The Independent Games Magazine Issue Five, Spring 2015
A new kind of game: An interactive murder mystery
ALSO IN ISSUE FIVE FEATURES
REGIONAL
EVENTS
NEXT GEN
Slain, Raging
Every Single
We experience
F reemium
Justice, Big
Soldier, a game
Virtual Reality in
games, our Next
Pharma, Congo
set in Vietnam
LA, and have the
Gen gamer gives
and Freaking
and made in
GDC15 Awards
us the low down
Meatbags too
South Africa.
winners.
on them
How games technology helped make the film...
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Contents IND13 Q&A
Congo
Page 6 Why do you think Independent Games Development is important to the entire Video Games industry?
Page 40 Stuck deep in the Congo jungle... and hunted by packs of demons.
Cubus Games Page 8 The Barcelona based indie studio and makers of games such as Necklace of Skulls.
Page 46 Find out more about this war game with a twist and hear more from this Independent Studio making games out of Johannesburg.
Slain!
Raging Justice
Page 12 A faithful homage to the gory hack and slash games of the 80’s and 90’s, with lots and lots of blood...
Page 50 A modern take on the 2D scrolling brawler that pulls the classic genre kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
Her Story
Freaking Meatbags...
Page 16 A new kind of game. An interactive murder mystery using database video footage of a woman whose husband has gone missing.
Page 54 The new game from Wild Factor.
Planet of the Apes Page 22 Matthew Bett spoke to our very own Harry Cole about life as an indie film maker, games in Scotland, and working on Planet of the Apes.
Big Pharma Page 26 A game all about running your own pharmaceutical empire from developer Twice Circled and publisher Positech Games.
Gang Nations Page 34 Paul Gouge talks about the new and highly addictive game Gang Nations.
Vietnam ’65
Next Gen Page 58 Our Next Gen gamer gives us her view on freemium games.
Cities: Skylines Page 60 IND13 talks to Karoliina Korppoo, the Lead Designer on Cities: Skylines, about how the new game cam to be.
VR LA Spring Expo 2015 Page 64 IND13’s VR evangelist, headed over on a (real) jet plane to catch up with the movers and shakers of the VR world and see what is on the virtual horizon.
GDC 15 Page 68 All the winners and finalists of The Independent Games Festival (IGF) Awards & Game Developers Choice Awards.
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EDITORIAL: IND13
Hello and welcome to IND13 (Indie), the magazine
sound effect artistry to retro arcades – we’ll take a
that champions independent games.
look at anything that grabs our interest.
Maybe you’re a developer, or a hardcore gamer,
We’re a small core team of just six members – so
or someone new to the concept of indie games
we’re always looking for new angles and fresh
wanting to learn more – we’ve got something for
writing. If you think you’ve got something that’ll
you all.
make indie game developers step away from their consoles for a few minutes, get in touch by emailing
Just like the games we love, we’re independent:
us at editorial@ind13.com.
this means no editorial agenda except good, solid reporting on all aspects of indie gaming. From
Enjoy,
veteran developers to crowdfunding campaigns,
ind13
Who we are... IND13 is a games magazine dedicated to independent games development. The team is made up of voluntary contributors from different areas of independent games development. We’ve created a magazine which discusses topics we think are important to, and cater to the fans of, independent games development. Our aim is to create interesting news, reviews and articles, all focusing on independent games development. The nucleus of our team is based in the UK but we hope to have a team stretching the globe. We aim to have independent gaming news from the UK, US, Europe and Asia, but also from all other gaming territories. The team behind IND13 are all volunteers, and we are giving our time because we are passionate about independent games development. The content of the magazine will be made up of articles created by the IND13 team but also by voluntary contributors from the games industry. Advertising is available in the magazine, at this time all proceeds will go into the development and stability of IND13’s production. Paying for advertising will also mean we can cover paying clients’ titles with editorial as well as with traditional advertising
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placements in the magazine. We also give pro bono ad placements to the companies the team work for, in exchange for our time spent contributing to the magazine and to keep our employers happy. We hope you enjoyed the magazine and please do get in touch with questions and comments.
The Team: Richard Hoffmann Editor-in-Chief Harry Cole Publisher Lee Smith Creative Director Rokas Butkus Art Editor Sophie Rossetti Copy Editor
Our Channels: Website: www.ind13.com Facebook: www.facebook.com/ind13 Twitter: @official_Ind13 For editorial enquires: editorial@ind13.com For advertising enquires: advertising@ind13.com
R
500 MILLION PLAYS WITHIN 3 YEARS WE PUT SOME OF THIS SUCCESS DOWN TO OUR
MINIWORLDGAMES IS A
GAMES STUDIO
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FEATURE: IND13 Q&A
Why do you think Independent Games Development is important to the entire Video Games industry? HARRY
SOPHIE
Sophie Without the pressures of gratifying a mass audience / large publisher demands, indie developers have the freedom to innovate and push boundaries. In many ways, the indie community has saved the industry. The current state of the industry in Australia is a great example of this. Large studios have been shutting down all over the country in the past few years, but the indies are rallying, and we are seeing game-changing titles come out of Aus all the time.
Jennifer The consistently creative innovations that spring from the subversive spirit of the indie development scene keep the industry on its toes. Without indie developers pushing the boundaries and proving that left-of-centre games can be commercially viable, the video games industry as a whole would be much more risk-averse and much less colourful.
Richard I see it a bit like my favorite City London. The hectic shopping (main) streets are nice for a little while, but then you discover the real beauty of the little side streets, gardens and canals with the boats where people live on. The real
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RICHARD
Bohemians, who live unconventional, usually artistic, lives. I think this is true for our mostly moneydriven Video Games industry as well. We need more heart and passion, like in the beginning, with a few creative people in the bedroom building cool games for an audience that can identify themselves with the creators and their game. Minecraft is one example that comes to mind.
Lee We have heard a lot about how the games industry is mimicking, and even over-taking, the film industry and this is reflected in a strong indie culture. Independent films have, for a long time, thrived due to its lack of creative restraints and this is the same for the indie game sector. Indie game designers and developers have more freedom to test new ideas which, if successful, will be picked up by the larger studios. It’s a symbiotic relationship in a way. Indie games test the market with imagination, creativity and vigour, and the AAA studios pick up the ideas and repurpose them with a bigger budget for development and, crucially, marketing. Without the independent sector, quite
LEE
JENNIFER
simply, we will just be left with a endless stream of safe games. In the same way that, without the indie film market, we would only be watching Tom Cruise action blockbusters. And we wouldn’t want that, would we?
