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#the one on the left is my pc the one on the right is Escher
spacey-png-art · 5 months
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Sometimes a kid says something in front of your situationship and you both kind of. Yknow.
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old-world-bird · 7 months
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UPD: if this post gets more notes, I'll draw more puffy-pants Escher. The confession post is in the reblogs (っಠ‿ಠ)っ
Okay, so we are currently at the ball (yep, that one from the last parts of the book) and I decided to sketch some outfits for my PC and also for some NPCs I'm responsible for. It's kinda rough, but I still like it.
From left to right:
Escher Belasco, who escaped Barovia and had a nice time in Waterdeep until he met us. The gorgeous lady, who decided to adopt him and perhaps cure his broken heart My PC Marcella Ilthine, whose hobbies include trying to seduce our priest since the pre-Barovian times and also making him terrifically uncomfortable
Also, in case you want to use that sketch of Escher for whatever unholy reasons you have, here ya go
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Also, an older sketch of him I've realized I never showed you. Circa an in-game month ago, when he recently arrived at Waterdeep
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svampirebait · 5 years
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My Curse of Strahd Campaign - latest session. The Feast of St Andral.
Warning, heavy spoilers for Curse of Strahd.
So this is how our Curse of Strahd game went last night:
The party are in Vallaki staying with Fiona Wachter, the Tiefling Warlock’s long lost cousin. She thinks they will help her overthrow the Burgomaster. They agree things in Vallaki need to change but don’t want either the Burgomaster or Lady Wachter in charge.
Since arriving in town, Ireena was snatched by Izek, the Burgomaster’s henchmen. The party want to make sure she’s ok and as they’re heading there anyway Lady Wachter asks them to bring her proof of whatever the Burgomaster’s son did to drive her daughter mad.
The party ended the last session having taken Victor’s journal from his secret lab. They ran into the Burgomaster, made nice and were told that Ireena is now betrothed to Victor. She is very clearly against this.
I was about to start the session when the Druid turns to me and says:
“Question, Octopuses...”
Me: “...ahuh...”
Druid: “they can breathe air for an hour out of water. So say I summoned some. Would they have full air?”
Me *knowing I’m about to unleash hell on this town and imagining everyone being attacked by Octopuses.*: “I’m gona say, yes.”
So we start the game in the Burgomaster’s mansion. Victor, invisible, follows the rogue who snatched his journal but can’t do anything to get it back because of all the people. He settles for glaring at him from the doorway of the dining room making it very clear that he is gona get it back.
The party and Ireena discover that Lady Lydia’s old wedding dress is being altered for Ireena to wear the next day during the festival of the blazing sun. She tries to protest but the Burgomaster acts like she hasn’t said a word. The Rogue starts to loudly tell the Burgomaster that “All is not well” and there is a runour that something is happening at the Coffin Makers that will ruin the festival. They have no proof and the Burgomaster is not pleased to hear such blatant nay saying about his beloved festival. He orders Izek, who is towering over Ireena, to arrest the rogue. The Rogue dodges him and yells that the coffin maker is doing something that will hurt Ireena.
Izek runs out of the Manor to take care of the Coffin Maker ignoring the Burgomaster who is yelling after him.
The Rogue is then grabbed by two remaining guards who are told to give him 10 lashes in the town square. He’s dragged outside.
The Druid immediately says to the Burgomaster that he is perfectly right, nay sayers are terrible for putting everyone in danger and the Rogue’s punishment is clearly justified. He offers the party’s assistance in investigating the coffin maker and retrieving Izek. He’ll even give Iteena away at her wedding tomorrow.
The Burgomaster is delighted and sends the party on their way.
They follow the guards and see them stripping the rogue of his shirt and belongings in the middle of the square, before chaining his hands to a pole.
They ready the whip. The bard casts Minor illusion and from a side street a voice yells “This festival is a sham!! The Burgomaster is insane! All is not well!”
What few townsfolk are around hurridly disappear. The party even see one poor man trying to hide behind a barrel his arse sticking out as he assumes the crash position.
The guards drop everything to chase down whoever said that, leaving the party and one guard who is standing watch over the people in the town stocks.
The Tiefling warlock sneaks away and uses mask of many faces to make himself look like another guard. He walks over to the one on watch and casts suggestion:
“Have you heard the rumour that Izek is planning to marry Ireena instead of Victor? You should tell everyone.”
The guard fails his save and immediately turns to the nearest person who happens to be in the stocks and says “Have you heard-“
While he’s destracted the bard takes the rogue’s lock picks out and tries to undo the manacles with no luck. The rogue at this point is thanking the party for the great destraction but wondering what the fuck they actually plan to do about getting him out of there!
Behind them the guard is moving down the line of prisoners, “Have you heard-“
At this point the Warlock turns to me confused that the guard didn’t walk off and i answer “you told him to tell “EVERYONE””
Finally as the guards are returning the druid has the bard cast minor illusion again to make fresh whip marks appear on the rogues back. The warlock takes that moment to walk back behind a house to change back from being a guard.
The spelled guard walks up to the party “Have you heard-“
The other guards return. See the whip marks and a guard walking away and assume the sentence has been carried out. They let the rogue go with a warning to be more careful what he says in future and hand him over to his friends.
The spelled guard is in the background peering over the barrel at the man trying to hide “Have you heard-“
As the party walk away towards the coffin maker the bard asks the warlock how long the suggestion will last. “8 hours or until the task is complete” poor guy.
Meanwhile, knowing what’s at the coffin maker’s I was rolling dice behind the screen to see what happened when Izek got there. Turns out, he wasn’t doing great...I rolled the last dice and choked on my drink. The players were confused as i recovered laughed and started crossing things out on my notes for future sessions.
So they get to the Coffin Makers and see that the front door has been kicked in. As they’re debating whether to go in or not they see Van Rickton/Rictavio lurking in the shadows.
They ask why he’s there. He gives an unconvincing story about hearing strange noises. Realising the PCs don’t believe a word he very grandly reveals the shocking truth, he is none other than THE Rudolph Van Rickten, vampire hunter.
The Druid says “I know, your monkey told me.”
They team up and enter the coffin makers.
Inside they find evidence of a scuffle. Several of the empty coffins in the showroom have been broken.
They hear voices coming from beyond a door and approach. From inside a silky voice calls out that they are welcome and asks “Henrik” to let the party inside.
A terrified older man wearing carpenters clothes opens the door and tries to motion for the party to run but the voice calls him out for being rude and he quickly opens the door stepping aside for the party to enter.
Seated at a table, stroking a curled up ginger cat and sipping from a goblet is a young man, handsome with long blonde hair, wearing a pink ruffled shirt. Escher, greets the party making side comments to Henrik who is curled in on himself in the corner of the room.
Escher recognises Van Rickten but only makes a brief comment anout him looking familiar. As his eyes fall on the Vistani rogue he immediately leaves his seat and goes over declaring him to be a “beauty” and being heavily flirty.
The rogue looks up at the ceiling and after the last few days decides this is all too much. He leaves the shop to wait outside much to Escher’s disappointment.
