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Death Stranding Goes Full Kojima With Mysterious New Trailer

Developer Corner Indie Creators Next-Gen Day of The Devs Game Writers Industry World of Video Games

Interview with The Legendary Creator of Metal Gear Solid on His Weird New Game

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Thank you for reading 8Bit Jump, a news and opinion site about games and things serious gamers care about. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re here to inform you and, sometimes, entertain you. We aim to be an inclusive magazine for gamers of any ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation. We expect our writers and commenters to treat those they write about as they would if they met them in person. For more on what that means, on the values we embrace and on what lines we expect writers and commenters not to cross, please read this. You might also be interested in 8Bit Jump Mediaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Editorial Code. crave news. We want scoops! So, please, tip your editors: tips@8Bitj.com DavidFlautero Contecha

Regarded As The Boss Of Video Games

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What A Video Game Producer Actually Does

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Developer Corner

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Death Stranding &

Kojima Productions

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The Five Rules Of A Very Successful Indie Game Creator

pg Industry

Next-Gen

Next-Gen Lighting

Interview with a Boring Gamer

f.KOOLA

pg Interview

Developer Corner

Nolan Bushnell

Regarded As The Father Of Video Games

What A Video Game Producer Actually Does Say you want to have a party. You want it to be the most incredible party o n the planet, one that all of your friends will remember forever. You’re putting a lot of money into it, so you can’t afford to fail It’s gotta be perfect.

pull off an event like this, you’ll need to get a bunch of things: balloons, chairs, pizza. You decide that just holding it at some bar won’t be cool enough, so you’re gonna hold it in France. You hire a bunch of people to help you make this party happen, with the promise that it’s going to be goddamn legendary.

In the interest of edification, I reached out to Treadwell, who has been working in games for ten years, first at Blizzard and then at Big Huge Games and BioWare. Now, he’s a producer at Certain Affinity, the Austin-based studio best known for designing the multiplayer in games like Doom and Halo.

“Everybody’s excited,” says Ryan Treadwell, a producer at the game studio Certain Affinity. “They’re gonna be willing to put forth all their effort in order to do that, but then once the excitement dies down a little bit, they might start having questions. Like, ‘Alright when is this party? How are we getting there? Is it just in France, it’s an entire country, how are we gonna know how to meet each other? What types of balloons?’”

“The basic version of what a game producer does is get stuff done,” he said. “That’s the easiest way to put it—we’re the people who are responsible for making sure that a product gets made.”

To answer those questions, you’ve gotta hire a producer. “Producer” has always been a nebulous title, not just in party-planning but in video game development. Most casual observers understand the role of a programmer, an artist, or even a sound engineer, but the word “producer” is more vague. They… produce things? What does that even mean? Are they the ones in charge? Do they make all the creative decisions? Pull all the strings? What do they do, exactly?

That means playing two big roles, Treadwell said. First of all, a producer is a project manager: their job is to design a reasonable schedule, keep track of a game’s budget, and ensure that everyone’s hitting their deadlines. When a development team has to bump everything back a day because one engineer just broke the build, it’s a producer’s job to rearrange the game’s schedule accordingly. If a bunch of computer gear winds up costing twice as much as everyone expected, it’s the producer who has to figure out whether something else can be cut from the budget. To illustrate this, Treadwell offered a simple example: an in-game chair.

“The basic version of

what a game producer does is get stuff done.”

“So let’s say we need

¨A producer is the glue that holds people together, the guy or gal that anyone can go to when they have a question about their project.¨

to make a chair,” he said. “We need to have this chair done next week. But we don’t know who’s gonna be able to do this chair yet, we don’t know what the process of getting this chair is gonna be, and we really don’t know what’s gonna happen if the chair doesn’t make it in a week. So my first step on that would probably be to say, ‘OK, what is this chair a dependency of? Is a character gonna sit in this, are we gonna need this for motion-capture, do we need to know the exact dimensions of this particular chair, do we have the ability in the studio to make that, do we have the artists available that week, should we reach out to an outsourcing studio in order to make those?’ As you can see, making a chair has a tendency to snowball.”