Harry Indie Gaming leads the way in innovation. Redeveloping old genres and starting completely new ones, thinking outside the ‘box’ and then taking that box and smashing it to pieces, only to rebuild it again. Indies embrace new talent, new software and new hardware, like retro 8bit graphics and The Oculus Rift. These innovations are essential to the wider industry to make that progress and overcome the challenges of new technology and ideas. The work of the Indies shapes the wider industry, stripping back ‘what makes a game’ while trying outrageous new things. It’s where innovation, creativity and business collide, like splitting an atom to create innovation explosion. Without the Indie culture, we would have a very stale and stagnant Games Industry. But with the tools and now available to Indies, we are operating in one of the most exciting times for Games Development in history. «
FEATURE: Cubus Games
WILL YOU FIND THE ANSWERS YOU SEEK... Or will you only find death on the road ahead? IND13 caught up with Quim Garreta, the co-founder of Cubus Games, the Barcelona based indie studio and makers of games such as Necklace of Skulls.
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FEATURE: Cubus Games
Could you introduce yourself, tell us about the team and your studio? I’m Quim Garreta, co-founder of Cubus Games. I began reading game-books when I was a kid. Then I got into RPGs. And between the two? Video games! I’m also a musician, so I’m responsible for composing the soundtracks for our interactive adventures. We are imaginative people with a need to create, and we have a deep passion for unique experiences. Everyone on our team has their own addictions -- such as video games, movies, and music -- and we wanted a way for all of us to express that passion collaboratively. Game-books were the perfect outlet for this. And because we’re so passionate, our game-book apps are much more than a book or a game. We want them to become a stunning mix of art, music, interaction and experiences that readers can really “live.” Our studio is in close proximity to Barcelona -- next to a beautiful vineyard and the holy mountain of Montserrat (where the wine could be called “godly”). It’s the perfect place to develop a mythical adventure like Necklace of Skulls.
What is the ethos of the team, what sort of games to you strive to create? We started by making an amateur
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prototype game-book app for Android devices. The results were good, and we all had a blast reading and writing in this format -- so we decided to go further and make it professional. Before we knew it, we had become a new start-up with a focus on digital choose-your-own-adventure books. Now, we have the experience of three adventure game-books released, and many other projects to come. We would like to explore new ways of interactive storytelling (e.g., transmedia), since our proprietary technology delivers cutting-edge entertainment from digital adventures to serious games. We feel that we have a duty to do help our education system by applying what we know about interactive storytelling to learning.
In your own words, how would you describe your game? Necklace of Skulls is an epic digital recreation of Dave Morris’s seminal choose-your-own-adventure paper gamebook. It’s a Mayan adventure game-book that allows you to create your own myth and puts you deep into the far reaches of this ancient world. For those not used to playing
gamebooks, it’s easier to think of them as adventures where the player is the main character and gets to make all the important decisions every step of the way.
What is the back story to the game? The lead character’s twin brother has been captured by a wizard who has taken him into the land of the dead, so the player sets out to cross the known world to get him back. The player will plunge into the strange, dreamlike wonders of Mayan myth -confronting ghosts and gods, bargaining for the main character’s life against wily demons, and finding allies and enemies among both the living and the dead. Even if players are brave enough to survive the dangers of the spirit-haunted western desert, they must still confront the wizard (named Necklace of Skulls) in a fight to the death! By the way, Dave Morris was inspired to write this story after while on his honeymoon in Mexico :)
Interactive novels are a unique area of gaming, can you tell us more about the genre? It’s an evolving genre that can be “played” in many different ways. The reader may play the part of the main character, advise the main character, or watch and decide what happens -- like the director of a movie. The reader can even play the antagonist: Imagine being Moriarty and trying to set a trap for Sherlock Holmes?
How has it developed from the original hard copy books? It keeps the same spirit (and text) of the original book, but it changes the atmosphere completely by offering players animated illustrations that depict scenes from the story in a refreshingly different (and very colourful) way. For us, the new combat system in Necklace of Skulls is a great achievement -since it’s easy to learn and requires a degree of strategy instead of dice rolls, which can be frustrating. We also reduced the characters to just four and converted two male characters to female. Finally, we provided all character with a special ability related to their particular backgrounds. The Warrior has more stamina, the Huntress has a blowgun, the Wayfarer can carry two more items, and the Sorceress can predict the enemy’s movement to a
certain degree. On top of these gameplayfocused improvements, the sound effects and soundtrack also give the story a very epic feel.
The artwork is really cool, how important is art in this genre of game? It’s exceedingly important. In fact, it’s the first thing players will notice. However, because these are game-books, it may be hard to fill the branching paths with “big” illustrations. Great art is one of the best ways to get non-gamebook players interested in playing through the whole thing!
What is it like creating interactive novels? Who are the readers? The readers are people who like roleplaying games but want a richer story and greater variety of characters -- plus actual choice, which game-books borrow from video games.
What is the community like that support interactive novels? There isn’t just one community. Some are gamers, and they tend to prefer the “you are the hero” style. Others are readers used to reading fiction. They enjoy interactivity as a way to play with and “engage” with the text.
Do you see Interactive novels as a niche group of gaming, are the fans different from COD fans? They are different, for the most part. If your main interest is non-stop action, video games deliver that in spades. But if you like CRPGs or adventure games, then you may get frustrated with what CoD can offer. One great thing about text is that it’s cheap for a developer to work with, so interactive novels can do some things CRPGs can’t.
The Mayan empire, what was the reason for choosing this era? Too much fantasy is white, Anglo-Saxon and culturally centred on a modern U.S./ European way of thinking. But human history and myth has so much more going for it than that. What is the story of the Maya and Aztec’s before Europeans came to conquer them? It was one of the world’s great civilizations, and we wanted to tell a bit of that story.
