World vs. World

How do you get 100 random people, of different skill levels and play styles, to cooperate in order for the greater whole to succeed? That is the question World vs. World combat asks in Guild Wars 2.

This unique player vs. player (PVP) environment pits three severs against one another in a week long territory war. Key locations on each of the four maps generate points, depending on their value, and those points slowly accumulate to grant bonuses (better health, healing, etc) to every player within the world.

Unlike most traditional pvp modes, the fact that three different servers battle for supremacy is unique. What this allows to have happen is a more balanced prolonged experience. If one particular server rises up as a dominate force, the other two band together to push it back down.

This creates a fluid tide of battle where everything can change in just a matter of hours.

So how does this system work? How do so many people cooperate?

Spontaneous Leaders rise up and utilizing a server wide chat they attempt to direct the horde of players. Everyone else can simply ignore them, go along their merry way, but the way the game type is setup that can be extraordinarily difficult because very few things can be accomplished alone. To be a positive contributing force, players need to band together.

And as a result everyone has a bit of ownership towards the current situation, and as such they become responsible for relaying any important information they gather.

The incredible thing is, is that for the most part it actually works. Siege happen on an epic scale with trebuchets knocking holes into walls, arrows raining down, supply lines getting ambushed and secured, and as whole it is one of the most memorable experiences you can have in online gaming.

How good art tells a story.

Dishonored, the supernatural, stealth/action/melee game that everyone has been waiting for comes out in a little less than two weeks.

This game has such a massive following because it is the first big new IP since who know how long ago. Dishonored promises to bring a fresh and unique world to explore, as the story of this adventure game is set in the steam punk, Victorian Noir city of Dunwall, which was inspired by industrial London.

So to ramp up marketing the team at Arkane turned to Psyop, an extraordinarily talented animation firm. Over the past three days, three small vignettes called The Tales of Dunwall have been released. You can find the videos here.

They provide a backstory for the game in one of the best animation styles I have ever seen. A scratchy hand drawn look really helps to create a feeling of grime and desperation. Colors are used boldly, but at the same time minimally to a give a weight to their appearance. On top of this, the stories have a superb narration delivered by Chloe Moretz the teen star from Kick-Ass.

These vignettes are some of the greatest ad material since the infamous Dead Island trailer. It all goes to show that all you need is something uniquely and professionally done to capture an audience’s attention.

The Wonderful World of 2D

So with our next game we are putting aside the Z axis and embracing 2D art again. Why you ask? Well, here are a few reasons:

1. 2D art is much less resource intensive when it comes to displaying something on screen. Don’t have to worry about a poly count anymore, because it’s just a flat image.


2. Marguerite is a great 3D artist, but when it comes to 2D there is no one better.


3. 2D art requires less time to create.

So how are we building it? The answer is Futile, a 2D sprite generation code base that Matt and Mike found. It is an open source project, freely available on github. The whole idea behind it is to make Unity act more like XNA.

Our experience thus far with the code set has been fantastic, one of the best ways to handle 2D sprites in motion. In addition, simple, repeating animations (something endlessly going back and forth) can be created via code instead of through frame-by-frame animation (Time consuming for the artist, and resource intensive on the code).

Because this time we actually know what we are doing, we have been planning for an eventual (possibly simultaneous) iPad release. This means, that the art we have created thus far is all at a retina display (stupid high resolution).  So iPad 3, here we come (eventually).

So without further adieu, here is a piece of Marguerite's art that can be found in our next game:

Next Up

So Loc is now out of the way and for the first time in months we are working on a brand new project. The switch to iOS has been treating us well, forces us to be smarter code and design wise because of its limitations. In addition iOS has the largest market currently available, so we are going to try our hand at an iPhone/iTouch game, with the probability of porting the game up to the iPad at a later date.

We will be getting some marketing material put together for a full reveal, so I’ll wait until then to spill everything, but thus far the code is coming along pretty quickly. Within the next few weeks we should have a proper testable version for anyone interested.

Along the experience we’ve had so far, getting a build to testers has always been our biggest problem. However, about a month ago we discovered Test Flight, a Ad-Hoc development method that streamlines the entire process. So that is our plan thus far.

More updates as we go, but here is what I was working on yesterday.