The party ask where Izek is. Escher is evasive, meering saying about how rude Izek was. He declares what a wonderful day to make new friends seeing as how it’s the feast of St Andral. There were others staying with him and Henrik but they’ve already left to begin the “festivities”
The party asked where they went and he answers “where else my dear boy? The church of course!” He says it’s getting late and he must be going. The bard is blocking his way so he charms her. She lets him pass with a smile as he bows and takes a subtle taste of blood from her hand.
Outside the rogue was leaning up against the wall of the shop. He turns to find Escher beside him. The vampire gets close and comments on his looks again then tells him that his Master bids him to join them. Rooms are already prepared at Ravenloft for him and Escher dearly hopes that he will agree to go back with him. He tells him they’ll take their time on the journey and get to know each other a little more.
The rogue sighed and said he’d think on it. Delighted Escher left and the rogue went back inside the shop yelling that, that dude was totally a vampire!
While he was outside the party had discovered that the ginger cat had been dead for s long time, the goblet was full of blood and instead of a chair behind the table, Escher had been sitting on the fresh corpse of Isrk Strenzni.
The rogue loots him and finds an old family picture where a much younger Izek is standing with his long lost sister. Noticing the resemblance between the sister and Ireena the rogue quickly hides the picture.
The rest of the party question the coffin maker who admits to agreeing to house the vampires. His arms and neck are covered in puncture wounds where they have fed off him. The wwrlock casts froends on him and asks where the bones of saint andral are. He said he didn’t know so they all start searching for the bones. The rogue eventually finds them in a secret compartment in the upstairs bedroom.
They leave the shop and race to the church. The druid turns into a horse with the rogue on his back carrying the bones. They leave the rest of the party on foot. As they run through the streets they see Ireena running towards them and sweep her up on to the horses back.
The night is drawing in. In the distance there are screams and the glow of flames. Above their heads thunder sounds and when they glance up they see the silhouette of strahd against the clouds astride his nightmare.
When they arrive at the church they see chaos. Terrified by Strahd’s appearance the townsfolk ran to the church only to find the vampire spawn already there. The party see two vampires on the steps cheerfully feasting on the confused townsfolk.
They rolled initiative, from somewhere in the painicking crowd they hear a familiar voice yelling in terror. “HAVE YOU HEARD-“
and that’s when the game ended.
I can’t wait to run the battle in two weeks.
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morsmanbacklog-blog · 7 years
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No. 5: The Bridge
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The Bridge opens with a man sleeping beneath an apple tree. As the screen pans down on the man a prompt appears: left and right arrow keys being pressed alternatively, indicating for the player to repeat the action on his or her keyboard. One would reasonably expect that pressing the side arrow keys would cause the man to move left or right as they do in almost any other side-scroller, but that is not the result in The Bridge. Instead, the entire world begins to tilt with each corresponding key press, and the player, if they are familiar with the fictional account of Sir Isaac Newton and an apple tree, will proceed to shake the world until an apple falls on the sleeping man’s head.
This world-tilting mechanic goes far beyond recalling stories told at the introduction of high school Physics, however, as it quickly becomes apparent that each puzzle is a bit of a playground of Newton’s laws of motion. One’s own momentum and that of potentially deadly objects is often in need of consideration in The Bridge’s numerous puzzles.
Newtonian physics is only part of The Bridge’s equation, as anyone who has ever seen M.C. Escher’s Relativity or Waterfall will immediately recognize that every one of the game’s puzzles is made of similarly impossible constructions. As was the case with the also Escher-inspired Monument Valley, the player must operate in environments that meddle with our conceptions of depth, line continuation, and other Gestalt principles of perception. 
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                                                         Relativity
The goal of most of The Bridge’s levels is to obtain keys that unlock doors to the next stage. The challenge comes from understanding the twisted architecture of each level as well as how the environment interacts with gravity and motion. death and the loss of crucial items is possible, but thanks to a Braid-like time reversal mechanic, experimentation is never punished. There is a vague, existential narrative that is communicated through text between the game’s chapters, but it truly takes a backseat to the gameplay.
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The Bridge is a fun playground for a time, and a game that seems like it was born out of much imagination and curiosity, but I do think that, as the game goes on, it begins to require aimless wandering and trial and error rather than calculated problem solving. Elements such as objects that operate in their own, tractable gravitational field complicate some of the later levels to a point where I felt more lucky than smart for completing them. The game is short enough, though, and can be completed before the unnecessary elements become unbearable. 
There are other, better puzzle platformers out there. Braid is clearly a huge influence on The Bridge, and I would highly recommend that to anyone who has the slightest interest, especially for the precedent it set for modern platformers. The Bridge does bring a distinct art style and interesting mechanics to the table, and I think it is worth checking out for its creativity alone if you can get it on the cheap or in a bundle like I did.
Before I go, I wanted to say that I will probably start adding a section of game recommendations that are either mechanically or tonally similar to the ones I cover. I already mentioned Braid, and I will use that as my main recommendation for this post. Braid nails its mechanics and art style so well, and its story is an example of what narrative in video games can be.
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Ok, so the next game is Destiny 2. This is not a result of chance; Destiny 2 was released on PC yesterday, and I am excited to play it and share my thoughts. 
I hope anyone who reads this has a spooky Halloween.
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wallpaperpainting · 4 years
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Top 15 Trends In Salvador Dali Art To Watch | Salvador Dali Art
The latest account in your inbox alert a day Monday – Friday additional breaking account updates
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Visit smile4our​carers.co.uk
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symbianosgames · 7 years
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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include Zelda's Switch inspirations, the modding scene of Cities: Skylines, & lots more.
As for other things going on this week - still relaxing after the end of GDC, & have been playing some Night In The Woods, which is charming & totally my speed of game, as well as Chime Sharp, which is still one of my favorite puzzle games, despite a slightly basic PS4 conversion.
No luck getting a Switch yet (since I only decided I wanted one after playing it at GDC after its release, haha), but there's plenty of stuff to keep us all going on PS4, PC, iPad & elsewhere, right? Talking of that final option, keep an eye on the Apple indie game celebration, which looks like it has some kickass timed iOS game releases like Mushroom 11, Beglitched & maybe Kingdom: New Lands. And onward to the links...
- Simon, curator.]
-------------------
Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Nintendo's Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and Takuhiro Dohta provide an in-depth look at how some of the convention-breaking mechanics were implemented in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. [SIMON'S NOTE: Yep, this is pretty much unmissable.]"
Horizon: Zero Dawn and the evolution of the video game heroine (Jonathan Ore / CBC News) "Horizon: Zero Dawn, a massive open-world game set in a lush, post-apocalyptic jungle inhabited by robot dinosaurs, is one of the most anticipated games of 2017. Players take the role of Aloy, a young hunter in a far-flung future, well after most of human society has disappeared in a long-forgotten disaster."
Game Design Deep Dive: Decisions that matter in Orwell (Daniel Marx / Gamasutra) "On a basic level, Orwell is a mostly text-based narrative game that constantly confronts players with choices of varying moral weight. Unlike a typical interactive novel Orwell does not present players with an explicit decision between a set of juxtaposed options (multiple choice) on how to continue the story or which action to take next."