How did choosing the Mayan Empire increase the excitement in the book? The Mayan world is full of life and death, vibrant with colour, a place where things we now pack away in a box labelled “imaginary stuff” were once real. There’s a jolt of pure. «
"Interactive novels are an evolving genre that can be played in many different ways. The reader may play the part of the main character, advise the main character, or watch and decide what happens... like the director of a movie..."
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FEATURE: Slain
Prepare to be
A faithful homage to the gory hack and slash games of the 80’s and 90’s, with lots and lots of blood... 12 SPRING 2015 ISSUE FIVE IND13.COM
Lee Smith looks into the latest game that has fired up the imagination of Kickstarter, to bring us the natural heir to the great Castlevania series. Let me just take you back on a little journey, to when the (games) world was populated not with cute little smartphone games where you pay to makes lines of candy; a world where games had a shelf-life of more than just a couple of weeks (more like a couple of years); a world where I, and my friends, gathered around the Nintendo Entertainment System, placed a special cartridge into it, and entered a land full of ghouls, ghosts, strange creatures and, of course, Dracula Vlad Țepeș. To me, and many others around the gaming globe of course, the original Castlevania game grabbed hold of our imaginations and slapped it around senselessly until we spent all our spare time as a member of the Belmont clan, trying to kick Dracula’s undead butt. With the exhilarating levels, the atmospheric graphics, and the immense playability of Castlevania, and the other games that followed it in the series (including my all time favourite, the SNES version), it has never really been bettered. Metal bands have even done cover versions of the dark soundtrack, and gamers have moshed along gleefully. So it was with some trepidation, and also some excitement, that I approached Slain! when I first heard about it. Castlevania is such hallowed gaming ground for me, it should never be touched or revisited. However, Wolf Brew Games, the makers of Slain, are not just gamers out to make a little bit of beer money from this, they are fans first and foremost. And being fans, they know what it means to other fans. So the graphics are amazingly designed in a way that feels like a homage to the early ‘hack and slash’ games, but also gives it an updated and new identity. The pixel art depicts a desperate and decaying apocalyptic world, a world which
is filled with some of the most vicious and evil creatures since Nigel Farage opened the doors to a UKIP conference. Oh, and did I mention the blood. Oh boy, there is blood. Lots of blood. Seriously, if they tried to recreate this level of blood in a film there would be an international fake blood crisis. The beauty is in its natural scariness.
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It isn’t just all looks though, the game play is to be enjoyed (and endured) too. You play Bathoryn, a long-haired warrior with multiple sword swings in which to attack the hordes of monsters that attack... and attack... and attack some more... They attack, you swing your sword (and hair), and all sorts of body parts, including heads, are soon being hacked off only to reside at your feet as you take on the next wave. It really is relentless, and tough, and so it should be. Castlevania was no picnic in the cemetary, and neither is this.
“A world which is filled with some of the most vicious and evil creatures since Nigel Farage opened the doors to a UKIP conference...” Also, with dastardly traps laid all through the levels, you have to be aware. This isn’t just a mere ‘button presser’ there is a skill and intelligence level required to really master it, otherwise you will be overcome with the hordes and face an imminent and very painful (and bloody, did I mention the blood?) death. It is most satisfying, in this age of two minute levels, to have a game that not only harks back to the pixalated graphics, but also to the days when games were freakishly hard, and real satisfaction was had by just reaching the next levels. But don’t just take my word for it, check out the game which is due for release after a very successful Kickstarter campaign. You will love it, as I love it, but be careful, and monitor your heart rate. «
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FEATURE: Slain
Andrew Gilmour from Wolfbrew Games, and the metal head responsible for all that delightfully dark and Gothic artwork, talks to us about Slain! I have been making games for years. I made my first game, which was just a bunch of text strings, on a ZX81 when I was eleven years old. Even though we had no internet connection, as there was no internet in those days, I managed to fool my parents into thinking I had hacked into their bank account and was transferring thousands of pounds into the account. Then, a message came up saying I was being traced and the police were on their way. My parents flipped, and I thought it was great fun! From that point, I knew I wanted to make games. At that time, computer magazines contained pages of code that you could type in to make your own games. I would buy the magazine, spend my time typing thousands of lines of code into my Spectrum, and give them to my friends to play. Once again, great fun! I left school when I was fifteen, and had several jobs before I managed to get my first job in the industry at Imagitek Design
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at the age of nineteen. We worked in an old mill house in the North of England. I became a sprite animator there putting my training in martial arts to good use and learning all I could about games, art, and life. It was an invaluable experience. I quit working in the mainstream games industry about four years ago. The industry, to me, had become stale. At that point I was making assets from other peoples’ concepts for other peoples’ games. I was, essentially, a 3D printer producing game-ready art. I missed small, effective teams, where I got to design, build, and animate my own creations. And I was tired of being told, “Andrew, I think this is a little bit dark, can you make it more...um cute?” About two years ago, I started designing Slain! which was then called The Seven Towers. I wanted to make a dark, Gothic, side-scroller using pixel art influenced by the music of Metal. I had made many games back in the day using pixel art and I wanted to do all the things I could not do back then using today’s tools and Fxs in an old-school looking game. So, I set off on my adventure into indie game development. I spent many days alone in my room cranking out art to the sounds of Candlemass, My Dying Bride, Katatonia, Anathema, Iced Earth, Entombed, Bathory, and Satyricon, to mention a few.