In game development, producers usually figure out the broad strokes of a schedule from the beginning, then plan out what they call “sprints”—two-to-four week blocks with specific goals—that will move and fluctuate as necessary. Goals and ideas are always changing, so a schedule has to be flexible when it needs to be. Often, Treadwell will work backwards, he says. He might look for a hard deadline—say, a motion-capture session in two weeks that requires use of the chair—and design the

THE ATARI COMPANY EARLY DAYS

¨A producer can’t just look at spreadsheets all day; he or she has to oil the gears that keep the game development machine running smoothly.¨ schedule around that, ensuring that every “dependency” is hit. Maybe on day one, he’ll find a designer to come up with the chair. Then the concept artist will have a couple of days to sketch it out and get approval from the art lead, who might have her own comments. Actually, this chair needs some rubies. Then the 3D modelers will have a week to create in-game models of the chair and get it all ready for motion capturing. If something falls apart during this process—say, nobody can figure out how to make the chair stand upright—the producer needs to step in. But of course, this is game development. Things are always falling apart. “So what do you do when you have that nice schedule and then the director says, ‘Actually, we don’t need a chair, we need a table?’” I asked. “That happens on a fairly regular basis,” Treadwell said. “If you’ve done your job well as a producer, you already have a backup plan. But let’s say you don’t already have a backup plan, or you’re making that backup plan, then you’re gonna need to be.

RALPH BAER

German- American game developer Creator of the first Game Console

Successful Indie Game Creator

10 Matt Hall is, by almost every definition of the word, ‘successful’. 50 million downloads and $10 million later, Crossy Road is probably his most high profile success, but it’s one of many. Of the seven games Matt has released on iOS, a mind-boggling five have made it to the number one spot. How does he do it? Well, he has a few rules and he follows them to the letter. In development circles there’s a story about Matthew Hall. Think of it like a game development fairy-tale. Hall was working at Tantalus in Melbourne, on a game that no-one particularly wanted to work on. Pony Friends: a game about Ponies. Back when games about ponies were a running joke. Here they were, a group of adult men mostly men working on a video game about ponies. They didn’t care about ponies. They didn’t understand ponies. And they went about the task like you might expect of a group of men who didn’t care about or understand ponies. (

)

They started talking about embedded skill trees, they started talking about complex video game mechanics. Matthew Hall, one of the development leads, had seen enough.

Matthew Hall is the lanky, soft-spoken co-creator of

Industry

5555555555555 5555555555555 5555555555555 5Rules Of A Very

Make Your Game

For One Person

Matthew Hall is the lanky, soft-spoken co-creator of Crossy Road. And Crossy Road is one of those video games. You know the kind. The Angry Birds kind. The Fruit Ninja kind. Flight Control, Cut The Rope, Ski Safari, Doodle Jump. Games that hit the iOS lotto. If iOS success is a lotto, Matthew Hall is the luckiest man alive. Of the seven games that Matthew Hall has released on the iOS store, five have hit the number one spot.Five. That’s a 71% strike-rate. How?

Matt Hall

Co-Developer Crossy Road

Matt Hall, also known as KlickTock is one of the developers of Crossy Road. Being one of the co-founders of Hipster Whale, he has also made games such as Doodle Find, Deck War, and ZONR.

Matthew Hall. He isn’t a man who talks about metrics. Or marketing. Matthew Hall is just one person. One of two who were responsible for Crossy Road. That core team and a few more were responsible for Pac-Man 256, Hall’s most recent number one. For someone who has made an incredible habit of making

games that appeal to millions, his first rule is baffling: make your game for one person. One person. Not a demographic. Not a group. One single person. An actual person who exists. Choose someone. Choose one.Think about that person. What would he or she like? What would he or she hate? “I made Pac-Man 256 for Toru Iwatani,” says Hall. Toru Iwatani, the creator of the original Pac-Man. Good choice. When you create a video game for one specific person, believes Hall, when you apply all your thinking towards one goal, you usually end up creating something that a lot of people like. “After I make that game for one person I try and broaden it a little bit. And as long as I don’t destroy what that one person loves, I’m happy.”

