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GDC: Industry talent favors PS4 development, self-publishing
The Game Developers Conference has released the results of its second annual State of the Industry survey, highlighting trends toward self-publishing and PlayStation 4 platform development. More than 2,600 developers responded to the survey following last year's GDC event, with twenty percent noting an intent to ship their next project for the PlayStation 4. Seventeen percent of surveyed developers foresee an Xbox One release for their next game, while four percent target the Wii U. Smartphones and PC platforms continue to dominate developer focus, however. According to the GDC's survey, 51 percent of respondents want to make their next game for tablets and smartphones, while 52 percent will tackle PC and Mac platforms. This year's survey also revealed a rise in self-publishing and self-funding among developers. 64 percent of surveyed developers reported that they are not partnering with a publisher on their current project, while 52 percent revealed that existing company funds provided financial backing. More developers have turned to Kickstarter since last year's survey, as 11 percent of respondents are crowdfunding their current projects, compared to last year's 4 percent. [Image: Sony]
Gone Home, The Last of Us, Tearaway top GDC Award nominations
The finalists have been chosen for the 14th annual Game Developers Choice Awards. This year's group runs the gamut from unassuming indies to AAA blockbusters, and encompasses all the best wonderful and weird experiences of the past year. The Last of Us, Tearaway and Gone Home lead the pack with five award nominations each. Other standouts include Device 6, The Stanley Parable, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and Super Mario 3D World – all of which were among our favorites from 2013 – along with Lucas Pope's Papers, Please. You can check out the full list of nominees, along with honorable mentions for each of the ten categories, after the break. The winners will be chosen at this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on March 19, 2014.
Microsoft's Perry on F2P the wrong way
Today's winner of the most provocative post title award is this little ditty about Age of Empires Online. But hey, don't blame Massively! It's actually the title of a speech given by Microsoft's Kevin Perry at GDC Europe 2013. Gamasutra has posted video of the event, and it's well worth watching if you've got 45 minutes to kill and you're interested in what goes through a developer's mind as he thinks about continually evolving monetization schemes. Perry says that this particular speech is on its third iteration. It initially started out positive when he shared it with an internal Microsoft audience some time ago. He then reworked it based on newly collected data about the game for GDC San Francisco earlier this year. And then he reworked it again for GDC Europe based on even more data. If you're sensing a trend here, you're right: game devs often don't know how well their business models are performing at any given time. As Perry says, "it's an ongoing conversation." There are a few other choice quotes as well, including the notion that PvP players are small in number but "very, very loud" in terms of influence as well as the supposition that you can launch incomplete games under the F2P business model and "sort it out on the fly." This last bit isn't always true, Perry says, "especially for a large, branded title."
Sony's DualShock 4 coming in 'Magma Red' and 'Wave Blue' at launch in Europe, North America to follow later
Colors! Who doesn't love colors, right? Well, if you were planning to snag a PlayStation 4, you'll be happy to hear that the console's DualShock 4 won't be available solely in black. As has been the case with previous generation PlayStations, Sony will be offering different color variations of its DualShock controller, this time in "Magma Red" and "Wave Blue." Both models will be available when the PS4 launches in Europe and in North and Latin America later in the year, where they'll cost £54 and $59, respectively. So, don't worry, it looks like you'll be able to add a bit of hue to your next-gen gaming sessions.
Seen@GDC Europe: Achtung Arcade is a little box of fun
Stowed literally in a corner of GDC Europe 2013 is Achtung Arcade, an adorable miniature machine put together by the man who made McPixel, the game notable both for being the first Steam Greenlight success to make it to Valve's portal, and for being bonkers. Just like McPixel, Achtung Arcade is kind of out there. Achtung Arcade is based around 17 of Mikolaj Kaminski's Flash games, mostly weird game jam creations like Ninjanoids - which is exactly what it sounds like, Asteroids with ninjas instead of meteors - and Spy Trouble, a platformer with lots of deadly lasers. The cabinet includes a grand total of 505 variations of the 17 games, with different versions featuring changes like "glitchy pixels" and different skins. "I don't have any game in the works as far as to be able to show it at expos or events. I decided to put an arcade machine that can house all my small games and Flash games," Kaminski told us. "These kind of games are way different from the big games that you make. Flash games, the games that you don't have to worry about them being good, or marketable. These are just games, that we love." Most of Achtung Arcade's 17 games are available on Kaminski's website, but some are exclusive to the device, like the aptly named Number 2, a game that sees you guide fecal matter through a line of intestine while trying not to touch the sides. (Don't pooh-pooh it before you've tried it.) Achtung Arcade made its debut at a Berlin game show earlier this year; Kaminski plans to add more exclusives to it, and even hopes other game makers will add their own creations to it as he continues to tour it wherever he can. Will Kaminski bring it to Gamescom this week? At the moment he doesn't have a booth, but he's hoping someone will let him find somewhere to put Achtung Arcade. After all, as he pointed out, it's not like it takes up much space.