After about a year of work, Slain! was starting to gain some interest from the right people. It seemed others were also in to dark games, Metal and pixels. So my direction changed a bit, to not only make the game for me but for others who shared my love for these things. Of course, I could not do this alone and finding people willing to leave their cushy industry jobs to work with a wild-card developer was difficult. I would show all my friends my work on Slain!, and ask for help with the code side of things, or the business side of things, so I could focus on the art and game. Then one day my good friend, Asa Dang, gets back to me and offers to help! Shortly after, he left his awesome job at Rockstar to work full-time at Wolfbrew, bringing with him years of coding experience and an unusual tolerance for my personality. Around the same time, I was approached by Nick Alfieri from Digerati with an E-mail that said something like, “I want to have sex with your game.” This was the final piece, Nick bought his business development and marketing skills to Wolfbrew, allowing us to focus on making the game. We are now running a Kickstarter campaign to fund Slain! for a few more months and test out the market to see what the gamers think of Slain! I hope you that gave you a little insight to the origins of Slain! and we hope to see you all in the Slain! community soon. «
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FEATURE: Her Story
A new kind of game. An interactive murder mystery using database video footage of a woman whose husband has gone missing. Her Story is a game like no other before it. Harry Cole and Lee Smith chat to Sam Barlow, the man behind it. Sam Barlow isn’t new to the games industry. The word ‘veteran’ is thrown around a lot, and gets applied to people who are on their second or third game. Maybe if you have managed to survive that long in a notoriously tough games world, it could be warranted. But Sam Barlow, the man behind one of the most original games to emerge in recent years, Her Story, can be could a veteran. He has earned his pixel stripes as a games designer, and now he is using all that gathered experience and knowledge to bring to us a unique experience. Sam spent over a decade working as a designer and game director on console titles, including two Silent Hill titles, ‘Origins’ and ‘Shattered Memories.’ But in 2014 he went independent to, as he says, “try my hand at making smaller games that explored types of play, or types of story that would be harder to pitch to traditional publishers. It was also partly because I was, frankly, jealous of the amazing work being done by other smaller scale devs like Simogo, Cardboard Computer and inkle!”
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His first game as an independent is Her Story, which is being made entirely by Sam with occasional input from other talented folk “if I was being fashionable, I would call this a ‘micro-studio’” he jokes. The question we always ask, though, is what got him into, not only gaming in general, but into game development and design. Now, for lots of people, it is seen as a viable career path. The gaming market has changed immensely, but if you hop back a few years, that wasn’t always the case. And as a child of the 8-bit home computer era, Sam started out making games “just because... that was what you did. Typed in stuff from magazines, modified them to pass them off as my own. Slowly picked up how to do that from scratch.” It’s quite a common route into game design, rather than the college/career path. It is something that people just love doing, and their hobby somehow becomes their way of making a living. Which isn’t always easy. “I used to make offensive little games to share with friends,” Sam says, “and hand them out on floppy disks at school, that kind of thing.”
Aisle Then once he got to university and discovered the internet (as it was then,
which is a very different beast to the high-speed networks of today) he discovered the community of writers and developers who were “rekindling the concept of ‘interactive fiction’” and went on to make a title called Aisle. Aisle is a text game that played with conventions of how that kind of game should unfold. However, at that point, it still hadn’t occurred to him that you could make a living creating games. He went out to work in the U.S. for a business software company, “planning to make my millions.” That didn’t happen, however, which is a familiar story, and he ended up back in the UK a few years later looking for work. But then one of those things happened where a friend suggested he try for a job as an artist for a games company... So being proactive he applied to every developer in the UK, heard back from one, and that, amazingly, got him his first job, “working on Serious Sam: The Next Encounter. This was initially as an artist, then as a level designer” he explains.
The journey into games Of course, from there the journey that he embarked on, in a career in games, was only just beginning. Which, as anyone can tell you, can be a long and difficult journey. For Sam, though, he admits to
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FEATURE: Her Story
being Lucky. In his own words: “lucky in that I’ve been able to work on cooler and cooler projects as I’ve moved forward in my career. I should emphasis the word: ‘lucky’. So much in an intense, creative industry like games is down to luck.” As much as there is an element of luck in any industry, in any career path, as there always is, it isn’t all down to whether you have the lucky gene. There is a lot of hard work to it too, even if it is just to be able to take advantage of the opportunities that might come your way. “Right time, right place. You have to be open to things happening, always on the look out to make the best of a unexpected circumstance. We made a movie tie-in game for the Nicholas Cage movie Ghost Rider, and that finished at just the right time to step in and work on Silent Hill: Origins. Another studio had problems on the title and we had to step in to save the project. Coming straight off Ghost Rider, the team worked really well together and we were able to rapidly adapt our tech to work with Silent Hill.” The went to produce, what Sams says, was “something that was half decent despite having half the time and half the budget to play with...” But then a bit later, after another few lucky breaks (them again...), they got the chance to make their own Silent Hill game, ‘Shattered Memories’. For the first time this was a chance to really push forward his ideas about how you could tell stories in a game, a chance, with Konami’s backing, to push the envelope.
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And from there, it is onto Her Story, which is a game so very different from what we are used to seeing. Simply, the game sits you in front of an mothballed old police computer and allows you to access its database of video footage. In this particular database are hundreds of clips taken from a series of interviews with a woman whose husband has gone missing. By watching these clips you can piece together ‘her story’. The catch is that to find the clips you have to search them out in the database by typing words... say you search for ‘murder’, you get the clips where the woman uses that word in her testimony. The additional complication is that the database only returns the first five clips, even if there are more, so you have to be more specific in your searches to ‘dig out’ the more juicy stuff. Essentially you are using the woman’s own words as the bread-crumb trail to explore her story, hence the title of the game. Although it doesn’t have the physical exploration you’d get in a more conventional game, the game gives you much greater power to ‘explore the story’ than you’re used to. It can feel conversational and also more like real detective work, without the hang ups that come with trying to actually simulate the second-to-second action of a detective story.
Crime fiction As I have said, it is a very original concept, and a game which should please a side audience who have been eagerly waiting
such a game. Everyone wants to be a detective, and solve puzzles. “I’ve always been a huge fan of police procedurals and crime fiction,” says Sam, when explaining how he developed the idea for Her Story. “I’ve been wanting to do a game in this genre for forever. It slowly dawned on me that the way to make it work was to simplify the gameplay and make it more abstract... rather than trying to make a ‘cop simulator’, over-complicating the game-play. This kind of combined in my head with my love of performance and a desire to use the availability of digital video as a way of putting a performance front and centre of an indie game. It really is a non-linear storyline, where he challenged himself to come up with a new angle to a game. Most of the ideas that appeal to him start as new formats, new structures, fresh takes on ways to tell a story interactively.