Watch

How People Are Playing

Matt Hall is making a game for his daughter Penny. It is unfinished. It might be his most challenging project yet. Penny has been playing games from an early age. In Hall’s words, “she learned to swipe to unlock before she could walk”. Once upon a time Matthew Hall had to stick a photograph of a girl to a wall and say, “this is

like. The end result of that is Deck Wars. Deck Wars is a work in progress. Hall loves card games and would like to share that love with his daughter. There’s only one problem: card games normally require a loser and Penny hates to lose. “With Deck Wars, I was really trying to make a game where Penny would feel good

“she learned to swipe to unlock before she could walk”

CROSSY ROAD Mobile Game

Crossy Road is a mobile game released on November 20, 2014. It was developed and published on iOS by the indie company Hipster Whale, consisting of Andy Sum, Matt Hall, and Ben Weatherall.

Amanda”. Now he had a real-life Amanda. That has informed much of his design mentality over the last five years. When it comes to his daughter, says Hall, he never stops learning. With Penny, Hall gave himself the ultimate challenge. Create a card game Penny would

about losing.” Penny’s hatred of losing is legendary in the Hall household. Every time there was a possibility of her losing a game, she’d close the app and toss the phone away. Every time a game threatened to kill her she would quit. Immediately.

CROSSY ROAD Mobile Game

According to Hipster Whale, it has around 90 million players. Now Crossy Road is downloadable on a PC via Windows store, although it lags behind with updates.

Always Be

Prepared To Change

“The biggest thing is that I always change,” says Matt. He pauses. “There has to be a better way of putting that…” Matthew Hall doesn’t like to use buzzwords, but he does use one. Quite frequently in fact. Paradigm shift.

Hall tries his very best to embrace change, even when he doesn’t necessarily approve of it. “Then free-to-play came along. That’s probably the biggest paradigm shift we’ve seen in a very long time.

He remembers working at Tantalus, a studio that created its own intellectual property, but focused primarily on work-for-hire projects. It was at Tantalus where Matt worked on Pony Friends. At Tantalus where he discovered ‘Amanda’.

“I was fairly hostile to free-to-play in the beginning. Because I like consuming games, I like going to the store, picking up a game, playing it for 12 hours and putting it away. I like owning it. But it’s really important for developers to understand that when big shifts happen like that, it’s going to change the perspective of the game audience.”

Matt was also working at Tantalus when he discovered ‘casual games’.

“It’s good to be able to accept new things, even if you don’t really like them.”

“I got into casual games really early,” says Matt. “I used to play a lot of complicated games like Dungeon Keeper but when Popcap came around I jumped on that very early.” Matt showed these new ‘casual’ games to his colleagues at Tantalus, but sensed a reluctance. Tantalus had its model. It would continue with that model. Tantalus has continued with that model to this day.

“Then free-to-play came along. That’s probably the biggest paradigm shift we’ve seen in a very long time.”

Of the last seven games Matt Hall made for the iOS marketplace, only two didn’t make it to number one. One of those games was ZONR. “ZONR didn’t do very well,” admits Matt. In Matt’s words: “ZONR was an interesting game with a very strange learning curve.” ZONR was about as abstract as it gets. It was a game about finding shapes, essentially, and finding those shapes as quickly as you could. As always, Matt made ZONR for one specific person: an artist. An artist he admired but had never met. That led the game’s development in a number of different paths. In hindsight, believes Matt, too much time was spent working on the art of ZONR. But that was the natural pro-

CROSSY ROAD Mobile Game

The essential idea of the game is to get as far as possible across the roads, rivers, grass and train tracks without losing.