Watch Brian Provinciano's Retro City Rampage talk from GDC
One of our favorite talks from GDC was Brian Provinciano's session, in which the indie developer discussed bringing his game, Retro City Rampage, to just about every platform known to man. It's a valuable talk for many reasons, giving a clear picture of what it's like working with The Big Three™ and the types of hurdles a determined indie developer will inevitably hit. Provinciano's determination to port Grand Theft Auto 3 to NES hardware escalated into a love letter to video games and pop culture. While Provinciano hasn't announced his next project yet, he says we should expect more humorous open-world games.
Zynga announces Solstice Arena, a social MOBA coming to mobile
Back at GDC earlier this year, I was invited to what I was told was a very limited meeting with Zynga. The company, which of course made its name with social Facebook games and recently has been trying to pivot to mobile platforms like the iPhone and the iPad. Most of Zynga's games tend towards the casual (simply because Farmville is the company's biggest hit, and that's where their success lies). But at GDC, they wanted to show me something different. It was a "midcore" game, they said -- a game that had the complexity of a hardcore title, but was accessible enough for iOS' large audience to enjoy and rally around. The game was being put together by a developer named A Bit Lucky, which had already built out a few social titles already, and it was going to be a "multiplayer online battle arena" title -- a MOBA game, very similar to the extremely popular League of Legends. The game they showed me was Solstice Arena, which has just been officially announced by Zynga. Now, the MOBA genre is a tough one to pull off on mobile -- it's traditionally a very PC-centric genre, originally based on real-time strategy, with lots of mouse-specific controls and keys to press. But the MOBA genre has been attempted on iOS before, so it's definitely not impossible to pull off. Zynga's real innovation on Solstice Arena is going to be the game's format: Instead of the traditional five players vs. five players, the team has boiled the game down into 3v3, all fighting on what's essentially one lane. There are still towers to take down and various heroes to fight with, but having just three people on a side means the game is more concentrated, and individual players can make more of a difference. The other big change from traditional MOBA is that Solstice Arena's main mode is timed, so matches are less about the long, dragged out battles than they are about quicker skirmishes. This fits the mobile platform as well: quicker matches are more doable on portable platforms, obviously. While it is a much more complicated game than a lot of Zynga's other offerings, Solstice Arena still makes use of social and freemium elements for sure. In addition to online matchmaking (for both skill and team setup, promises A Bit Lucky), there will be social hooks in the game, and the title will have a metagame in the form of items that can be leveled up outside of matches. There will be an in-app currency, and it'll be used to purchase heroes, buy boosts, and other outside of game elements. Obviously, the developers don't want the game to simply be pay-to-win, but this is Zynga we're talking about. While not everything is figured out just yet, it's not a stretch to predict there will definitely be no shortage of places in the app to spend real money if that's what you choose to do. Still, even in this early stage, Solstice Arena looks like fun. Lots of the abilities are fairly simple -- they're designed to work on a touchscreen, so many of them target an area or a direction rather than a specific target. But there is a nice mix of hero classes, from casters to support, fighters, and assassins. And there are some fun mechanics being developed as well -- acing the other team by killing all of your opponents at the same time is called a "Power Play" and gives your team a temporary boost in power. There are also plenty of items to pick up around the game's field, which confer various individual or team bonuses as they go. Solstice Arena is due out for mobile platforms soon -- Zynga will run a beta first, probably in a market like Canada or New Zealand, and then bring the game out to more App Stores worldwide after that. A Bit Lucky also tells us that soon after that they're hoping to have the game running on both Mac and PC as well, depending of course on the game's reception and what kind of audience the title eventually finds. Solstice Arena is a fairly gutsy move for Zynga -- it's definitely more complicated than what most people expect from the company, and given the success of League of Legends and Dota, Zynga's going after a very specific audience that might not have played their titles before. We'll keep an eye on Solstice Arena as development moves along, and let you know when it's finally available to try for yourself.
Prototypes show the evolution of XCOM: Enemy Unknown
XCOM: Enemy Unknown art director Greg Foertsch conducted a GDC 2013 panel called Art Direction Autopsy: XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Foertsch shared a few internal videos chronicling the different directions considered by Firaxis Games, and was kind enough to share those videos with Joystiq.Above, you can see a video with a more survival-horror slant – a prototype with methodical pacing, centered around a lone farm house wrapped in dark atmosphere. Jump past the break for two more prototype videos.