Is Halo Broken? (Nathan Ditum / Glixel) "Today, the series is overseen by 343 Industries, a Microsoft internal studio created specifically for the job. Most recently it helped Creative Assembly to release the in-universe strategy game Halo Wars 2, which is both quite good and unlikely to stop the series’ slow slide to the margins. So what can 343 do to fix Halo? Is it already too late?"
Balancing Metas (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "Meta games and balancing are always interesting to me so I thought it'd be fun to go over how these things can work in different contexts and what forces meta games to evolve."
How two Cities: Skylines modders turned hobbyist work into life-changing careers (Joe Donnelly / PC Gamer) "Today, Colossal Order and Paradox's city-building sim Cities: Skylines has one of the most prolific modding communities across all genres. Its Steam workshop page alone boasts well over a hundred thousand mods, and the number of keen enthusiasts flooding its forums is steadily growing with each passing update, expansion and portion of DLC."
Hookshots, Wii U Maps, And Other Things Nintendo Cut From Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "To make a game as massive and astounding as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the developers at Nintendo needed to take a lot of experiments. As a result, they left a lot of ideas on Hyrule’s floor."
The 'Card-ification' of Competitive Gaming (Steven Strom / Red Bull eSports) "Increasingly, though, developers are codifying the benefits of progression behind something new: virtual, collectible cards. From Clash Royale and Hearthstone on iOS, to Halo Wars 2, Paragon, Paladins, Battlerite and a helluva lot more on PC and consoles, digital cards are becoming the de facto method of displaying player skills."
'Rust Belt Gothic': lead writer Scott Benson unpacks the art that inspired Night in the Woods (Nate Ewert-Krocker / Zam) "From Flannery O’Connor to Richard Scarry and Symphony of the Night, we talk with animator/writer/Twitterman Scott Benson about what makes everyone's favorite new indie adventure game tick."
Reviving Ocarina of Time's long-lost Ura expansion (Edwin Evans-Thirlwell / Eurogamer) "The Legend of Zelda series has always dabbled in alternate realities - mirror worlds, sunken pasts, waking dreams, futures that might have been. This is the story of one such lost future, a dream originally dreamt by the developers of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, kept alive by a fervent underground community of fans, modders and artists."
Lights, Camera, Distraction: The Problem with Virtual Camera Systems (Jack Yarwood / Waypoint) "The average gamer rarely notices the camera, and when they do it's usually to complain about what's wrong with it. This is in spite of the camera being the most important tool for communicating a chosen situation to the player. Done well, its presence can be almost imperceptible, framing the action perfectly. Done poorly, it can ruin the experience, causing frustration and disorientation."
Meet the Man Behind the Most Acclaimed Board Game in Years (Steve T. Wright / Glixel) "Now, with the second "season" of Pandemic Legacy just around the corner, Glixel spoke with [Rob] Daviau to chat about the cardboard life, his former corporate overlords, and the travails of self-employment."
In the Land of 'Dying' MMOs: Dark Age of Camelot (Robert Zak / Kotaku) "My second time-warp into venerable MMOs takes me to the cross-mythological lands of Camelot, where, after 16 years, a sizeable number of players remain embroiled in a never-ending war."
The importance of cultural fashion in games (Matt Sayer / RockPaperShotgun) "Virginia’s career in cultural fashion began out of a desire for self-expression. After spending her childhood immersed in African culture, she couldn’t ignore the severe lack of traditional African fashion in The Sims’ wardrobe. With nobody else attempting to rectify the issue, Virginia was left with no choice but to take matters into her own hands."
Ron Gilbert: "From Maniac Mansion to Thimbleweed Park" (Talks From Google / YouTube) "Veteran game designer Ron Gilbert has been making games since the 1980s, most notably as writer, programmer, and designer for LucasFilm Games / LucasArts, producing classics like Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Today he is putting the finishing touches on his crowdfunded pixel-art puzzle adventure Thimbleweed Park."
Pixelated popstars: Japan’s dance dance revolution (Jack Needham / Dazed) "Rhythm-based video games dominate Japan’s arcades, and their popularity has influenced everyone from major pop stars to underground electronic producers."
A Video Game Immerses You in an Opera Composed by Dogs (Katie Rose Pipkin / Hyperallergic) "In David Kanaga’s latest game, Oiκοςpiel, an immortal Donkey Koch (of the Koch brothers) commissions a group of dogs to produce a digital opera for an arts festival scheduled for 2100. [SIMON'S NOTE: this game won the IGF Nuovo (art) prize, and you may be able to work out why! Full interview text here.]"
Monkey Island (or, How Ron Gilbert Made an Adventure Game That Didn’t Suck) (Jimmy Maher / Digital Antiquarian) "Shortly after completing Maniac Mansion, his first classic graphic adventure, Ron Gilbert started sketching ideas for his next game. “I wanted to do something that felt like fantasy and might kind of tap into what was interesting about fantasy,” he remembers, “but that wasn’t fantasy.” "
Shipping Kills Studios: A Study of Indie Team Dynamics (Danny Day / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2016 GDC Talk, QCF Design's Danny Day (Desktop Dungeons) explains how to keep your indie team alive after shipping a successful game."
Reverse-Engineering The Industry (Ernie Smith / Tedium) "Third-party developers weren’t always quite so revered in the video game industry, but a pair of legal decisions helped them earn their place at the table."
Art of the Impossible (Joel Goodwin / Electron Dance) "I played an amazing looking game this week, Fragments of Euclid by Antoine Zanuttini, a short first-person puzzler that appears to be set inside the art of M. C. Escher. For me, however, it's more like a dry run for William Chyr's Manifold Garden, a game I've been looking forward to for a while now."
The Dazzling Reinvention of Zelda (Simon Parkin / New Yorker) "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which launched last Friday, represents the first true reimagining of the series. Gone are the typical corridors and blockages intended to funnel every player along the same worn narrative lines. In this Hyrule, a wilderness of hills and lakes and mountain peaks, you are free to go wherever you please."
Frustration Can Improve Video Games, Designer Found (Nathan Grayson / Kotaku) "In video games, frustration is often viewed as a dirty word. If you’re feeling frustrated—like you’ve hit a wall and can’t find a way over, under, or around—the designers must have made a mistake. That’s not always the case, though. Sometimes, game makers try to make you feel irritated, or even livid."
Why I love Peggle and hate Peggle: Blast (Henrique Antero / Medium) "Peggle is divine. Peggle: Blast is an aberration. This is a story on how a videogame first touched perfection and then became a vessel for evil. It could be compared to The Fall of the Abrahamic religions, when humankind was collectively expelled from Paradise— if the Demiurge was perverse enough to have invented microtransactions along the way."
The designers of Dishonored, Bioshock 2 and Deus Ex swap stories about making PC's most complex games (Wes Fenlon / PC Gamer) "We put together a roundtable of familiar faces, all of whom have had a major hand in exploring or creating immersive sims. Our guests: Warren Spector (Otherside Entertainment), Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare (Arkane Studios), Tom Francis (Suspicious Developments) and Steve Gaynor (Fullbright)."
