Planetoid Pioneers is Now Available on Steam and is up to 25% off!*

Welcome to Planetoid Pioneers, a cooperative sci-fi Physicsvania where kooky old astronauts fall over themselves with QWOP-like action to explore the Asteroid Belt beyond Mars. It’s been built on the unique Crush2D physics engine and can be played on your couch with or against your friends in seamless pick-up-and-play Co-Op and PvP action.

To celebrate the launch from Steam Early Access, the Contributor Edition is 25% off*. Owners of Cortex Command receive an additional 25% off the Contributor Edition.*

*Offers end February 15 at 9AM Pacific Time

The game accessibility guidelines is a collaborative effort between a group of studios, academics and specialists who released a living document used by creators as reference for implementing accessible features to their projects. 

Even the inclusion of an assist mode similar to Celeste’s and could prove useful for developers seeking to make their games more accessible for a wider range of players. 

As well as including a full list of considerations (which contain the basic/intermediate/advanced guides), each guideline explores a facet of the most commonly requested accessibility features. For example, the basic guideline includes how to provide subtitles for important speech for any players who might be hard of hearing. 

More information about how the resources can be used are listed on the game accessibility guideline’s website here. 

Following an exciting Year 2, more people are playing Rainbow Six Siege than ever before! If you’ve decided to pull the trigger on picking it up for Xbox One, here are a few tips and tricks to help you succeed in your first few missions as a Rainbow Operator.

Jumping into a game with a high skill ceiling and an experienced playerbase can be intimidating, but if you take the following six Siege Rules to heart, you will thrive in the heart-pounding action and suspense that only a tactical FPS like Siege can bring. Rainbow Six Siege is a unique spin on the first-person shooter (FPS) genre, and you will need to approach it differently than you would any other game. To put you in the right mindset, we advise you to think of it more as chess with guns.

Prepare for Close-Quarters Combat

Combat in Rainbow Six Siege is in your face. With an average kill distance of roughly nine meters — you’re going to see the whites of your enemy’s eyes before you pull the trigger. There could be an enemy around any corner, and there usually is. Our maps have a mix of small rooms, long hallways, and always-changing sightlines. Keep in mind that some Operators, like Mira, can open up chunks of reinforced walls to create a protected line of sight, and use it to keep an entire room clear. Knowing where and who your enemy is will help you figure out how to close with and eliminate them.

Know Your Strengths

Will you focus on gathering intel? Are you more interested in denying your enemies the use of their gadgets? Perhaps carrying a mountain of a shield is more up your alley. Every role matters in Rainbow Six Siege. Communicate with your team to ensure that your Operators can work together effectively, and use your loadout accordingly. Rainbow Six Siege is a team game in every sense of the word, and our Operators’ unique skill sets play to that. If your teammate picked Ying, maybe you should look at selecting Glaz and working together. Thermite and Thatcher are a great pair as well. On Defense, you can run with a killer intel-denying combo like Bandit and Mute, or an extra-durable Doc-and-Rook pair. Don’t forget about countering the enemy’s gadgets! Twitch is Mira’s arch nemesis, and a couple of Jager’s Magpies can really ruin Fuze’s day.

Use Destruction as a Tool

We built the maps, but it is up to you to destroy them. For example, destroying a section of wall that separates the two bomb sites you’re defending allows you to rotate quickly when your enemy decides to rush point B. Try breaking a hatch or two to step up your vertical game and create a quick escape route if you’re getting pushed by a couple of Attackers. Utilize breachers to make holes in the other team’s defenses. Nothing in Rainbow Six is permanent, except for death.

Utilize Your Team

Communication with your teammates is another essential resource in Rainbow Six Siege. Working with them to overcome the enemy’s strategies can turn the tide of battle. The Defenders may have set up a series of Magpie anti-grenade defenses and electronics jammers. You can coordinate with your team to throw in flash/smoke grenades to get rid of the Magpie charges, and if you have Thatcher on your team, he can follow up with his EMP grenade to get rid of these electronic devices.