Silent Hill “I need that kind of hook to get excited. But after that, once I start to put flesh on the bones, it’s the story and characters that take over. So with Aisle it was the idea of a ‘one turn game’, a game where ‘players were punished for suggesting silly actions’. With Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, it was a combination of ‘A game where your are psychologically profiled’ and ‘A game that uses fluid motion controls to make looking around more intuitive’. Those hooks are what gets the ball rolling. However it wasn’t simply just watching
an episode of Columbo and any other police/detective drama and thinking that it should be interactive. But rather that Sam was trying to “take everything back to its simplest form... so the action adventure that tells its story through audio diaries, reducing that down to just the audio diaries. And then building it back up... how do I add interactivity to this to make it more interactive, more player-driven?
games that don’t assume direct control is essential to interactivity.” Sam says.
The story is frequently just doled out to the player chunk-by-chunk... how can I give the player more agency and more interesting involvement in that process?
“I’ve always been a huge fan of police procedurals and crime fiction, and I’ve been wanting to do a game in this genre for forever...”
Her Story is most definitely a game though, despite it’s fimatic approach and it’s feel. “It’s a game, in as much as that word is used to describe digital experiences that require the player to perform actions and react to what’s happening. It’s not a traditional game, clearly. ‘Game’ is an awkward word, but it’s the best one we’ve got!” The question, though, is whether we can look forward to seeing more games, following this style, being made once Her Story is released. Maybe not the same concept of Her Story, as such, but games that focus on a higher sense of interactivity. We can certainly take a move away from the Call of Duty type games that flood the market, with its increasingly formulaic game-play and graphics. “I’d love to see more developers make
Going on to say that he would like to see more developers make use of video. “I’d like to see more developers tell stories that sit outside the well worn genres and settings. If I can inspire just one developer to do that, that would make me happy”
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It is his experiences of working on games such as Silent Hill: Shattered Memories that have aided in this, and also with Aisle. Essentially they share the same DNA. “There’s a bit in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories where you hack into a computer in the high school’s principals office. So the sensation of telling a story within a fake computer has been something I’ve been working over for a while. There’s a whole theme running through that game of video footage. And there’s the use of the formal interview (there, a psychiatrist) which I think is a great fit for a video-game. It gives it structure. I
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But how is life as an indie games developer? How is it different. How is it better, or worse in some circumstances. The usual answer that people give is creative freedom, which is an obvious but oh-veryunderstandable answer. We have all been curtailed in our creative freedom at points in our career. Pros: I don’t have to spend time justifying a concept to green-light committees. I am not constrained by a tight list of genres and story templates that I have to work within. I can be very flexible. One of the coolest things has been discovering how supportive and friendly the wider community of indie developers is. Publisher funded developers tend to be more selfcontained, more secretive because of all the legal tape that they’re tied up in.
Cons: I don’t have an office full of people to chat to, or to delegate work to. Of course, there’s uncertainty that comes with self-funding. Being just about to drop off to sleep and my wife turns over and says ‘Are you sure people are actually going to what to buy you game?’
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“The thing that’s exciting about game writing is that you are directly engaged with that process. You can really get hands on with the interaction, rather than being one step removed as you are with movies or books...”
think all the games are trying to do similar things, but they’re perhaps trying to do it in different ways. So it’s not a clear progression, it’s more scattershot than that I guess! With Shattered Memories we weren’t trying to build on top of the existing survival horror template.
is to be truthful. If you’re repeating other people’s ideas, if you’re borrowing conventions without making them your own, sometimes that honesty is lost. So I think it’s vital to always start with the possibility of making something new if that’s where your heart is leading you.”
reading one of Andre Dubus’s short stories, I love the authenticity of his character’s voices; Shirley Jackson... her stuff just kills me; Jim Thompson, who writes the hardest, blackest of all the noir; one of my favourite books is Damage by Josephine Hart, such an amazing little book...
We said to ourselves: “If no other horror games existed, what might you come up with?” And here it was similar: “If no detective games existed, how might you make one?”
And with this, the equation of game developing, designing and writing really is about story telling. About putting in the middle of the narrative.
I love good writers, but I really love good writers who can write short books”
So the experience of working on major games has proven invaluable, but would he be tempted to take the helping aid of the major publishers for Her Story? Well, no. Early on a few contacted him and he simply told them that “When I said I was making a game that publishers wouldn’t want to touch, I really meant it!” He really is his own person, and has the confidence to pursue his own dreams and creations. He isn’t afraid to push boundaries and experiment. “I think the only thing that is important
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As Sam says, “all writing is strongly interactive. The great writers understand that they’re putting ideas in people’s heads and helping them create the true story in their minds... the thing that’s exciting about game writing is that you are directly engaged with that process. You can really get hands on with the interaction, rather than being one step removed as you are with movies or books. And for the writers, non-games writers that is, that inspire him? “Too many to list! A few off the top of my head... every month I treat myself to
This is a man who is focused on bridging the gaps that can occasionally appear between the games world, and the story telling. They should inhabit the same space, but the story telling can sometimes be lazy and unfocused, instead relying on clichés and well tread paths. For Sam, though, the immediate focus is on getting Her Story finished and then helping it find its audience. He is hopeful that “I can show that there is an audience for this kind of game... a broad (and plentiful!) Audience. From there, I’d love to raise the stakes and follow up with something as ambitious, but on a bigger scale. I have ideas...” «
Prepare to be Slain! A homage to the gory hack and slash games of the ‘80s and ‘90s.
www.wolfbrewgames.com/slain
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FEATURE: Matthew Bett
“You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” Matthew Bett spoke to our very own Harry Cole about life as an indie film maker, games in scotland, and working on Planet of the Apes.
