Drew: Hey all, I’m Drew. I started playing FPS games back during some of the early Halo titles, and since then been in love with Bungie FPS games. I’ve attended a few MLG events and made some great friends through competitive Halo, and that trend continued into Destiny where I’ve had the pleasure of attending some great community gatherings and made some lifelong friends. In my personal life, I’m a musician, and enjoy other hobbies like playing soccer and the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG.

I suppose that I’m best known in the Destiny community for making opinion and review videos where I try and include a high degree of depth and analysis. Second to that, I guess most people would identify me for being a controller player, sniping, and having 42,069 kills on my Twilight Oath kill counter—oh, also jamming to Taylor Swift while sniping.

Drew: My favorite Subclass is definitely Spectral Blades, I think both the neutral game and Super are incredibly powerful and rewarding. Second to that, I really love the new changes to the Attunement of Sky Dawnblade. The dodge handles momentum much better now and allows for some incredible movement and plays. Both Supers remind me of some characters I like in my favorite anime, Sword Art Online, so I love the fantasy behind them.

I’m not sure I could name my absolute favorite weapons in the game, there are too many I love because of either aesthetics, functionality, or memories I have associated with them—and occasionally for all of the above. If I had to include some names that would probably find themselves in my top-ten list, they would be (in no particular order):

Izanagi’s Burden

Suros Regime

The Chaperone

Not Forgotten

Twilight Oath

Mida Multi-Tool

Redrix’s Claymore

Outbreak Perfected

Drew: My YouTube Channel is home to many hot takes, thoughts, and opinion videos. These are my best attempts to break down different elements of the sandbox and show how they work, for the purpose of better understanding the game and creating the most effective and fun loadouts possible. I do reviews on specific weapons and armor pieces (as well as comparisons between them), and sometimes show off synergistic loadouts including different weapons and armor that I find to be very effective, fun, or both. My Twitch channel is where I like to relax and be a bit more candid—usually sniping, trying out different weapons, going for cool clips, and talking with chat.

Drew: I’ve most certainly picked out my Trials dream team, and of course it includes CammyCakes and Sidezz. We’ve played together since the beginning of Destiny 2, and I can confidently say that they are incredibly talented players and two of my best friends. We may not be the best in the game, but I feel we have great synergy together—we complement each other’s gameplay and are also very like-minded so we’re able to discuss our mishaps/losses to focus on improving.

Drew: Only last thing I’d like to add is that I think the Destiny community is fantastic, and I’m so thankful for meeting some great individuals (many I can call friends) and creating lifelong memories with them. I hope we—as players, content creators, and developers—continue to lift each other up and spread kindness to keep making great memories and grow the community.

New blocks, new sounds, more changes for the Nether!  I mean, what did we expect?  This is building towards the Nether Update after all.

• Added crimson and warped hyphae – all-sided “stem” blocks including stripped variations
• Use a smithing table to fuse the Netherite ingot with your diamond weapon/tool/armor
• New ambient sounds for the Nether biomes

• Fish now despawn when further than 64 blocks away from the closest player
• Hoes are now more like other tools used to break blocks
• Updated the Netherite item textures
• Bartering loot has been tweaked once again to bring back Soul Sand, make Netherite Hoes less common, and remove/add items to better fit survival players

HOE CHANGES

We’ve made some changes to Hoes to make them more useful in the Nether.

• Each tier has different speed at which Hoes mine blocks they are effective against
• Hoes can now be enchanted with the following enchantments: Efficiency, Fortune, Silk Touch
• Those enchantments can now be provided through the enchanting table.