Don’t Expect a Respawn

You only get one life; use it wisely. When you die, though, that doesn’t mean it’s time to get up and grab a drink. You can still help your team out! When you’re dead, you have access to your team’s cameras and/or drones, as well as the ability to spectate among your teammates. Even in death, being able to call out an enemy’s position to help your teammate land a headshot through a wall is integral to the success of the mission.

Always Communicate

Speaking of calling out enemy positions, make sure you play Rainbow Six Siege with a headset. Hearing your enemy’s footsteps through the hole you made in the wall could win the day, but so will communicating with your teammates! Utilizing teamwork to force the enemy right where you want them is integral to taking home more wins than losses, and for that, you need to use your microphone. Figuring out exactly where your teammate needs a Hibana X-KAIROS charge placed so they can lock down an entire side of the map while playing as Blackbeard is an advantage you can’t ignore.

To learn more about Siege Rules, click here. If you are looking to catch a few tips from the best players to touch the game, tune into the Six Invitational on February 16 to February 18. We will be streaming this world championship on our Twitch channel, here, and our Mixer channel, here.

Closers is Now Available on Steam!

Closers is an episodic anime action RPG bursting with spectacular battles and steeped in an epic storyline. Choose your Closer, gather your friends or dive in solo, and use your amazing powers to protect Earth, in mankind’s desperate battle against horrific monsters from another dimension!

Todays snapshot brings in a complete rewrite of how world generation works behind the scenes, so that we can do some really cool things with it in the future & speed it up dramatically. It may be quite unstable in this first snapshot though, so as always: do not open worlds you care about in a snapshot without having a backup first. We can almost guarantee that any world opened in this snapshot will not work in the full 1.13 release.

A full changelog can be found on Minecraft.net:

CHANGES IN 18W06A

• Re-added /enchant command
• Added a recipe book for the furnace
• Rewrote the world generation system
• Added command suggestions for entity selectors
• Allow whitespaces in entity selectors & blockstate arguments
• Added new item & block tags

WORLD GENERATION

We’ve spent the last few years (yes, years) rewriting the world generator completely from the ground up, and this snapshot finally has the first version that we have some kind of confidence in. It may not be much faster at first, but that’s because we’re playing it safe and want to just achieve “it works” before “it’s fast”. It might still be unstable, too, so watch out for that. It’s the very first snapshot with it in, after all!

FURNACE RECIPE BOOK

Now there’s a recipe book for the furnace! Exactly like the existing crafting recipe books, you can unlock recipes as you play through the game and they will automatically appear in your recipe book for smelting. Mapmakers can customize the recipes with data packs, which allows them to add or completely change furnace recipes. “Fuel”, the items that can be burned in a furnace, is not included in this and is still somewhat hardcoded currently.

CUSTOMIZED WORLDS

… don’t work in this snapshot. Sorry. We have plans to re-add them in a much more extendible way, but unfortunately we were not able to have that ready yet. You will be unable to open any world of type “customized” in this snapshot, it will tell you to revert to an old version to play in those worlds.

/ENCHANT VS /MODIFYITEM

It’s back how it was. We have shelved the /modifyitem idea that was supposed to replace /enchant and we will look into that again in a future update.

FIXED BUGS

• MC-77488 – TAB player list sorts player names based on ASCII values instead of alphabetically
• MC-121641 – Impossible selector combinations don’t fail to build
• MC-121644 – Recipe book tab sound plays twice
• […………….] x 10

To get snapshots, open your launcher and go to the “launch options” tab. Check the box saying “Enable snapshots” and save. To switch between the snapshot and normal version, you can find a new dropdown menu next to the “Play” button. Back up your world first or run the game on in a different folder (In the “launch options” page).

Please report any and all bugs you find in Minecraft to bugs.mojang.com.

Snapshots can corrupt your world, please backup and/or run them in a different folder from your main worlds. 1.13 will have a lot of experimental snapshots that may break everything and smell funny. This may be one of those snapshots. This is what happens when Mojang are changing all the things! 

Share your thoughts on how 1.13 is shaping up in the comments below!