Laika Believes preview: The robot space dog with a heart of gold
Minicore Studios is a small indie developer in Austin, TX, and it's making an alternate history game about the first dog in space. The game is called Laika Believes, but unlike the legitimately terrible fate that befell the real Laika, Minicore's version of history represents something a bit more hopeful, despite its dystopian overtones.In this universe, Laika survived her trip into orbit and returned to Earth with robotic augmentations, somehow transformed into a capable canine war machine. Why exactly this happened remains uncertain, though her mysterious metamorphosis hasn't changed her into a mindless killing machine. If anything, Laika's conversational skills are just as important as the various weapons mounted on her back.%Gallery-184816%
IGDA defines new rules for future industry parties after GDC 'mistake'
During the week of GDC, the International Game Developers Association threw a party that featured underdressed, dancing women as part of the entertainment, prompting two IGDA members to resign and Executive Director Kate Edwards to issue a statement of regret.Today, Edwards defined a new set of regulations for future IGDA gatherings, starting with the goal to cut back on "parties" and instead offer more "networking events.""Building a community and providing networking opportunities are part of our core mission, and we want to create activities that provide that opportunity, and to do that in a way that will be appropriate and enjoyable for everyone," Edwards wrote.If a specific IGDA chapter wishes to throw a party, it may, but the organization still expects "chapters to uphold the IGDA's values of inclusion and diversity, regardless of the type of event and locale." Edwards said the IGDA will be vigilant when dealing with partners in the future, to provide "comprehensive oversight" of the entire event: The dancing women at this year's GDC party were courtesy of party sponsor YetiZen, which said it hired "avid gamers, who happened to be models." YetiZen said the IGDA approved all aspects of the party, including the dancers.Edwards outlined a set of actions for IGDA members to uphold while at other industry events, including a "walk out and talk out" policy for any party with content "contrary to the IGDA ideals, regardless of the potential value of being present.""Our humanity makes us prone to mistakes, but that does not diminish our resolve to be a force of change," Edwards concludes. "I hope the IGDA membership will rise to the challenge, and keep working together to help our industry reflect the reality of our diversity, whether it's at events, in the workplace or in the games we create." Read her full missive here.
Path of Exile interview reveals plans for player-generated races
Although there is no Some Assembly Required in the title, don't let that fool you; today's focus is on one of the founding precepts of this column, player-generated content. It's just not sandboxy player-generated content like we've covered before. Today's special edition explores the PGC proposed for the decidedly non-sandbox action RPG Path of Exile. At GDC I sat down with managing director Chris Wilson and technical director Jonathan Rogers to discuss Path of Exile and their idea of adding player-run races to the game. A fan favorite, these timed gaming experiences are currently only officially sponsored events grouped into seasons, the first of which just concluded. However, devs would like to give players the opportunity to create and host unofficial events (meaning results won't have any bearing on the seasons) to allow players to enjoy this wildly popular facet of the game in a place where they can practice skills, test themselves against friends, or just enjoy a unique challenge.
Wings Over Atreia Exclusive: Aion 4.0 launches in June!
Good news! (Well, at least for my police record.) As it turns out, I didn't have to resort to kidnapping to convince someone from NCsoft to talk to me about Aion at this year's GDC. I swear, Sean Orlikowski, the game's associate producer, came willingly. It does, however, appear that in the fine print of the meeting proposal, I agreed to be outfitted with a special electronic device that would send massive jolts of electricity through my system if I tried to speak about something I shouldn't. So let's see how much I can share with you before this apparatus leaves me unconscious. Can I tell you that Aion has a special celebration planned for the first anniversary of the Truly Free conversion? So far, so good, folks. Hmm... can I add that the next big expansion has a North American launch date planned without going unconscious... oh, appears so! OK, let's push this a little further: How about if I happened to mention that 4.0 will hit servers in June 2013 -- would I be zapped? Nope! So there you have it, folks: 4.0 is indeed going live in just two short months!
GDC 2013: City of Steam demo showcases crafting and other streamlined features
It may seem like a while has passed since we last experienced City of Steam, the fantasy steampunk MMORPG that fits in your browser. That's because it has! The game's last closed beta testing round was back in December, and fans have been eagerly waiting to get back into the city-state of Nexus. Of course there has been some news to tide us over in the meantime while developers have been turning all of that beta feedback into fixes and updates, but that's not the same; people want to play. Luckily, it's GDC to the rescue! While the rest of the world won't actually get to access City of Steam until it launches open beta (which is anticipated to be within the next two months!), I was able to dive in and explore the fruits of the devs' winter labors. And let me tell you, they've put their time to good use! I met with Communications Manager Gabriel Laforge and Operations Director Andrew Woodruff from Mechanist Games who showed off all the work that has gone into the game since the beta closed, from graphics to crafting to airships. They also highlighted the game's cash shop and revealed numerous rewards players can earn simply by playing the game.