-------------------
[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to [email protected]. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]
0 notes
symbianosgames · 7 years
Link
The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include Zelda's Switch inspirations, the modding scene of Cities: Skylines, & lots more.
As for other things going on this week - still relaxing after the end of GDC, & have been playing some Night In The Woods, which is charming & totally my speed of game, as well as Chime Sharp, which is still one of my favorite puzzle games, despite a slightly basic PS4 conversion.
No luck getting a Switch yet (since I only decided I wanted one after playing it at GDC after its release, haha), but there's plenty of stuff to keep us all going on PS4, PC, iPad & elsewhere, right? Talking of that final option, keep an eye on the Apple indie game celebration, which looks like it has some kickass timed iOS game releases like Mushroom 11, Beglitched & maybe Kingdom: New Lands. And onward to the links...
- Simon, curator.]
-------------------
Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Nintendo's Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and Takuhiro Dohta provide an in-depth look at how some of the convention-breaking mechanics were implemented in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. [SIMON'S NOTE: Yep, this is pretty much unmissable.]"
Horizon: Zero Dawn and the evolution of the video game heroine (Jonathan Ore / CBC News) "Horizon: Zero Dawn, a massive open-world game set in a lush, post-apocalyptic jungle inhabited by robot dinosaurs, is one of the most anticipated games of 2017. Players take the role of Aloy, a young hunter in a far-flung future, well after most of human society has disappeared in a long-forgotten disaster."
Game Design Deep Dive: Decisions that matter in Orwell (Daniel Marx / Gamasutra) "On a basic level, Orwell is a mostly text-based narrative game that constantly confronts players with choices of varying moral weight. Unlike a typical interactive novel Orwell does not present players with an explicit decision between a set of juxtaposed options (multiple choice) on how to continue the story or which action to take next."
Is Halo Broken? (Nathan Ditum / Glixel) "Today, the series is overseen by 343 Industries, a Microsoft internal studio created specifically for the job. Most recently it helped Creative Assembly to release the in-universe strategy game Halo Wars 2, which is both quite good and unlikely to stop the series’ slow slide to the margins. So what can 343 do to fix Halo? Is it already too late?"
Balancing Metas (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "Meta games and balancing are always interesting to me so I thought it'd be fun to go over how these things can work in different contexts and what forces meta games to evolve."
How two Cities: Skylines modders turned hobbyist work into life-changing careers (Joe Donnelly / PC Gamer) "Today, Colossal Order and Paradox's city-building sim Cities: Skylines has one of the most prolific modding communities across all genres. Its Steam workshop page alone boasts well over a hundred thousand mods, and the number of keen enthusiasts flooding its forums is steadily growing with each passing update, expansion and portion of DLC."
Hookshots, Wii U Maps, And Other Things Nintendo Cut From Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "To make a game as massive and astounding as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the developers at Nintendo needed to take a lot of experiments. As a result, they left a lot of ideas on Hyrule’s floor."
The 'Card-ification' of Competitive Gaming (Steven Strom / Red Bull eSports) "Increasingly, though, developers are codifying the benefits of progression behind something new: virtual, collectible cards. From Clash Royale and Hearthstone on iOS, to Halo Wars 2, Paragon, Paladins, Battlerite and a helluva lot more on PC and consoles, digital cards are becoming the de facto method of displaying player skills."
'Rust Belt Gothic': lead writer Scott Benson unpacks the art that inspired Night in the Woods (Nate Ewert-Krocker / Zam) "From Flannery O’Connor to Richard Scarry and Symphony of the Night, we talk with animator/writer/Twitterman Scott Benson about what makes everyone's favorite new indie adventure game tick."
Reviving Ocarina of Time's long-lost Ura expansion (Edwin Evans-Thirlwell / Eurogamer) "The Legend of Zelda series has always dabbled in alternate realities - mirror worlds, sunken pasts, waking dreams, futures that might have been. This is the story of one such lost future, a dream originally dreamt by the developers of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, kept alive by a fervent underground community of fans, modders and artists."
Lights, Camera, Distraction: The Problem with Virtual Camera Systems (Jack Yarwood / Waypoint) "The average gamer rarely notices the camera, and when they do it's usually to complain about what's wrong with it. This is in spite of the camera being the most important tool for communicating a chosen situation to the player. Done well, its presence can be almost imperceptible, framing the action perfectly. Done poorly, it can ruin the experience, causing frustration and disorientation."
Meet the Man Behind the Most Acclaimed Board Game in Years (Steve T. Wright / Glixel) "Now, with the second "season" of Pandemic Legacy just around the corner, Glixel spoke with [Rob] Daviau to chat about the cardboard life, his former corporate overlords, and the travails of self-employment."
In the Land of 'Dying' MMOs: Dark Age of Camelot (Robert Zak / Kotaku) "My second time-warp into venerable MMOs takes me to the cross-mythological lands of Camelot, where, after 16 years, a sizeable number of players remain embroiled in a never-ending war."
The importance of cultural fashion in games (Matt Sayer / RockPaperShotgun) "Virginia’s career in cultural fashion began out of a desire for self-expression. After spending her childhood immersed in African culture, she couldn’t ignore the severe lack of traditional African fashion in The Sims’ wardrobe. With nobody else attempting to rectify the issue, Virginia was left with no choice but to take matters into her own hands."
Ron Gilbert: "From Maniac Mansion to Thimbleweed Park" (Talks From Google / YouTube) "Veteran game designer Ron Gilbert has been making games since the 1980s, most notably as writer, programmer, and designer for LucasFilm Games / LucasArts, producing classics like Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Today he is putting the finishing touches on his crowdfunded pixel-art puzzle adventure Thimbleweed Park."
Pixelated popstars: Japan’s dance dance revolution (Jack Needham / Dazed) "Rhythm-based video games dominate Japan’s arcades, and their popularity has influenced everyone from major pop stars to underground electronic producers."
A Video Game Immerses You in an Opera Composed by Dogs (Katie Rose Pipkin / Hyperallergic) "In David Kanaga’s latest game, Oiκοςpiel, an immortal Donkey Koch (of the Koch brothers) commissions a group of dogs to produce a digital opera for an arts festival scheduled for 2100. [SIMON'S NOTE: this game won the IGF Nuovo (art) prize, and you may be able to work out why! Full interview text here.]"
Monkey Island (or, How Ron Gilbert Made an Adventure Game That Didn’t Suck) (Jimmy Maher / Digital Antiquarian) "Shortly after completing Maniac Mansion, his first classic graphic adventure, Ron Gilbert started sketching ideas for his next game. “I wanted to do something that felt like fantasy and might kind of tap into what was interesting about fantasy,” he remembers, “but that wasn’t fantasy.” "
Shipping Kills Studios: A Study of Indie Team Dynamics (Danny Day / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2016 GDC Talk, QCF Design's Danny Day (Desktop Dungeons) explains how to keep your indie team alive after shipping a successful game."
Reverse-Engineering The Industry (Ernie Smith / Tedium) "Third-party developers weren’t always quite so revered in the video game industry, but a pair of legal decisions helped them earn their place at the table."