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FEATURE: Matthew Bett
W
e all know that the film and games worlds are being pushed together much more than they ever were. This isn’t in terms of film tie-ins, such as the Super Mario Brothers and Street Fighter movies (shudder). But more in the way that games are borrowing more of the narrative and story telling skills from traditional filmmakers, and films are borrowing more of the techniques that game developers use to bring their ideas to life. For this, I don’t just mean animation blockbusters from the likes of Pixar. I am talking about more tradition live action films, that need that little bit of games magic to really help filmmakers realise their visions. One such film that has taken advantage of technology that was initially designed as a games tool, is Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Matthew Bett is a Lecturer in Games Engineering at the University of Abertay Dundee. A part of this involves research into virtual reality, virtual production and cross discipline applications of games technology and techniques. Also, coming off of this, is his research into applications of procedural generation techniques across film and game pipelines. So when Fox were looking for someone to coolaborate with their pre-visuation team on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, they turned to Matthew and the University of Abertay. “We collaborated with Fox for just over a year on the development of a tool for their pre-visualisation team,” Matthew says. “Several projects actually came and went, but by the time things were at a working level Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was coming up for pre-visualisation so it worked out well that this project became the first where the pipeline included our technology.” What they were working on was developing software and techniques to enable an off-the-shelf game motion controller, in this case the Razer Hydra, to control virtual camera setups within Fox’s pipeline. Essentially it was a plugin for Maya, where 24 SPRING 2015 ISSUE FIVE IND13.COM
“we took our technology and ideas and applied these over a long period of time, with a lot of feedback, into something that a director or camera operator could manipulate in a useful way to create camera work and scout virtual sets.” What really was the point of this though, how did it help and aid the techniques and technology that the Hollywood companies already have in place. After all, the film making business has been around a very long time. What is now possible with this. Well, one of the most powerful uses they found was for virtual scouting of sets and blocking out of initial camera shots. “Since the game controllers capture motion data in all 6 axes”, Matthew says, “you are free to move them in any way you want just like the far more expensive virtual camera setups you see being used in mo-cap studios.” “Where we had to be a little clever is in the scene navigation. In a fully featured mo-cap setup you can walk around a larger area, moving the virtual camera. With the game controllers there is a smaller area so we were able to apply some more game-like sensibilities, with the ability to navigate around the scene while respecting the limits of the smaller capture volume. But it’s possible to go everywhere and look from any angle. The film and games industries are very different beasts though. Although they are both ‘entertainment’ industries as such, their methods of working are surely very different. Hollywood is the grand old man compared to the young upstart that is the games industry. Matthew, though, didn’t find it too disimilar. He was “fortunate enough to visit the studio a number of times and see the setup, meeting the people you are working with was really valuable. Even communicating by phone and email wasn’t a problem. In all honesty I found it a very similar industry to the games industry in terms of the type of creative and technical people that are involved at this level. The intriguing thing is how all this came to being in the first place. A lecturer in a Dundee University is called in to work on
“These techniques are not out of reach anymore. Now it’s possible to actually do a lot of these things, such as the virtual scouting, right at your desk without leaving the room...”
a major Hollywood blockbuster! That isn’t meant as disrectful to the University of Abertay, but they are slightly strange bedfellows. Well, it seems, it was with the help of that other upstart to the film industry, YouTube. As Matthew explains, way back in 2010 they “put up a short YouTube video showcasing the basic proof of concept of this idea. We had no idea the interest it would get at the time and actually we had a few studios contact us out of the blue! Fox were one of those studios. Previsualisation at Fox were actually seeking a solution of this type at the time and, “they found our video and contacted us through that. In the end it was with Fox that our needs aligned and we were able to work out the collaboration so that the whole thing could happen.” Back to the games, however, and it seems that Scoland is a hotbed of ideas and games development at the moment. It has the Scottish Games Network which is the country’s official trade body for games development, and, of course, Grand Theft Auto V was developed mostly at Rockstar’s studio in Edinburgh. Matthew is seeing that too, and especially in Dundee. “We have great companies working on some of the biggest franchises as well as start-ups popping up with new and innovative ideas. It’s actually pretty crazy to consider this microcosm that we seem to have in Scotland and Dundee in particular, but I think it’s only going to go from strength to strength. And seeing the talent we have coming through the games-related courses at the university I have great confidence in the future of the industry in the area.”
any kind of virtual camerawork was an expense where a motion capture studio had to be rented or even equipment bought. Now it’s possible to actually do a lot of these things, such as the virtual scouting, right at your desk without leaving the room. Ultimately it would be possible to create all the camerawork for a CG animated movie in this fashion.” It’s a big money saving tool for filmakers because, “pre-visualisation is all about speed and flexibility so anything in your pipeline that promotes that has got to be a cost saver. If it’s enabling you to free yourself from a little time at the mo-cap facility then there could be a big potential saving there. Matthew goes on to say that “for indie CGI films it definitely helps. Aside from the virtual camera capabilities for scouting and other virtual camera techniques, the rise of affordable and high quality game engine technology has really given the filmmaker another powerful tool.” It doesn’t stop here though, it is all about moving things on. Technology moves at an incredibly fast pace now, and it is all about pushing it further to see where it goes. “The first priority is to try and complete a virtual camera solution for the Unreal engine and see where that takes us. We will be looking at some potential applications for VR within this type of system as well but there is a bit of work to be done on that front before it’s usable.” Matthew said. “Right now this project is fully engaged in the process of integrating the technology, all we learned with Fox collaboration, and everything we would have done with Fox given the time, into the Unreal 4 engine.
Unreal is a fantastic example of a modern game engine producing stunning visuals in real-time.” “Ultimately using the virtual camera this way is going to enable far more impressive visuals and feedback to how things look when you are moving the camera or setting up a shot.” “Given what we have learned there is a lot of interest in the industry in this kind of high-quality real-time solution for pre-visualisation and other areas of the pipeline so this addresses that directly.” It may seem incredibly geeky, but for some solving technological problems and pushig bounderies is what it is all about. “It’s about solving these interesting problems that only crop up in this kind of cross-disciplinary application. How can you adapt something created for games for a serious use as a tool? It’s very challenging, but ultimately rewarding, to look at games and think how these things can be applied elsewhere.” And for the future of games? “Game tech is incredibly important because, as the film industry is learning, if you want some nice looking graphics in real-time you have to look at games technology! Because of the emphasis on games being graphically impressive and really optimised for speed it’s going to be the go-to sector for this type of knowledge. So as more devices that we use lean towards this type of capability, more and more knowledge and expertise from the games industry will be applied.” «
The games future is certainly bright north of England, and it is looking to carry on helping filmakers too, in an affordable way that isn’t out of reach to the more indie filmakers. “The big deal here is that these techniques are not out of reach anymore. Previously
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FEATURE: Big Pharma
Ease suffering, cure the sick… and earn a tidy profit... Big Pharma is a game all about running your own pharmaceutical empire from developer Twice Circled and publisher Positech Games. Harry Cole talked to Tim Wicksteed, the designer, programmer and general head honcho of the one-man game studio.