Love

Your Failures

gression of making a video game specifically for an artist. Throughout its development, from an aesthetic perspective, ZONR became progressively stranger and Matt embraced that. “I was like, ‘this is working this will do.” By Matt’s standard, ZONR was a commercial failure. It barely made enough money to cover the costs of creating it. “But what’s interesting,” says Matt, “is that ZONR, even though it started off as a casual game, the people who liked it — who championed it — were indies.” Years before the release of Crossy Road, Matt Hall was invited to a developer lunch. Tim Schafer was in Melbourne for the Game Masters exhibition at the ACMI and wanted to meet with all the local developers.

Matt arrived wearing a ZONR t-shirt. “Hey, I know that game, do you play it?” Asked Tim. It turns out that everyone at Double Fine, including Tim, were playing ZONR. And competing against one another. ZONR found its audience, just not the one Matt expected.

“But the people who liked it were the kind of people who liked to play different things. So it was actually a big success for me.”

5 “Every single aspect of your game needs to be world class in order to survive. Whether it’s the art, the sound or the design.”

CROSSY ROAD Mobile Game

Crossy Road has that ‘one more go’ factor and that’s a result of yes session length and how quickly one can move from death to brand new game.

Be World

Class

“One of the pieces of advice I give to people making iOS games,” begins Matt, “is that if your game doesn’t look as good as say Alto’s Adventure — why not?”

Making video games is tough. Making a successful video game that reaches a broad audience is even tougher. Matt Hall admits there has been an element of luck in every single one of his successes, but firmly believes that developers have to at least give themselves a shot at success. That doesn’t mean having the greatest production values. That doesn’t mean spending more than you can afford. It simply means focusing your effort on making the best possible video game. “Every single aspect of your game needs to be world class in order to survive. Whether it’s the art, the sound or the design.” A common mistake young developers make, explains Hall, is looking to their friends, or the local development community and using that as their personal benchmark. The reality: games are sold on a global marketplace and if you want to succeed on a grand scale your product has the world class. You shouldn’t be trying to make a better game than your friends. You should be looking to compete with the very best on a global scale. “I think Australia has done that really well,” says Matt, and points to games like Hand of Fate and Ski Safari 2 as recent examples. “These people are just trying to make the possible games they can.” It’s a competitive marketplace. Particularly on Steam. Matt Hall makes another point: the days of small, underdog stories on a service like Steam are all but history. There are exceptions but, for the most part, success on that scale requires an incredible, near-unsustainable amount of resources and effort. Great video games that would have been runaway successes even five years ago are being lost. In a world like that, you can’t afford to play in half measures.

NextGen

Lighting 16

Next-Gen Lighting Is Pushing The Limits Of Realism Resolution and polygons arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t the only things behind increasingly lifelike 3D worlds. Lighting plays a huge part as well. French artist koola has shared some truly extraordinary images and footage of his work in Unreal Engine 4, with particular emphasis on the work heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s done with things like lamps and sunlight. If you need some reference to dream for once devs can stop tailoring games for the One/PS4 and can really kick the tyres of new hardware (not to mention the PC), then these should do the job nicely.

Next-Gen 17

KOOLA

3D Artist - UNREAL ENGINE 4 Specialist

KOOLA. Unreal Engine 4 is already well established as a powerful tool for game developers, but one talented French artist is proving that weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re just beginning to test the engineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s limits. Known only as Koola, this creative mind has made it his mission to deliver hyper-realistic real-time architectural visualizations using Unreal Engine 4. Taking advantage of both the power and accessibility of UE4, the results of his work have wowed colleagues and as garnered attention from the international press and the Unreal team at Epic. Earlier this year Koola became the very first recipient of the inaugural Unreal Dev Grants program, a financial development fund designed to incentivize and reward innovative projects designed in Unreal Engine 4.Koola has delivered a level of realism that has to be seen to believe.

KOOLA

3D Artist - UNREAL ENGINE 4 Specialist

“I have absolutely not optimize my scenes, the trees can have less poly, the lods can be tuned better, the quality settings are maxed ... in short, there is lot of room for improvement.” “I apply some very simples material (with just a color and roughness value) that roughly corespond to what I wanna do, and then I do the lighting.”