Art of the Impossible (Joel Goodwin / Electron Dance) "I played an amazing looking game this week, Fragments of Euclid by Antoine Zanuttini, a short first-person puzzler that appears to be set inside the art of M. C. Escher. For me, however, it's more like a dry run for William Chyr's Manifold Garden, a game I've been looking forward to for a while now."
The Dazzling Reinvention of Zelda (Simon Parkin / New Yorker) "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which launched last Friday, represents the first true reimagining of the series. Gone are the typical corridors and blockages intended to funnel every player along the same worn narrative lines. In this Hyrule, a wilderness of hills and lakes and mountain peaks, you are free to go wherever you please."
Frustration Can Improve Video Games, Designer Found (Nathan Grayson / Kotaku) "In video games, frustration is often viewed as a dirty word. If you’re feeling frustrated—like you’ve hit a wall and can’t find a way over, under, or around—the designers must have made a mistake. That’s not always the case, though. Sometimes, game makers try to make you feel irritated, or even livid."
Why I love Peggle and hate Peggle: Blast (Henrique Antero / Medium) "Peggle is divine. Peggle: Blast is an aberration. This is a story on how a videogame first touched perfection and then became a vessel for evil. It could be compared to The Fall of the Abrahamic religions, when humankind was collectively expelled from Paradise— if the Demiurge was perverse enough to have invented microtransactions along the way."
The designers of Dishonored, Bioshock 2 and Deus Ex swap stories about making PC's most complex games (Wes Fenlon / PC Gamer) "We put together a roundtable of familiar faces, all of whom have had a major hand in exploring or creating immersive sims. Our guests: Warren Spector (Otherside Entertainment), Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare (Arkane Studios), Tom Francis (Suspicious Developments) and Steve Gaynor (Fullbright)."
-------------------
[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to [email protected]. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]
0 notes
symbianosgames · 7 years
Link
The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include Zelda's Switch inspirations, the modding scene of Cities: Skylines, & lots more.
As for other things going on this week - still relaxing after the end of GDC, & have been playing some Night In The Woods, which is charming & totally my speed of game, as well as Chime Sharp, which is still one of my favorite puzzle games, despite a slightly basic PS4 conversion.
No luck getting a Switch yet (since I only decided I wanted one after playing it at GDC after its release, haha), but there's plenty of stuff to keep us all going on PS4, PC, iPad & elsewhere, right? Talking of that final option, keep an eye on the Apple indie game celebration, which looks like it has some kickass timed iOS game releases like Mushroom 11, Beglitched & maybe Kingdom: New Lands. And onward to the links...
- Simon, curator.]
-------------------
Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Nintendo's Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and Takuhiro Dohta provide an in-depth look at how some of the convention-breaking mechanics were implemented in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. [SIMON'S NOTE: Yep, this is pretty much unmissable.]"
Horizon: Zero Dawn and the evolution of the video game heroine (Jonathan Ore / CBC News) "Horizon: Zero Dawn, a massive open-world game set in a lush, post-apocalyptic jungle inhabited by robot dinosaurs, is one of the most anticipated games of 2017. Players take the role of Aloy, a young hunter in a far-flung future, well after most of human society has disappeared in a long-forgotten disaster."
Game Design Deep Dive: Decisions that matter in Orwell (Daniel Marx / Gamasutra) "On a basic level, Orwell is a mostly text-based narrative game that constantly confronts players with choices of varying moral weight. Unlike a typical interactive novel Orwell does not present players with an explicit decision between a set of juxtaposed options (multiple choice) on how to continue the story or which action to take next."
Is Halo Broken? (Nathan Ditum / Glixel) "Today, the series is overseen by 343 Industries, a Microsoft internal studio created specifically for the job. Most recently it helped Creative Assembly to release the in-universe strategy game Halo Wars 2, which is both quite good and unlikely to stop the series’ slow slide to the margins. So what can 343 do to fix Halo? Is it already too late?"
Balancing Metas (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "Meta games and balancing are always interesting to me so I thought it'd be fun to go over how these things can work in different contexts and what forces meta games to evolve."
How two Cities: Skylines modders turned hobbyist work into life-changing careers (Joe Donnelly / PC Gamer) "Today, Colossal Order and Paradox's city-building sim Cities: Skylines has one of the most prolific modding communities across all genres. Its Steam workshop page alone boasts well over a hundred thousand mods, and the number of keen enthusiasts flooding its forums is steadily growing with each passing update, expansion and portion of DLC."
Hookshots, Wii U Maps, And Other Things Nintendo Cut From Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "To make a game as massive and astounding as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the developers at Nintendo needed to take a lot of experiments. As a result, they left a lot of ideas on Hyrule’s floor."
The 'Card-ification' of Competitive Gaming (Steven Strom / Red Bull eSports) "Increasingly, though, developers are codifying the benefits of progression behind something new: virtual, collectible cards. From Clash Royale and Hearthstone on iOS, to Halo Wars 2, Paragon, Paladins, Battlerite and a helluva lot more on PC and consoles, digital cards are becoming the de facto method of displaying player skills."
'Rust Belt Gothic': lead writer Scott Benson unpacks the art that inspired Night in the Woods (Nate Ewert-Krocker / Zam) "From Flannery O’Connor to Richard Scarry and Symphony of the Night, we talk with animator/writer/Twitterman Scott Benson about what makes everyone's favorite new indie adventure game tick."
Reviving Ocarina of Time's long-lost Ura expansion (Edwin Evans-Thirlwell / Eurogamer) "The Legend of Zelda series has always dabbled in alternate realities - mirror worlds, sunken pasts, waking dreams, futures that might have been. This is the story of one such lost future, a dream originally dreamt by the developers of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, kept alive by a fervent underground community of fans, modders and artists."
Lights, Camera, Distraction: The Problem with Virtual Camera Systems (Jack Yarwood / Waypoint) "The average gamer rarely notices the camera, and when they do it's usually to complain about what's wrong with it. This is in spite of the camera being the most important tool for communicating a chosen situation to the player. Done well, its presence can be almost imperceptible, framing the action perfectly. Done poorly, it can ruin the experience, causing frustration and disorientation."
Meet the Man Behind the Most Acclaimed Board Game in Years (Steve T. Wright / Glixel) "Now, with the second "season" of Pandemic Legacy just around the corner, Glixel spoke with [Rob] Daviau to chat about the cardboard life, his former corporate overlords, and the travails of self-employment."
In the Land of 'Dying' MMOs: Dark Age of Camelot (Robert Zak / Kotaku) "My second time-warp into venerable MMOs takes me to the cross-mythological lands of Camelot, where, after 16 years, a sizeable number of players remain embroiled in a never-ending war."
The importance of cultural fashion in games (Matt Sayer / RockPaperShotgun) "Virginia’s career in cultural fashion began out of a desire for self-expression. After spending her childhood immersed in African culture, she couldn’t ignore the severe lack of traditional African fashion in The Sims’ wardrobe. With nobody else attempting to rectify the issue, Virginia was left with no choice but to take matters into her own hands."