Expect more humorous open-world games from Brian Provinciano
"I'm definitely going to be doing more open-world comedy stuff in the future, but it might not be my next game," Retro City Rampage creator Brian Provinciano told Joystiq following a GDC panel where he broke down sales of his game across the various platforms. "I have about four open-world game ideas in my head that I'm passionate about, but I'm also very concerned about jumping into another big project. So I'm sorting out my ideas right now and figuring out if there's a smaller game idea or something different I could do in the middle, just as a palate cleanser. When I do my next big ambitious game, again it'll probably be open-world."While Provinciano is keen on making more games, he wants to "let the dust settle" on Retro City Rampage before diving into his next game. We probably won't see his next project in 2013, unless it's a smaller-scale game. "I would love to ship another game this year, but the only way for that to happen is if I get a small idea and everything just falls into place."Art was one thing Provinciano had strong opinions about regarding his next project. He doesn't want to become "typecast" as the pixel-art guy – and he wants future games to place a bigger emphasis on art and audio."I had an amazing time working with the artist and the audio person on Retro City Rampage, and I really love art and audio so I want to put more of an emphasis on those in the next games – higher production value. As much as I love doing art – so I found this artist that was doing amazing art and it was way better than me, I would still do some of the art because I love doing it and it's fun, but now I'm thinking differently. I would rather have amazing art way beyond my capabilities and have it all done by other people than have some half-assed art I did myself, just for the sake of saying 'I did it myself.' So one of the big goals in my next games is to have really high-quality art and – as much as I do love pixel stuff, and I may do revisit that in different degrees at some point – again, I want to do different art styles, to show to the world that I'm not just a pixel-art guy."Provinciano said that PlayStation 4 is on the table as a potential platform for upcoming games. At a previous panel, Provinciano confirmed he would also work with PS Vita in the future.
GDC 2013: Activision's pursuit of photorealism
At a GDC panel titled "Next Generation Character Rendering" last week, research and development staffers at Activision-Blizzard showed off some stunning computer-generated portraits. The catch? They don't represent in-game assets; instead, they showcase the tech behind the graphics. So while these we won't be seeing the lady above as the protagonist of Titan, it's reasonable to expect that the characters of Blizzard's future games could look just as convincing and real. As I looked on from the audience, my iPhone's camera focused on the projected slides as if they beheld actual faces.
Majic Jungle's The Blockheads charges on
Developer David Frampton is one of our favorites around here at TUAW -- he made a big splash on the App Store a while ago with Chopper 2, but these days he's working on a huge sandbox app he's made called The Blockheads, which is a Minecraft-style game where you can explore a world with the titular characters, making and building items and contraptions from the items that you can find and collect. The Blockheads is doing very well for Frampton -- he says the game has seen over four million downloads so far, and it's definitely the biggest project he's ever worked on. The game's gotten even bigger after a recent update that allowed "backgrounding," too. When the game first arrived, you had to basically watch your Blockheads perform their tasks, and leaving the app caused the task to pause as well. I mentioned this in the game's inital review, and while the game was still a lot of fun, longer tasks could be very annoying. Frampton says he agrees that requiring the app to stay open while those tasks were running could be annoying, but during the game's initial development, he just wasn't sure if backgrounding could work, "whether I could do that or not." The game's monetization depends on using time crystals to skip past tasks as well, and Frampton included the ability to bring in a few different characters at a time, which he hoped would help people with the waiting periods. Unfortunately, he says, "only 1% of players warped in a second Blockhead," which means that most of his players didn't use the tools he'd given them to make the waiting more bearable. That convinced him he had to find a solution, and the backgrounding patch went in recently (along with a price drop on actually bringing in a second character). Frampton says the change has helped him, both with exposure for the app as well as growing the audience. "Everything doubled," he says about making the change. As for what's next in Blockheads, Frampton has a huge list of features, both from things he wants to do as well as fan requests. There's a tutorial coming into the game, to smooth out the initial player experience, which he feels can still be a bit confusing. Fans on the message boards have asked him for the ability to create signs (because right now there's no way to see what's in the game's chests until you open them up), but Frampton isn't sure that's a good idea. He's more interested in providing "shelves," which would be storage items where you can see exactly what's being stored at just a glance. Currently, there is two-player local multiplayer, but Frampton says that Game Center is really causing problems with any larger multiplayer game, as the system is not very good at keeping game sessions running when one player leaves or enters. So multiplayer is up in the air for now, though Frampton says it's definitely a possibility at some point in the future. In other future plans, he says he'd love to bring more complicated machinery to the game, like copper wiring, elevators, and even electricity. Fans have asked for more goals, so he'll be filling out the endgame as well. But unlike Minecraft, says Frampton, he doesn't want the game to "end" at all. "I can keep adding more and more games to it," he told me. One idea he has is to allow players to build up technology to the point where they can travel to other worlds, which would obviously open up a whole new set of resources and areas to explore. That's all in the distant future of the game, however -- Frampton is just brainstorming ideas, not simply working on actual features for that yet. Still, The Blockheads is definitely a popular title, and Frampton says he personally is excited by the process of creating and developing this game, in a way that he wasn't with Chopper 2 or his other titles. If you haven't gone to check out The Blockheads yet, you can find it on the App Store for free right now.