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FEATURE: Big Pharma
A
s the head of your own Pharmaceutical Conglomerate you have this power resting in your hands. Will you use it for good? Being totally altruistic may not be the best business plan. The uncomfortable truth (is there an ointment for that?) is that some remedies are more profitable than others and illness is good for business.
logistics puzzle. It’s one thing to work away in the lab perfecting new formulas, but converting the ‘sciency stuff’ into cold hard cash means bringing an engineering and business mind to the problem. Factory space is expensive, and those fancy new agglomerators and centrifuges don’t always slot nicely together.
This is Big Pharma, where you can make a fortune and still maintain a healthy conscience. Or can you?
Could you introduce yourself, tell us about the team and your studio?
From humble beginnings with a few rusty reconditioned machines, you can progress from knocking out cheap generic treatments for minor ailments, to discovering new active ingredients and hi-tech machines to help refine the next generation of world-changing drugs.
Twice Circled is a one-man game studio run by me, Tim Wicksteed. It’s your classic indie setup, I’m the designer, programmer and general head honcho, but I work with a number of talented individuals on a freelance basis to create the wonderful artwork, music and sound effects that you can see exhibited in Big Pharma.
But watch out, you’re not alone out there. Rival corporations that want to put you out of business have their own set of competing cures and treatments. Then there’s the dynamically shifting marketplace which means that your fancy cold and flu medicine from last winter might not sell so well now it’s the height of summer. Where did I put my anti-wrinkle sun cream? Big Pharma is part business sim, part 28 SPRING 2015 ISSUE FIVE IND13.COM
It’s tough running an entire business on your own but there’s something magical about this particular setup which seems to allow people to create weird and wonderful things. I think it probably comes from the fact that when a single person has full creative control they have the freedom to follow their instincts to the extreme and not compromise on their vision. Of course, you can end up creating a lot of dross this way too!
What got you into making games? What is your game making experience? Believe it or not, I’ve been making games since I was around 8. I used to make pen and paper boardgames with my older brother but then slowly got into digital creation using tools such as The Games Factory and Multimedia Fusion. I took a bizarre hiatus from game making while I trained to become a Mechanical Engineer and got a “proper job”. I worked as an engineer for a couple of years but then in 2012 this whole indie resurgence seemed to be happening and I thought “That’s what I should be doing”. I quit, set up Twice Circled and here I am. I’m much happier now.
Simulation games, what’s the big idea? Where has this phenomenon come from? It’s a form of escapism. We like the idea of life but life has all these weird surprises and ragged edges. Simulation games create this new version of real life which is funnier and makes more sense than the real thing. For example, the complex challenges of running a business in reallife can be boiled down to a number of logical mechanics which you can study
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FEATURE: Big Pharma
and master. That’s a really nice feeling. One that’s much more difficult to find in real life.
Do you think one day, we’ll have farmers playing farm simulators? Rather than going to work? Perhaps in some form, yes. We’ve all got to eat and farmers have to make money, so do I think farmers will stop doing real farming because the simulators are more fun? No. However I think we might see real life become more and more gamified to incentivise people to work harder. I can imagine farmers sitting in cottagebased terminals sending automated crop harvesters around their acreage, tweaking parameters to increase their yields.
What is the appeal, the escapism? The fascination with tasks that are part of other peoples jobs? The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, isn’t it? However, I don’t think it’s about doing other people’s jobs really. I think it’s about doing idealised versions of jobs, with all the best bits intact but the bad bits removed. Let me explain. People complain about work a lot but actually work can be incredibly rewarding. The blast of serotonin you get from working hard and achieving something is so much more powerful than just sitting around and watching TV. The problem with real-life work is that it so rarely hits the right difficulty curve though. It’s very common
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when starting a new job to feel out of your depth, then after six months the challenge has faded and you feel underutilised. Games recreate the same style of challenges as real-life work but they’re designed so that the difficulty curve perfectly matches your capabilities at all times so you feel competent but challenged. The good ones do, anyway.
In your own words, how would you describe Big Pharma? Big Pharma is a business simulation mixed with a logistics puzzle. You’ll find your number crunching brain cells just as challenged as your spatial awareness ones. It’s a game about spotting patterns and making moves based on gut instinct. Big Pharma is a game that makes you feel in control.
Why Pharmaceuticals? Was it the cash involved in developing drugs? Are you part of a government run programme to get us all making super-drugs for the ‘man’? Pharmaceuticals are both familiar and exotic. We’ve all taken them but how many of us know how they are produced? The vast numbers add to the excitement though. Our society has a tendency to complain about big business but people are obsessed with the idea of making it big. Films like The Wolf of Wall Street add to the excitement and allure of it. Am I a corporate stooge for the government and pharma companies? Not yet, but I’m expecting a Half-Life style g-man at my
door any day.
What interesting things have you seen from people playing Big Pharma? Is anyone the next pharmaceuticals tycoon, have people done things with the game you didn’t expect? The skill range varies dramatically but most people seem to be having fun. There seems to be two ways of playing the game. First, is the super optimum approach where you don’t waste a second and you crunch all the numbers to work out the best drug to make at any one time. The other is a more exploratory approach where you make things because you like the sound of the cure or because you think you could make a funny joke by naming it something rude. The nice thing is the exploratory approach is a valid one, you won’t make as much money or progress as quickly but because of the range of drugs available there’ll always be something to do and have fun with. At the recent EGX Rezzed show, one couple managed to make a drug which was full of “Can Cause Anal Leakage” effects. The funny thing is, it’s actually quite difficult to do, so they were a strange mix of extremely competent but doing stuff just for the fun of it.
Have you enjoyed inventing diseases and cures, rare ingredients? All of the diseases and cures are pretty rooted in real life. It was an early bit
of feedback I got from the community - they didn’t want it to be too silly or science fiction. The ingredient names are randomly generated at runtime so you get some pretty funny names coming out: “Genuine Trayfly Shavings” is one of my favourites.
Where has your insight into the medicine industry come from? I’ve talked to doctor friends and reading Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma was very illuminating. I’ve done a fair bit of general web research on diseases so I can model them in-game realistically.
