected! At least the foundation of its gameplay. Here’s a look at some early prototype screenshots…

I also took some inspirations on the way, in terms of artistic direction. For technical reasons I had to make easy-to-produce characters to fit in the 3D environment, and the idea came from the old-school Doom: making “cardboard cutout” characters constantly looking towards you.

I had the key concepts locked in now: an action-adventure FPS with 2D characters in a 3D environment!

Then I needed to define the story and core gameplay mechanics. Taking on the same idea of FPS games being generally violent or very mature in their narrative, I took the opposite direction: let’s make a fun game about a kid living a fun adventure with friends! In regards to the art style, I dug into my childhood memories and tried to capture the feeling of the anime style that was all over the 90s TV in France.

And there you go, the concept behind Away was set around that core idea: creating a new type of FPS adventure, with a lighthearted and fun story, and a nostalgic 90s anime style to it. I hope you enjoy this little post!

Away: Journey to the Unexpected will release February 8, 2019 on Xbox One via the Microsoft Store. For more information on this title and many others, keep it tuned here to Xbox Wire for all the latest Xbox gaming news and features.

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Activities

• Fixed an issue where the final boss encounter of Scourge of the Past would not end properly.
• Fixed animation error on Awoken Corsairs so that they no longer pretend to hold invisible rifles.
• Fixed a rare bug in Scourge of the Past where players would not receive a Phase Radiance buff when meleeing a terminal.
• Fixed an error on Brakion’s weapon so that he can once again shoot at Guardians.
• Players will now spawn insides the arena with the downed ship rather than reusing the previous phase’s spawn points that placed them behind the spawned encounter barrier.

Crucible

• Fixed an issue where Heavy Ammo was not spawning appropriately on Convergence

Items & Economy

• Players under 600 Power may now receive higher-powered rewards when completing Director Challenges.
• Fixed an issue where weapon frames would be removed from inventory in error when completing alternate forges.
• Fixed an issue where players were not rewarded properly when completing a forge activity that was joined in progress.
• Players may now access forge bounties before completing a forge activity.
• Fixing an issue where players were not properly granted the Scourge of the Past Emblem or Triumph for completing the activity within the first 24 hours.
• Fixed an issue where submachine guns awarded by research weapon frames were not dropping with the appropriate perks.
• Completing and claiming the Dreaming City Triumph “Ascendant Paragon” will always properly grant the Secret Victories Emblem and its Transcendent variant. Players who already claimed this record will have the variant automatically unlocked on reaching orbit.
• Removed Season 4 shader Crucible Solemnity as a requirement for the “Forged in Fire” Collections Badge.
• Fixed an issue where players weren’t properly being granted Harbinger’s Echo if they destroyed eggs across multiple characters. For affected players, the Sparrow will appear in inventory and be unlocked in Collections upon reaching orbit.
• Removed Annual Pass requirement for claiming the “Curator of the Black Armory” Triumph.

Misc

• Fixed an issue where the “Envoy While it Lasts” bounty did not display properly for players using Spanish, Russian, or French languages.
• Fixed an issue where Season of the Forge shaders were not dismantling quickly.

Sandbox

• Pressing reload while charging a fusion rifle will initiate a reload. Previously, pressing reload while charging a fusion rifle did nothing.
• Fixed an issue where SUROS Machine Guns (Avalanche) had more recoil than intended.

Disruption/Insults/Disrespect

Disruption/Insults/Disrespect

Harassment/Personal Attacks/Privacy Violation

Gory Violence/Explicit Sexuality

Illegal Activity

Hacking/Cheating

Spoilers/Stolen Content

Soliciting/Phishing/Impersonation

Updates to the Lenovo ThinkPad L390 and L390 Yoga are designed to keep users and IT departments happy through proven reliability and comprehensive ThinkShield device security—without sacrificing performance. The ThinkPad portfolio has always offered a broad range of choices to give customers the specific device they need. The updated ThinkPad L390 and L390 Yoga are no different.

Key features include:

• The latest 8th Gen Intel® Core™ processors.
• 13.3-inch FHD displays with Touch option and garaged Active Pen on L390 Yoga.
• ThinkShield security features including dTPM 2.0, touch fingerprint reader, and IR camera on L390 Yoga.
• World-facing camera on L390 Yoga enabling field workers or students take photos on the go.
• Complete Lenovo Services portfolio including premier support, deployment services, transition assistance, and asset protection.
• Windows 10 Home or Windows 10 Pro operating system.

Workplace transformation initiatives are in full swing, responding to the desires of energized and dynamic users. New workspaces are all about collaboration areas and greater user mobility to promote interaction and productivity. Such spaces require technology that enables more flexibility and creativity.

Positioned with price-sensitive business customers and professional consumers in mind, the L series maintains the ThinkPad reputation for ruggedness and durability. Sitting below the ThinkPad X1 premium notebooks and the mainstream corporate workhorse T and X series, the updated L390 and L390 provide users with mainstream performance and value. These highly portable notebooks with MilSpec build quality incorporate business features and solutions that address the challenges faced by users and IT departments.

Availability and pricing:

ThinkPad L390 and L390 Yoga will be available to order in black or silver this month.

L390 will start from $659 and L390 Yoga from $889.

Visit Lenovo to learn more.