Fall Release Window

The official fall session for the game industry has begun, bringing an end to the summer drought of games. Borderlands 2 opened, setting a high water mark that will be challenge by a variety of different games this year.

The next heavy hitter up is probably Dishonored, which releases for PC, Xbox and PS3 on October the 9^th. Dishonored is a brand new IP created by Arkane studios and published by Bethesda. And from the serious marketing push they have been generating, the game looks amazing and is currently sitting as one of the favorites for the session.  Here at work, Marguerite is planning on playing it.

XCOM, which releases the same day, will probably become the strategy game of the Fall, simply because there is no other competition, but that won’t stop Firaxis (the team that has been creating Civilization) from doing an amazing job.  XCOM is a reboot of classic squad, turn based strategy game and is what I am eagerly awaiting to play.

Mike has been a long time Resident Evil fan, and seven days before Dishonored and XCOM, the 6^th iteration in the series will release. Resident Evil 6 has been making some big promising, linking all of the stories of the previous versions together, creating a unique cast of beloved characters, and finally giving the player the ability to reload while moving.

Other big titles included in this season are Halo 4, Call of Duty 2, Assassins Creed 3, Far Cry 3, Hawken, and on top of all that the WiiU launches. It’s the last hurrah for current generation consoles, with next year looking mighty slim because everyone is anticipating the arrival of the next generation. But who knows what next year brings, for the moment 2012 is looking to be a pretty heavy contender for games attention.

East & West

Over this past weekend was another industry event that is held annually in Japan called the Toyko Game Show.

This is one of the smaller events for the global game industry mainly because it is only attended by the Japanese game industry. A few media outlets travel there to attempt to cover the news, but from what I’ve heard of the experience, it’s a difficult setting. The convention goes to no lengths to assist any western media who attend and several of the main conferences and speakers are not translated.

For many, this is just another sign of how the Japanese Games Industry is in decline, which is strange thought because in the 80’s the Japanese Game Industry singlehandly saved the global game industry from near and utter disaster. Gamasutra, the go to place for industry news, put out a few articles about why the split between East and Western development has widened over time.

One of the biggest differences is the core development process.

The big thing right now is the iterative development cycle. A game is created, the team discovers what is fun about it, that one thing is refined, and the process starts all over again.

Independent development is the peak of that. A small team only has the time to really polish one aspect of their design and that becomes the core of everything.

In the AAA development world this iterative development process usually happens between sequels. The Mass Effect franchise is an excellent example of this; the changes between 1, 2 & 3 are huge steps that drastically change the foundations of gameplay.

As a whole, the Japanese Game Industry does not tend to do this. A game director has a vision and despite what the fans or critics reaction is to it, the vision is carried out. Even between sequels there are rarely any huge leaps in innovation.

Western Developers also have a tendency to come together more and share their processes and even toolsets, the unreal engine is a prime example of this. No Eastern made game engine has, or probably ever, be released like the Unreal Development Kit.

Take for example GDC, the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco is one of the largest gathering’s of developers in the world. Yet despite that, only Western Developers have been in attendance. Japan does not host anything similar.

This critique is by far and away not an attack on a part of our industry, just observation that several others have already pointed out. The question becomes, how will the Japanese Game Industry survive if they don't learn to adapt?

The Iphone 5

The release of a new device has a completely different meaning for the development community. And in the case of the just released iPhone 5, it was to the sound of groaning.

As I stated in an earlier post, we prefer to develop for the iOS platform because of its unified aspect ratio, 3:2 or 960x640.All iOS devices carry this. That is not the case with Android devices where the aspect ratio is all over the place, making it difficult to build on the platform because of the extensive testing needed to ensure that all assets are displaying correctly, and are not stretched.

The reason behind the collective groan was because Apple decided to change their aspect ratio, it’s now a 1.775:1, or 1136x640. Which is just kind of bizarre. The reasoning behind the change is to give a wide format look to the device.

But to developers, it means that all games created for the iPhone 4 and lower will not fill the entirety of the screen.  Thankfully the content is not stretched to fill up the space, it is simply letter boxed.

The biggest problem that this creates is that two versions will be needed to be created by the developers if they wish to cater to the iPhone 5 users as well as the majority who still use iPhone 3’s and 4’s.  This is going to pose difficulty to studios, like us, who don’t own an iPhone 5. We will not be able to test any of the aspect ratio changes we build…