BARTERING LOOT

• Soul Sand is back!
• Netherite Hoe much less common
• Shroomlight removed
• Warped Fungus removed
• Iron Nuggets added

ENTITY UUIDS

• UUIDs of the owners of projectiles, such as arrows or snowballs, are now stored as an array of four integers. All UUIDs will be stored in this format in the future

NEW TAGS FOR ITEM FRAMES

• Invisible – makes item frame invisible (item inside frame remains visible)
• Fixed – prevents item frame from being broken and the item inside from being removed

TARGET_HIT ADVANCEMENT TRIGGER TYPE

• signal_strength matches the signal strength output from the block on hit
• projectile matches the projectile entity
• shooter matches the player who shot or threw the projectile

• MC-130906 – Dolphins are moving very fast when near a boat
• MC-131046 – Angry dolphins give players dolphin’s grace
• MC-146824 – Inconsistency: Ladders and tripwire hooks cannot be placed on the sides of redstone blocks, observers and target blocks
• MC-147496 – Dolphin tries to catch the boat of the non-player ride
• MC-152441 – Corner quartz stairs (not corner smooth quartz stairs) do not have the border on the back/bottom that a normal quartz stair would have
• MC-165518 – Village houses desert_temple_1 and plains_temple_4 have no floor at entrance
• MC-169533 – Asymmetrical walls in snowy_cartographer_house_1
• MC-169715 – Misrotated block in snowy_small_house_3
• MC-169869 – Mooshroom using incorrect texture in Programmer Art
• MC-170242 – Asymmetrical walls in taiga_medium_house_4
• MC-170470 – At snowy_library_1, the snow block is placed next to the window, which causes ugly visual effect
• MC-170819 – Netherite sword and boots textures have transparent pixels
• MC-170829 – When dropping netherite tools and armor into lava, it sounds as if they are burning
• MC-170897 – Fossils in soulsand valleys can be generated in the air
• MC-171367 – Warped Fungi item does not match block texture
• MC-171447 – Crimson root item form has inconsistent texture
• MC-172077 – Piglins with NoAI shake in the overworld
• MC-172082 – Piglins do not serialize their conversion time
• MC-172242 – Left handed piglins don’t look at gold ingots in their right hand
• MC-172567 – Wither skeletons don’t automaticly attack piglins
• MC-173021 – Unuseful warning is logged when server receives incorrect vehicle movement packets
• MC-173090 – Attacking baby piglins don’t anger any adult piglins
• MC-173165 – Piglin Bartering Loot Table contains an extra “set_count” function
• MC-173168 – The word “backup” appears instead of the phrase “back up.”
• MC-173169 – Piglins still aren’t attracted to powered rails
• MC-173176 – Serialization error affecting operators list and whitelist
• MC-173244 – Target block moved by pistons permanently keep their signal strength

In this update we are introducing a new system for gathering data on the type of changes that are harder to evaluate or predict without very large number of games, such as gold bounty formula changes.

We expect the number of times that we actually do this during the year to be very low, however when we do it it’ll be during weekdays only at the lowest point of user activity, between 4 and 6PM Seattle time. In addition, we are adding a convar “dota_disable_experimental_gameplay” that can be used by players to disable it. Any gameplay changes will only be active in matchmaking games where no players have the convar set. The changes will never be active in lobby and league games.

We recognize that in some cases players will back solve what changes were done, however we won’t announce changes ourselves in part because we don’t want players to overcompensate with knowledge of them and because generally we prefer to not reveal potential upcoming changes.

Although the type of changes we are thinking about, like gold distribution, take much more than a game or two to show their full impact, we will still be able to get meaningful data and analysis on the direction and scale of changes.

The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!

Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Location: Cambridge, MA or Chicago, IL

 Disbelief is a game development studio focusing on contracting and consulting services. We’ve worked with both AAA and independent studios to help their projects ship. Notable projects we’ve worked on include Gears 5, Borderlands 3, Gears of War 4, and Torn.

At Disbelief we value work-life balance, and want to create an alternative to the crunch-culture prevalent in game development. We also believe strongly in investing in our talent and our team. Disbelief is a place to puzzle out the solutions to cutting-edge problems in graphics and engine programming, but also a place where people can grow their careers and skill sets as valued members of a stable and close knit team.