Ron Gilbert: "From Maniac Mansion to Thimbleweed Park" (Talks From Google / YouTube) "Veteran game designer Ron Gilbert has been making games since the 1980s, most notably as writer, programmer, and designer for LucasFilm Games / LucasArts, producing classics like Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Today he is putting the finishing touches on his crowdfunded pixel-art puzzle adventure Thimbleweed Park."
Pixelated popstars: Japan’s dance dance revolution (Jack Needham / Dazed) "Rhythm-based video games dominate Japan’s arcades, and their popularity has influenced everyone from major pop stars to underground electronic producers."
A Video Game Immerses You in an Opera Composed by Dogs (Katie Rose Pipkin / Hyperallergic) "In David Kanaga’s latest game, Oiκοςpiel, an immortal Donkey Koch (of the Koch brothers) commissions a group of dogs to produce a digital opera for an arts festival scheduled for 2100. [SIMON'S NOTE: this game won the IGF Nuovo (art) prize, and you may be able to work out why! Full interview text here.]"
Monkey Island (or, How Ron Gilbert Made an Adventure Game That Didn’t Suck) (Jimmy Maher / Digital Antiquarian) "Shortly after completing Maniac Mansion, his first classic graphic adventure, Ron Gilbert started sketching ideas for his next game. “I wanted to do something that felt like fantasy and might kind of tap into what was interesting about fantasy,” he remembers, “but that wasn’t fantasy.” "
Shipping Kills Studios: A Study of Indie Team Dynamics (Danny Day / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2016 GDC Talk, QCF Design's Danny Day (Desktop Dungeons) explains how to keep your indie team alive after shipping a successful game."
Reverse-Engineering The Industry (Ernie Smith / Tedium) "Third-party developers weren’t always quite so revered in the video game industry, but a pair of legal decisions helped them earn their place at the table."
Art of the Impossible (Joel Goodwin / Electron Dance) "I played an amazing looking game this week, Fragments of Euclid by Antoine Zanuttini, a short first-person puzzler that appears to be set inside the art of M. C. Escher. For me, however, it's more like a dry run for William Chyr's Manifold Garden, a game I've been looking forward to for a while now."
The Dazzling Reinvention of Zelda (Simon Parkin / New Yorker) "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which launched last Friday, represents the first true reimagining of the series. Gone are the typical corridors and blockages intended to funnel every player along the same worn narrative lines. In this Hyrule, a wilderness of hills and lakes and mountain peaks, you are free to go wherever you please."
Frustration Can Improve Video Games, Designer Found (Nathan Grayson / Kotaku) "In video games, frustration is often viewed as a dirty word. If you’re feeling frustrated—like you’ve hit a wall and can’t find a way over, under, or around—the designers must have made a mistake. That’s not always the case, though. Sometimes, game makers try to make you feel irritated, or even livid."
Why I love Peggle and hate Peggle: Blast (Henrique Antero / Medium) "Peggle is divine. Peggle: Blast is an aberration. This is a story on how a videogame first touched perfection and then became a vessel for evil. It could be compared to The Fall of the Abrahamic religions, when humankind was collectively expelled from Paradise— if the Demiurge was perverse enough to have invented microtransactions along the way."
The designers of Dishonored, Bioshock 2 and Deus Ex swap stories about making PC's most complex games (Wes Fenlon / PC Gamer) "We put together a roundtable of familiar faces, all of whom have had a major hand in exploring or creating immersive sims. Our guests: Warren Spector (Otherside Entertainment), Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare (Arkane Studios), Tom Francis (Suspicious Developments) and Steve Gaynor (Fullbright)."
-------------------
[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to [email protected]. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]
0 notes
symbianosgames · 7 years
Link
The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include Zelda's Switch inspirations, the modding scene of Cities: Skylines, & lots more.
As for other things going on this week - still relaxing after the end of GDC, & have been playing some Night In The Woods, which is charming & totally my speed of game, as well as Chime Sharp, which is still one of my favorite puzzle games, despite a slightly basic PS4 conversion.
No luck getting a Switch yet (since I only decided I wanted one after playing it at GDC after its release, haha), but there's plenty of stuff to keep us all going on PS4, PC, iPad & elsewhere, right? Talking of that final option, keep an eye on the Apple indie game celebration, which looks like it has some kickass timed iOS game releases like Mushroom 11, Beglitched & maybe Kingdom: New Lands. And onward to the links...
- Simon, curator.]
-------------------
Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Nintendo's Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and Takuhiro Dohta provide an in-depth look at how some of the convention-breaking mechanics were implemented in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. [SIMON'S NOTE: Yep, this is pretty much unmissable.]"
Horizon: Zero Dawn and the evolution of the video game heroine (Jonathan Ore / CBC News) "Horizon: Zero Dawn, a massive open-world game set in a lush, post-apocalyptic jungle inhabited by robot dinosaurs, is one of the most anticipated games of 2017. Players take the role of Aloy, a young hunter in a far-flung future, well after most of human society has disappeared in a long-forgotten disaster."
Game Design Deep Dive: Decisions that matter in Orwell (Daniel Marx / Gamasutra) "On a basic level, Orwell is a mostly text-based narrative game that constantly confronts players with choices of varying moral weight. Unlike a typical interactive novel Orwell does not present players with an explicit decision between a set of juxtaposed options (multiple choice) on how to continue the story or which action to take next."
Is Halo Broken? (Nathan Ditum / Glixel) "Today, the series is overseen by 343 Industries, a Microsoft internal studio created specifically for the job. Most recently it helped Creative Assembly to release the in-universe strategy game Halo Wars 2, which is both quite good and unlikely to stop the series’ slow slide to the margins. So what can 343 do to fix Halo? Is it already too late?"
Balancing Metas (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "Meta games and balancing are always interesting to me so I thought it'd be fun to go over how these things can work in different contexts and what forces meta games to evolve."
How two Cities: Skylines modders turned hobbyist work into life-changing careers (Joe Donnelly / PC Gamer) "Today, Colossal Order and Paradox's city-building sim Cities: Skylines has one of the most prolific modding communities across all genres. Its Steam workshop page alone boasts well over a hundred thousand mods, and the number of keen enthusiasts flooding its forums is steadily growing with each passing update, expansion and portion of DLC."
Hookshots, Wii U Maps, And Other Things Nintendo Cut From Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "To make a game as massive and astounding as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the developers at Nintendo needed to take a lot of experiments. As a result, they left a lot of ideas on Hyrule’s floor."
The 'Card-ification' of Competitive Gaming (Steven Strom / Red Bull eSports) "Increasingly, though, developers are codifying the benefits of progression behind something new: virtual, collectible cards. From Clash Royale and Hearthstone on iOS, to Halo Wars 2, Paragon, Paladins, Battlerite and a helluva lot more on PC and consoles, digital cards are becoming the de facto method of displaying player skills."
'Rust Belt Gothic': lead writer Scott Benson unpacks the art that inspired Night in the Woods (Nate Ewert-Krocker / Zam) "From Flannery O’Connor to Richard Scarry and Symphony of the Night, we talk with animator/writer/Twitterman Scott Benson about what makes everyone's favorite new indie adventure game tick."