Destiny Update 1.1.2 – The one about Armor Masterworks

Armor Masterworks

Raid

Sandbox

Activities

UI

Rewards

Misc

What’s involved in the making of a charming, inclusive, and remarkably funny dating sim?

Magic Notion founder Richard Franke explained just that at GDC 2015 when he took the stage to chart the development of the company’s drag queen-hosted mobile dating sim Kitty Powers’ Matchmaker.

Matchmaker was his first indie project after almost 20 years making “big” console games, and in a very personal story, Franke (a “close personal friend” of Kitty Powers herself!) covered how he dealt with inclusiveness, making comedy work in a game, designing a compelling dating game, and how to keep your wig on when all around are losing theirs.

It was a fabulous talk that touched on subjects rarely covered in these sorts of postmortem presentations, so if you missed it back in 2015 don’t miss out on your chance to now watch Franke’s talk completely free via the official GDC YouTube channel!

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 UBM Americas.

Welcome to Next Week on Xbox, where we cover all the new games coming soon to Xbox One. Every week, the team at Xbox aims to deliver quality gaming content for you to enjoy on your favorite gaming console. This coming week a wide variety of titles are on the way like the gravity-bending metroidvania Dandara, the return of Wryn in the fast-paced Bleed 2, and tactical 4X strategy in space with Starpoint Gemini Warlords are just a few of the select games coming to Xbox One next week. Read about these games and more below.

Games

February 06, 2018

Join friends on the couch or online in this unique party game that switches between game types as you compete for the best score. Pick from a roster of peculiar characters and use more than 70 weapons to take out your enemies… er, we mean your friends. With more than 25 games and maps, there’s tons of party game excitement to be had in Marooners.

Games

February 06, 2018

In this gravity-bending metroidvania, you’ll be thrown into a universe where the oppressed are on the brink of destruction. With beautiful pixel art and a wide variety of enemies and puzzles, you’ll have to jump from surface to surface to survive in the hostile world of Dandara.

Games

February 06, 2018

As a member of highly-skilled, guns-for-hire group known as the Mercenary Kings, you’ll do battle against the forces of CLAW who have taken control of a top secret base. It’s up to you and your team to do whatever it takes to stop them in this wild 2D action game. Join up with friends and save the world from CLAW!

Games

February 07, 2018

Xbox Play Anywhere title – With a wide variety of cute triangle skins to choose from, a ton of bosses to battle, and unique level design, Little Triangle endeavors to be a fantastic blend of party game, platformer, and battle royale with addictive pick-up-and-play gameplay. Featuring local co-op and online play.

Games

February 07, 2018

Venture through six levels of Hell as Teddy, an estranged former minister, searching through the afterlife for his daughter and her kidnapper. Discover your character’s dark past and confront Teddy’s nemesis: Mr. Pinstripe.

Games

February 07, 2018

In this challenging platformer that requires the utmost of precision and skill to survive, it will be up to you to restore color to the world and defeat the evil Necrolights. Wall jump and float your way through four unique worlds full of challenges that range from beginner to advanced.

Games

February 09, 2018

Wryn returns in a new fast-paced action game in Bleed 2. She will fight to defend Earth from an invading force of enemies, requiring you to master the art of air-dodging and bullet-deflection to survive. With more than 20 bosses across seven levels, you’ll have to prove yourself once again that Wryn is the greatest hero of all time. Featuring two player local co-op.

Games

February 09, 2018

Combining a mix of 4x strategy, RPG elements, and starship combat, Starpoint Gemini Warlords puts you command of assembling a fleet of warships to send into battle — or you can lead them into combat yourself. Utilize a unique blend of battleship tactics to conquer the Gemini system!

Games

February 09, 2018

Take out huge bosses and dodge thousands of bullets in Overdriven Reloaded: Special Edition. With fast, fun vertical shooting elements, a ton of game modes, and supporting up to four players in local co-op, it’s time for you to grab a controller and save the universe!

Games

February 09, 2018

A unique blend of pinball with arcade gameplay featuring realistic ball physics, eight unique mini-modes, and six tables. This might be one of the best games for retro-pinball arcade enthusiasts to play on Xbox One.