Currently, we’re looking for a programmer. This opportunity is for a full-time position in Cambridge, MA or Chicago, IL. Programmers at Disbelief are called on to develop and debug in a variety of areas from game play to core engine programming. You are expected to learn new systems and projects as you grow as a developer. You are also expected to use your knowledge to solve problems both you and others in your team have

 Key Responsibilities 

• Clearly communicate your work to others
• Debug code
• Estimate task work
• Assess impact of issues on schedule
• Write performant code and specialized systems
• Document your code
• Study version histories to guide current problems
• Implement new system features

Skills and Requirements

• BA/BS in Computer Science, or equivalent experience
• Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written
• 1+ years of experience in writing software in C++
• 1+ years in game development, or 3+ in a related industry
• Experience with version control with P4, git, or equivalent
• Understanding of multi-threaded systems

Remote: No, but we do enjoy working from home up to two days a week, when project constraints allow.

Visa Sponsorship: No

Technologies: Most of our work is C++ of varying standards with a sprinkling of other languages as needed for tooling. We do a lot of graphics programming work, using shader languages and platform graphics APIs. Since we often are debugging the lower levels of systems, being able to read x64 or ARM assembly is useful. Primarily we work with Unreal Engine 4, but we also work with Unity and custom game engines. Our work uses rendering, physics, audio, VR, AR, and other APIs frequently. Our primary platforms are PC, Xbox One, PS4, Switch, and VR/AR devices.

Interested? Apply now.

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.

Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.

Looking for a new job? Get started here. Are you a recruiter looking for talent? Post jobs here.

The ultra-niche “propaganda simulator” genre has a new entry with Steam Early Access game Not for Broadcast, the latest satire from Britain’s NotGames.

Not for Broadcast puts the player in the role of a censor in charge a radical government’s media operations, making “live” TV decisions about what to air and as the title suggests, what’s not for broadcast.

We spoke with the game’s creator, director, writer, and artist Alex Paterson about Not for Broadcast, who explained the non-traditional background of the dev team and how Sam Barlow’s Her Story informed the game’s design.

Who are you, and what is Not For Broadcast?

I’m Alex Paterson, creator, director, writer and artist of Not for Broadcast.

NotGames is a British game studio that opened its doors in 2013 to attempt to save the charity that brought us all together. Coming from a bizarre background of film, TV, theatre and comedy, NotGames aren’t your usual game developers. If you’re asking, we’d like to call ourselves ‘multi-talented all-rounders’, while our former employers would probably say we’re ‘unfocused and easily distracted.’

Not For Broadcast is an immersive, narrative-driven TV station sim set in an alternate 1980s as the nation stumbles towards dystopia.

An FMV game in 2020 is a rather bold choice. Why’d you do it? Would you say the play inspired by older FMV games like Dragon’s Lair or Night Trap?

At NotGames we’re not your usual game devs. We come from backgrounds in film, TV, theatre and comedy (it’s actually how we all met) so film, comedy, and story were always going to take their place in the forefront of our games.

While I have fond memories of playing my uncle’s copy of Tex Murphy adventure Under a Killing Moon as a child in the late 90s, I’d say as inspiration for NFB goes, we were much more influenced by Sam Barlow’s Her Story and his innovative approach to FMV.

How much footage did you end up producing?

Hmm. Excellent question. Short answer: loads. We shot most scenes on four cameras simultaneously so that makes the total amount of footage just sky rocket. In Episode 1 alone, we’ve got over four hours of FMV. And that’s only the stuff that made it into the game. One sequence, the Sportsboard Championship (super prestigious), is about an 11 minute sequence which we shot eight times.

Video production is not a skill in most game developers’ toolbox. How’d you manage to create and maintain all those video clips? Do you have any tips for people making their own FMV games?