Reviving Ocarina of Time's long-lost Ura expansion (Edwin Evans-Thirlwell / Eurogamer) "The Legend of Zelda series has always dabbled in alternate realities - mirror worlds, sunken pasts, waking dreams, futures that might have been. This is the story of one such lost future, a dream originally dreamt by the developers of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, kept alive by a fervent underground community of fans, modders and artists."
Lights, Camera, Distraction: The Problem with Virtual Camera Systems (Jack Yarwood / Waypoint) "The average gamer rarely notices the camera, and when they do it's usually to complain about what's wrong with it. This is in spite of the camera being the most important tool for communicating a chosen situation to the player. Done well, its presence can be almost imperceptible, framing the action perfectly. Done poorly, it can ruin the experience, causing frustration and disorientation."
Meet the Man Behind the Most Acclaimed Board Game in Years (Steve T. Wright / Glixel) "Now, with the second "season" of Pandemic Legacy just around the corner, Glixel spoke with [Rob] Daviau to chat about the cardboard life, his former corporate overlords, and the travails of self-employment."
In the Land of 'Dying' MMOs: Dark Age of Camelot (Robert Zak / Kotaku) "My second time-warp into venerable MMOs takes me to the cross-mythological lands of Camelot, where, after 16 years, a sizeable number of players remain embroiled in a never-ending war."
The importance of cultural fashion in games (Matt Sayer / RockPaperShotgun) "Virginia’s career in cultural fashion began out of a desire for self-expression. After spending her childhood immersed in African culture, she couldn’t ignore the severe lack of traditional African fashion in The Sims’ wardrobe. With nobody else attempting to rectify the issue, Virginia was left with no choice but to take matters into her own hands."
Ron Gilbert: "From Maniac Mansion to Thimbleweed Park" (Talks From Google / YouTube) "Veteran game designer Ron Gilbert has been making games since the 1980s, most notably as writer, programmer, and designer for LucasFilm Games / LucasArts, producing classics like Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Today he is putting the finishing touches on his crowdfunded pixel-art puzzle adventure Thimbleweed Park."
Pixelated popstars: Japan’s dance dance revolution (Jack Needham / Dazed) "Rhythm-based video games dominate Japan’s arcades, and their popularity has influenced everyone from major pop stars to underground electronic producers."
A Video Game Immerses You in an Opera Composed by Dogs (Katie Rose Pipkin / Hyperallergic) "In David Kanaga’s latest game, Oiκοςpiel, an immortal Donkey Koch (of the Koch brothers) commissions a group of dogs to produce a digital opera for an arts festival scheduled for 2100. [SIMON'S NOTE: this game won the IGF Nuovo (art) prize, and you may be able to work out why! Full interview text here.]"
Monkey Island (or, How Ron Gilbert Made an Adventure Game That Didn’t Suck) (Jimmy Maher / Digital Antiquarian) "Shortly after completing Maniac Mansion, his first classic graphic adventure, Ron Gilbert started sketching ideas for his next game. “I wanted to do something that felt like fantasy and might kind of tap into what was interesting about fantasy,” he remembers, “but that wasn’t fantasy.” "
Shipping Kills Studios: A Study of Indie Team Dynamics (Danny Day / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2016 GDC Talk, QCF Design's Danny Day (Desktop Dungeons) explains how to keep your indie team alive after shipping a successful game."
Reverse-Engineering The Industry (Ernie Smith / Tedium) "Third-party developers weren’t always quite so revered in the video game industry, but a pair of legal decisions helped them earn their place at the table."
Art of the Impossible (Joel Goodwin / Electron Dance) "I played an amazing looking game this week, Fragments of Euclid by Antoine Zanuttini, a short first-person puzzler that appears to be set inside the art of M. C. Escher. For me, however, it's more like a dry run for William Chyr's Manifold Garden, a game I've been looking forward to for a while now."
The Dazzling Reinvention of Zelda (Simon Parkin / New Yorker) "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which launched last Friday, represents the first true reimagining of the series. Gone are the typical corridors and blockages intended to funnel every player along the same worn narrative lines. In this Hyrule, a wilderness of hills and lakes and mountain peaks, you are free to go wherever you please."
Frustration Can Improve Video Games, Designer Found (Nathan Grayson / Kotaku) "In video games, frustration is often viewed as a dirty word. If you’re feeling frustrated—like you’ve hit a wall and can’t find a way over, under, or around—the designers must have made a mistake. That’s not always the case, though. Sometimes, game makers try to make you feel irritated, or even livid."
Why I love Peggle and hate Peggle: Blast (Henrique Antero / Medium) "Peggle is divine. Peggle: Blast is an aberration. This is a story on how a videogame first touched perfection and then became a vessel for evil. It could be compared to The Fall of the Abrahamic religions, when humankind was collectively expelled from Paradise— if the Demiurge was perverse enough to have invented microtransactions along the way."
The designers of Dishonored, Bioshock 2 and Deus Ex swap stories about making PC's most complex games (Wes Fenlon / PC Gamer) "We put together a roundtable of familiar faces, all of whom have had a major hand in exploring or creating immersive sims. Our guests: Warren Spector (Otherside Entertainment), Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare (Arkane Studios), Tom Francis (Suspicious Developments) and Steve Gaynor (Fullbright)."
-------------------
[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to [email protected]. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]
0 notes
symbianosgames · 7 years
Link
The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include Zelda's Switch inspirations, the modding scene of Cities: Skylines, & lots more.
As for other things going on this week - still relaxing after the end of GDC, & have been playing some Night In The Woods, which is charming & totally my speed of game, as well as Chime Sharp, which is still one of my favorite puzzle games, despite a slightly basic PS4 conversion.
No luck getting a Switch yet (since I only decided I wanted one after playing it at GDC after its release, haha), but there's plenty of stuff to keep us all going on PS4, PC, iPad & elsewhere, right? Talking of that final option, keep an eye on the Apple indie game celebration, which looks like it has some kickass timed iOS game releases like Mushroom 11, Beglitched & maybe Kingdom: New Lands. And onward to the links...
- Simon, curator.]
-------------------
Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Nintendo's Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and Takuhiro Dohta provide an in-depth look at how some of the convention-breaking mechanics were implemented in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. [SIMON'S NOTE: Yep, this is pretty much unmissable.]"
Horizon: Zero Dawn and the evolution of the video game heroine (Jonathan Ore / CBC News) "Horizon: Zero Dawn, a massive open-world game set in a lush, post-apocalyptic jungle inhabited by robot dinosaurs, is one of the most anticipated games of 2017. Players take the role of Aloy, a young hunter in a far-flung future, well after most of human society has disappeared in a long-forgotten disaster."
Game Design Deep Dive: Decisions that matter in Orwell (Daniel Marx / Gamasutra) "On a basic level, Orwell is a mostly text-based narrative game that constantly confronts players with choices of varying moral weight. Unlike a typical interactive novel Orwell does not present players with an explicit decision between a set of juxtaposed options (multiple choice) on how to continue the story or which action to take next."