GDC 2013: Hands-on with Vendetta Online on the iPad
When we talk about getting our hands on a game at GDC for a little playtime, we don't usually get to literally grasp said game in our fingers. But that's exactly what happened when I tested out Vendetta Online on an iPad 3; instead of just relating to the space-based sandbox through the standard accessories like mouse, keyboard, or joystick, I held the entirety of the game universe in the palms of my hands. My own 10 digits were the only accessories. And the experience impressed me! I had the opportunity to sit down with John Bergman, Founder and CEO of Guild Software, to talk about the new iOS platform for Vendetta Online while doing my best Goose impersonation (he's way better than Maverick) playing it.
Molyjam: Building a game jam for everyone
Double Fine programmer Anna Kipnis hosted a wonderful GDC panel about her time creating "What Would Molydeux," a 2012 game jam inspired by the Peter Molyneux twitter parody, Peter Molydeux. The jam was a rousing success, spanning 32 cities worldwide, with Peter Molyneux himself even showing up for the London event. Rather than trying to encapsulate the whole panel here, I suggest you watch it for yourself.After the panel, Kipnis told me that one of the most remarkable things about Molyjam was that it attracted so many kinds of people. "We really wanted people who had never worked on games to come, because there was such a wide variety of disciplines," she said. Sound composers in particular, she said, were reticent to come and were worried they wouldn't have enough to do. "People die for audio, and what ends up happening actually is that you have one audio guy working on like five different games."
GDC 2013: The MMO impact of the Webzen and Gala-Net merge
Acquisition. Though it sounds pretty benign on its own, when used in reference to one developer taking over another, the word can inspire fear in the hearts of gamers. Questions quickly arise about the future of titles that fall on the acquired side of the equation. How will the games and players be affected by the change? Will there even still be a game? I sat down with Claas Wolter (European PR Manager) and Deanna Peter (Marketing/PR Associate) to discuss just this topic regarding the recent purchase of Gala-Net (the parent company of gPotato) by Webzen and how that acquisition will affect Allods Online, Age of Wulin, Terras Militaris, and the company's other MMORPGs.
Third Eye Crime combines a stealth game with a psychic twist
I saw quite a few really terrific indie games at GDC last week, but Third Eye Crime was one of my favorites on iOS. It's being put together by a studio called Moonshot Games, made up of game industry veterans working on mobile games together after having some bad experiences with console publishing. Third Eye Crime is a stealth game, where you need to sneak around a series of levels while trying to avoid armed guards. But the twist here is that you've got some psychic ability, so not only can you see where the guards are looking (always important in games like this), but you can see where they're planning to look next, and lay out your escape route accordingly. It's very interesting just how much this changes the game. In Third Eye Crime, guards never really give up, so once you've attracted their attention, it's a game of diving in and out of various hidey-holes, constantly trying to dodge your pursuers. And you literally have to stay one step ahead of them, keeping an eye on where they are and where they're going, so you can duck out safely. Fortunately, you get access to a few other tools, like a "patsy" spell that will create a fake clone of you, or other various abilities. But your enemies have some extra moves as well: I saw sniper enemies that can take you out with one shot right away. Unfortunately, Third Eye Crime isn't quite done -- the graphics looked good, but there were definitely a few optimization issues and rough areas that still could use some smoothing out. The idea is quite well-done, however, and it should have enough juice to keep the game rolling for the expected 80 to 100 levels. Third Eye Crime is set to arrive on iOS sometime around early June.