The honest answer is get people with the right skills. Our crew include directors, camera ops, booms, sound recordists, autocue operators, runners, make up artists, lighting, armorers, choreographers. And that’s just the folks behind the cameras. We would not have been able to produce the content that we did without all of those people. Which is simultaneously what makes Not For Broadcast so interesting and unique and also just such a bad idea…

A tip for people making their own FMV games I’d say–don’t feel limited to how other games have done it before you. We were adamant that our FMV wasn’t going to be shot in the office with Gary from finance in a silly hat. Even though, on paper, shooting four-camera, 10 minute long sequences without any mistakes or cuts including music, dance and camera moves is a terrible idea, we meticulously worked out a way to make it work and then did it anyway.

The obvious comparison for Not For Broadcast is to Papers Please, which was released in 2013. Have you played it? How would you say NFB is differentiated from it?

Of course we’ve played it! It’s similar in the sort of ‘dystopian work simulator’ angle but apart from that I’d say it differs quite heavily.

The main difference is of course the central mechanic of cutting together a live TV broadcast, censoring language and choosing ads. Lots of dystopias, including Papers, Please begin with their oppressive states already established. In NFB we wanted to explore ways these kinds of states can start and make people question the steps along the way almost more than the end result itself.  We also try to leave the political morality quite open. There’s no bad guys in our dystopia. The government certainly aren’t evil. In Episode 1 they’re actually fairly nice…

Although the point of the game is serious, a lot of the individual clips are comic. How did you balance the tone between the dystopian elements of the story and the humor?

We had our scripts read aloud as much as possible. We treat the writing process very much like writing a play (stick to what you know, right?), and gathered all the actors around a table to read the script. It’s a sure fire way to judge the tone in a way that you never can while writing.

The atmosphere in the room does the job for you. The joke you’re proudest of could get the least laughs or what you thought was a shocking revelation can fall flat. We’d then slink back to our keyboards and rewrite the script again.

The simulation element is interesting. Some parts (like switching feeds and playing ads) are similar to how a real station technician would work, while other parts (avoiding “interference”) seem more fanciful. About what percent of the game is realistic? Did you feel like the play should simulate how someone would actually do this job, or did you make it more game-like as a nod to playability?

We always wanted to strike a balance between immersion and fun. We wanted the choices in the game to feel like they mattered, so it was important for the player to really feel in the shoes of the character.

But simultaneously it is a game and to make the mechanic as fun as possible we removed lots of the dull realism. We initially had a much more realistic sound desk with different mute buttons for different feeds but players found it way too overwhelming so we decided that, for now at least, giving too much control might actually negatively impact the experience of the game. People could accidentally mute the important bits and not know what they’d done for example.

And at a certain point if your goal is realism, the game stops becoming a game or a work simulator and just becomes work. Of course the player is actually taking on the jobs of many people in reality but by gamifying them down to their basic functions we managed to create that sense of one person having to constantly firefight and spin plates.

Playing multiple videos at once and quickly switching between them is something that’s technically impressive even now, reminding me of demos for the old BeOS. Did you have technical trouble with playing multiple videos simultaneously? Any trouble with streaming bandwidth that you had to solve?

Yes! The biggest problem we had was getting videos to play ball across different platforms. Because of the way videos are decoded, it’s not always simple to identify what the problem is, as you can’t know what media packs or codecs a system has. We had issues where the game ran great on Windows 10 machines but just lagged unbearably on Windows 7 which turned out to be something solved by a Unity video hardware loading fix.

I personally have trouble with games with a plethora of controls, especially when they expect me to make quick decisions between many controls while under sensory assault. It’s possible to make things arbitrarily difficult for a player in this way, by throwing them more balls to juggle. Where do you draw the line in terms of the number of plates the player is expected to keep spinning at once, so to speak?

Playtest, playtest, and playtest again. We regularly brought in fresh players and watched them play the game, watched carefully how quickly they learned the mechanics and what levels of multitasking were fun and what was too much.

Early on we actually overestimated how much the players actually wanted to do and discovered that just letting them focus on editing the show and paying attention to the FMV sequences was already pretty engaging alone. We found that as people mastered mechanics, it was good to slowly introduce more and the pacing is what actually mattered more than number of plates.