Is Halo Broken? (Nathan Ditum / Glixel) "Today, the series is overseen by 343 Industries, a Microsoft internal studio created specifically for the job. Most recently it helped Creative Assembly to release the in-universe strategy game Halo Wars 2, which is both quite good and unlikely to stop the series’ slow slide to the margins. So what can 343 do to fix Halo? Is it already too late?"
Balancing Metas (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "Meta games and balancing are always interesting to me so I thought it'd be fun to go over how these things can work in different contexts and what forces meta games to evolve."
How two Cities: Skylines modders turned hobbyist work into life-changing careers (Joe Donnelly / PC Gamer) "Today, Colossal Order and Paradox's city-building sim Cities: Skylines has one of the most prolific modding communities across all genres. Its Steam workshop page alone boasts well over a hundred thousand mods, and the number of keen enthusiasts flooding its forums is steadily growing with each passing update, expansion and portion of DLC."
Hookshots, Wii U Maps, And Other Things Nintendo Cut From Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "To make a game as massive and astounding as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the developers at Nintendo needed to take a lot of experiments. As a result, they left a lot of ideas on Hyrule’s floor."
The 'Card-ification' of Competitive Gaming (Steven Strom / Red Bull eSports) "Increasingly, though, developers are codifying the benefits of progression behind something new: virtual, collectible cards. From Clash Royale and Hearthstone on iOS, to Halo Wars 2, Paragon, Paladins, Battlerite and a helluva lot more on PC and consoles, digital cards are becoming the de facto method of displaying player skills."
'Rust Belt Gothic': lead writer Scott Benson unpacks the art that inspired Night in the Woods (Nate Ewert-Krocker / Zam) "From Flannery O’Connor to Richard Scarry and Symphony of the Night, we talk with animator/writer/Twitterman Scott Benson about what makes everyone's favorite new indie adventure game tick."
Reviving Ocarina of Time's long-lost Ura expansion (Edwin Evans-Thirlwell / Eurogamer) "The Legend of Zelda series has always dabbled in alternate realities - mirror worlds, sunken pasts, waking dreams, futures that might have been. This is the story of one such lost future, a dream originally dreamt by the developers of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, kept alive by a fervent underground community of fans, modders and artists."
Lights, Camera, Distraction: The Problem with Virtual Camera Systems (Jack Yarwood / Waypoint) "The average gamer rarely notices the camera, and when they do it's usually to complain about what's wrong with it. This is in spite of the camera being the most important tool for communicating a chosen situation to the player. Done well, its presence can be almost imperceptible, framing the action perfectly. Done poorly, it can ruin the experience, causing frustration and disorientation."
Meet the Man Behind the Most Acclaimed Board Game in Years (Steve T. Wright / Glixel) "Now, with the second "season" of Pandemic Legacy just around the corner, Glixel spoke with [Rob] Daviau to chat about the cardboard life, his former corporate overlords, and the travails of self-employment."
In the Land of 'Dying' MMOs: Dark Age of Camelot (Robert Zak / Kotaku) "My second time-warp into venerable MMOs takes me to the cross-mythological lands of Camelot, where, after 16 years, a sizeable number of players remain embroiled in a never-ending war."
The importance of cultural fashion in games (Matt Sayer / RockPaperShotgun) "Virginia’s career in cultural fashion began out of a desire for self-expression. After spending her childhood immersed in African culture, she couldn’t ignore the severe lack of traditional African fashion in The Sims’ wardrobe. With nobody else attempting to rectify the issue, Virginia was left with no choice but to take matters into her own hands."
Ron Gilbert: "From Maniac Mansion to Thimbleweed Park" (Talks From Google / YouTube) "Veteran game designer Ron Gilbert has been making games since the 1980s, most notably as writer, programmer, and designer for LucasFilm Games / LucasArts, producing classics like Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Today he is putting the finishing touches on his crowdfunded pixel-art puzzle adventure Thimbleweed Park."
Pixelated popstars: Japan’s dance dance revolution (Jack Needham / Dazed) "Rhythm-based video games dominate Japan’s arcades, and their popularity has influenced everyone from major pop stars to underground electronic producers."
A Video Game Immerses You in an Opera Composed by Dogs (Katie Rose Pipkin / Hyperallergic) "In David Kanaga’s latest game, Oiκοςpiel, an immortal Donkey Koch (of the Koch brothers) commissions a group of dogs to produce a digital opera for an arts festival scheduled for 2100. [SIMON'S NOTE: this game won the IGF Nuovo (art) prize, and you may be able to work out why! Full interview text here.]"
Monkey Island (or, How Ron Gilbert Made an Adventure Game That Didn’t Suck) (Jimmy Maher / Digital Antiquarian) "Shortly after completing Maniac Mansion, his first classic graphic adventure, Ron Gilbert started sketching ideas for his next game. “I wanted to do something that felt like fantasy and might kind of tap into what was interesting about fantasy,” he remembers, “but that wasn’t fantasy.” "
Shipping Kills Studios: A Study of Indie Team Dynamics (Danny Day / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2016 GDC Talk, QCF Design's Danny Day (Desktop Dungeons) explains how to keep your indie team alive after shipping a successful game."
Reverse-Engineering The Industry (Ernie Smith / Tedium) "Third-party developers weren’t always quite so revered in the video game industry, but a pair of legal decisions helped them earn their place at the table."
Art of the Impossible (Joel Goodwin / Electron Dance) "I played an amazing looking game this week, Fragments of Euclid by Antoine Zanuttini, a short first-person puzzler that appears to be set inside the art of M. C. Escher. For me, however, it's more like a dry run for William Chyr's Manifold Garden, a game I've been looking forward to for a while now."
The Dazzling Reinvention of Zelda (Simon Parkin / New Yorker) "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which launched last Friday, represents the first true reimagining of the series. Gone are the typical corridors and blockages intended to funnel every player along the same worn narrative lines. In this Hyrule, a wilderness of hills and lakes and mountain peaks, you are free to go wherever you please."
Frustration Can Improve Video Games, Designer Found (Nathan Grayson / Kotaku) "In video games, frustration is often viewed as a dirty word. If you’re feeling frustrated—like you’ve hit a wall and can’t find a way over, under, or around—the designers must have made a mistake. That’s not always the case, though. Sometimes, game makers try to make you feel irritated, or even livid."
Why I love Peggle and hate Peggle: Blast (Henrique Antero / Medium) "Peggle is divine. Peggle: Blast is an aberration. This is a story on how a videogame first touched perfection and then became a vessel for evil. It could be compared to The Fall of the Abrahamic religions, when humankind was collectively expelled from Paradise— if the Demiurge was perverse enough to have invented microtransactions along the way."
The designers of Dishonored, Bioshock 2 and Deus Ex swap stories about making PC's most complex games (Wes Fenlon / PC Gamer) "We put together a roundtable of familiar faces, all of whom have had a major hand in exploring or creating immersive sims. Our guests: Warren Spector (Otherside Entertainment), Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare (Arkane Studios), Tom Francis (Suspicious Developments) and Steve Gaynor (Fullbright)."
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