KOOLA

3D Artist - UNREAL ENGINE 4 Specialist

Special

He is Back For years, analysts and commentators haveremarked that the age of the console may be at an end and rapidgrowth in mobile .

Video games also have the ability to help us get lost solving seemingly unsolvable problems. We live in a society with increasingly complex problems that donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t always seem to have a solution â&#x20AC;&#x201D; our ability to figure out a level of Angry Birds gives us hope about even the most hopeless problems. This perhaps has the greatest mainstream appeal. With perhaps first mainstream game of this kind, Tetris, Nintendo executives negotiated with Soviet Union computer programmer in the midst of the Cold War to acquire the copyright for a tile-matching game they would package with the Gameboy. The game went on to sell more 33 million copies, just on the Gameboy. Now of course, the game is available on your iPhone, your Android phone and in an ever-expanding array of formats.

DEATH STRANDING

That is to say, when the baby disappears from Norman Reedus’ hands all of a sudden, it’s getting pulled into the world of Guillermo del Toro through a machine.

...what the fuck. That’s gotta be intentional, right? Will Death Stranding deal with multiple realities? What’s the importance of the baby in the first place? What does it MEAN, Kojima? Even if this is purely coincidental, I love that fans are getting so obsessive about these trailers, that they’re making connections that aren’t actually there. (EDIT 12:44 PM: To add fuel to the fire, Kojima himself has retweeted this article.)

I can’t wait to see what other wild stuff fans find, especially given that we’re about to hear more about Death Stranding at today’s Playstation Experience event.

That is to say, when the baby disappears from Norman Reedus’ hands all of a sudden, it’s getting pulled into the world of Guillermo del Toro through a machine.

Hideo Kojima

Regarded As The most innovator Video Game Developer

Mads Mikkelsen

Actor playing the villian

Interview

Interview with a

Boring Gamer

Alex McCabe isn’t the kind of person who usually gets profiled on a video game website. He doesn’t make games, doesn’t play.

hem competitively, and doesn’t make many videos about them. He hasn’t even found a wild new way to play Fallout or Super Mario 64. He did make himself a multi-colored PlayStation 2 when he was a kid. That’s pretty cool. But he’s just an ordinary guy who plays video games. McCabe is no gaming celebrity, which is the point of why we recently spoke on Skype for an hour. Even an ordinary person likely has some notable stories to share. McCabe did. We were talking thanks to a complaint and a joke. A little over two weeks ago, I ran an article about PewDiePie, the huge gaming celebrity who has some 49,004,866 followers on YouTube. The article was really about the folly of pre-ordering games, focusing on one

extraordinarily pointless pre-order made by the super-successful YouTuber. As happens with articles featuring PewDiePie, a horde of haters showed up. “Can you not post articles about this wanker please?” one of PewDiePie’s online enemies wrote under that article. “It only heightens his profile even further. Thank you.” I declined and then asked: “Who’d you like to see us cover more?” The commenter coughed up a wiseass response, but someone else chimed in as well. That someone else was Alex McCabe: You could profile me, but I am also a wanker and I have zero following online. I’m also very boring. I do play nothing but Destiny and I don’t stream. Maybe don’t profile me. “Actually, let’s do it,” I replied. “We’ll see how boring you are.”

“My mom, from time to time, still regales me with the story of the time they stayed up until 4am on a work night to play Crash Bandicoot 3,”

NEXT MONTH! NEARLY 10 years since

development started on The Last Guardian, designer Fumito Uedaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s long-anticipated follow-up to Ico and Shadow of the Colossus.

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10 YEARS IN THE MAKING

THE LAST GUARDIAN FINALLY ARRIVES TO THE PLAYSTATION

Developer Corner Indie Creators Next-Gen Day of The Devs Game Writers Industry World of Video Games

EXTRA

Why We Play For years, analysts and commentators have remarked that the age of the console may be at an end and rapidgrowth in mobile gaming seemedto attest to this.

In December 2015, Kojima's employment contract with Konami was officially terminated, and he reformed Kojima Productions as a new independent studio.