Once your ears are tuned to censoring it actually takes no time at all to slam the space bar when you hear an “F” or a “Geoff,” but at the beginning, getting your brain around the concept takes a lot of your focus. So we’ve tried to keep that level of focus constant by forcing players to do new things at about an equal rate to them getting the hang of the old mechanics. It keeps the pressure and tension steady and stops you getting bored. Though of course every now and then it’s important to ease up slightly and let the player feel cool for mastering something.

The most important collection data type in Python is the list data type. You’ll use lists basically in all your future projects so take 3-5 minutes and study this short guide carefully.

You can also play my short video tutorial as you read over the methods:

If you’ve studied the table carefully, you’ll know the most important list methods in Python. Let’s have a look at some examples of above methods:

>>> l = []

>>> l.append(2)

>>> l

[2]

>>> l.clear()

>>> l

[]

>>> l.append(2)

>>> l

[2]

>>> l.copy()

[2]

>>> l.count(2)

1

>>> l.extend([2,3,4])

>>> l

[2, 2, 3, 4]

>>> l.index(3)

2

>>> l.insert(2, 99)

>>> l

[2, 2, 99, 3, 4]

>>> l.pop()

4

>>> l.remove(2)

>>> l

[2, 99, 3]

>>> l.reverse()

>>> l

[3, 99, 2]

>>> l.sort()

>>> l

[2, 3, 99]

Action Steps:

• Master Python Sets (with Harry Potter Examples)
• Master Python Dictionaries (the ultimate blog tutorial)
• Join my free email computer science academy for continuous improvement in Python

Thanks for taking the time to reading this article!

It’s not been a terribly interesting week, but I’ve made do the best I can – lots of behind the scenes changes going on at the moment, which I’ll be talking more about next week hopefully. We’ve got a few reviews in the pipeline but as we head towards the end of the month don’t expect much in the way of new features. I’ll be ticking things over with news in the interim.

Meanwhile, in mobile gaming…

New App Releases

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (iOS & Android)

Castlevania is back in vogue at the moment thanks to the Netflix show, but we were genuinely surprised when we’d heard that one of the best entries of the series, Symphony of the Night, had dropped on mobile as a premium port – with controller support, no less!

It’s dirt cheap as well at $2.99, and the game is pretty much as it was back in the PS1 days, with a new ‘Continue’ feature being added by Konami, as well as Game Center achievements on iOS. There hasn’t been a new mobile trailer released as far as we’ve seen, so the below is from when the game was ported to the PS4.

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Other new releases today include War Tortoise 2, which is exactly what it sounds like (an on-rails Idle Shooter where you’re on a tortoise. Free to Play). Interestingly, Motorsport Manager has returned, only this time as online free-to-play game Motorsport Manager Online. I was thinking the other day we were overdue for a new entry in the series and it seems like rather than going down the annual release of other sports franchises, they’d try their hand at the free-to-play MMO world instead.

We’re not sure how it stacks up vs. the premium games, but we’ll try and find out. If you want to try it for yourself it’s available on both iOS and Android.

App Updates & News

Star Traders: Frontiers got some new updates over the past couple of weeks – a new crew class was added called the Blade Dancer, and this week a new blade weapon type was also added. ‘Straight Blades’ use quickness instead of strength as the primary stat, and have a higher piercing chance. This week’s update also closed the loop-hole where you could get a negative jump-cost stat and generate fuel by hyper jumping between systems. Crafty.

Mario Kart Tour has also received a few quality of life improvements ahead of the official release of multiplayer early next week.

App Sales

Football Manager Mobile & Football Manager Touch are at least 25% off on both iOS and Android.

It’s not much, but Bad North is also discounted by $1, which is still the cheapest it’s gone since launch. Kingdom: New Lands is 50% off, as is Star Traders: Frontiers.

Seen anything else you liked? Played any of the above? Let us know in the comments.