How much did you research into the medical industry to make the game believable? It varies from system to system. The general idea of using industrial processes to bring out the positive effects of your active ingredients while reducing and negative ones is very much rooted in reality. While most of the machines exist in some form they don’t actually have the same effects as they would in real life. Outside of the factory I’ve tried to keep things relatively true to life in terms of the economic models used for the cures. Painkillers are a mass market product with low margins but it’s possible to sell huge volumes. Something that treats Sickle Cell Anaemia would be very valuable to the patient who needs it but this is a disease that only affects 0.4% of the UK population so if there are two competing products, it might be easy to fall into a price war for market share.
Capitalism and economics are a huge factor of the game. What’s the research, investment and equipment side of the game? One thing I was very keen to get into the game was the high risk nature of the industry. It’s very expensive and timeconsuming to find new ingredients and unlock new machines but you need these to access new cures. Likewise, due to the capital investment required to create production lines, it’s normally several months before you start to see a return on your investment. However, just like the real industry, if you can get a monopoly on a drug in high demand you can reap incredible financial rewards.
“We like the idea of life but life has all these weird surprises and ragged edges. Simulation games create this new version of real life which is funnier and makes more sense than the real thing...” How have you managed to inject humour into the game, such as anti-wind tablets? It is very clever. I don’t consider myself the best writer in the world. My tactic has been to include systems which allow the player to create their own humour, like allowing them to name their own products. At the recent Rezzed show I was surprised to hear people laughing simply because a drug they were
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FEATURE: Big Pharma
producing was “Inducing Nightmares”. I think there is going to be an even split between people being amused and horrified by the content of this game.
It of course raises big questions about creating medical cures for profit? What is your view on this wider issue? I think there are certain aspects of the pharmaceutical industry which incentivise companies to make decisions which may not be in the best interests of the public. But I don’t blame the people who work for these companies. I think we would all make the same decisions if we were in the same position. Traditionally governments use fiscal policy (taxes) as well as laws to control people’s and companies’ actions. I think some clever policies targeting the pharmaceutical industry could help. Perhaps a special grant system to encourage companies to research in less profitable areas paid for by an additional levy on pharma company profits. There’d be the same money available in the system but perhaps we’d have a few more wonder drugs and a few less antiwrinkle creams.
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“Big Pharma is a business simulation mixed with a logistics puzzle. You’ll find your number crunching brain cells just as challenged as your spatial awareness ones...” The problem with all this is in our globalised society, it’s increasingly difficult for governments to exert their power. If our government starts giving the pharma companies a hard time they’ll just stop operating in our country. There needs to be a unilateral effort across all governments to really enact change.
Do you think Big Pharma will one day cure all the illnesses and diseases in the world? I don’t have the statistics to hand but there’s been a slow down in the number of new wonder drugs hitting the market over the last couple of decades. I think we’ll continue to see developments on the genetic side of things including removing genetic disorders from the DNA of fertilised eggs. «
AWARDS 2015
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PC GAME OF THE YEAR
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”Verdun is a squad-based multiplayer FPS in a realistic WW1 setting. The merciless trench warfare offers a unique battlefield for tactical squad play in the realistic Frontlines game mode, and raw gameplay in the rifle-deathmatch.”
Available Now www.VerdunGame.com IND13.COM SPRING 2015 ISSUE FIVE 33
FEATURE: Gang Nations
“Don’t you know I’m loco...”
It’s your hood. Build it. Defend It. Own it. Lee Smith talks to Paul Gouge, the CEO of Playdemic Ltd, the makers of the new and highly addictive game Gang Nations.
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Y
ou may think that you have seen and played a game such as Gang Nations before. What with Clash of Clones and the hordes of other games of a similar ilk. But no, if you do think that then you are very seriously mistaken. Gang Nations has a very unique feel to it, and not just in terms of the amazing artwork, but also its approach to the game play. Yes, it does have similar elements to other games, such as resource gathering, base building, and item upgrading, but Gang Nations is a sprawling urban entity, which just provides you with all the game play you are going to need. Gang Nations creates its own identity, by giving you some excellent tower defence attributes. Plus, you can strategically blockade streets to shepherd attacking rival gangs past your sniper towers, and ;take them out; before they can steal your juice, pilfer your cash, or wreck up your crib. But at first sight, it is the artwork that really catches your eye. It’s amazingly detailed, and brilliantly cartoony. Paul Gouge, CEO of Playdemic Ltd, explains this by saying that they “tried
really hard to offer something to the players of this type of game that they hadn’t seen before. Our whole mission is to add something to the genre and move it forward, the graphics and context is a big part of this. There are so many obvious clichés out there we wanted to have something fresh and edgy whilst keeping it mainstream. The guiding principle for the creative teams was ‘What if Pixar made GTA’!” Onto the elements that are similar to other games, adn I have already mentioned Clash of Clones, but there is also elements of Command and Conquer, but it does feel really like a unique and new game. “When we started this game in some respects it went against our ethos,” Paul says, “We like to innovate and we recognised that going into a highly crowded genre so full of clones was a big risk. After careful consideration though we started to see the opportunity and found ourselves saying that this is a game type that millions of people love to play on mobile, that we love to play on mobile, its our job to try to evolve this to offer something new to the Player. We set a clear objective that unless players of
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FEATURE: Gang Nations
Gang Nations could instantly see the big differences in the game play and context from the mass of CoC copies then we would have failed. I believe we have succeeded here and the game we have launched is unique in the genre in many ways E.g. the city building style road systems that allow a much more Tower Defence style of play, the ability to use troops in real time in battle rather than having to ‘farm’ them and be left with a single attack strategy, the advanced social features such as friending and following, custom chatrooms etc, the ability to fight your friends and many many more.” One of the things I noticed, was that Gang Nations almost has an element of Sim City behind it in the way that you can shape the roads etc and this is something that is going to be explored more in the game, Paul says, as it is “a big part of the game and something really different. There is lots more we are going to do with it as the game grows. I liken it to building your base as a Kingdom Rush level.” Of course, Gang Nation isn’t the only ‘gang’ related game on the market. There have been numerous others, including some game called Grand Theft Auto, or something. Now, you may be tempted to think that
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this game is an attempt to jump on that band wagon, but it most certainly isn’t. From the artwork and gameplay, as soon as you start playing you forget all about GTA. Although, Paul is a fan of GTA, they haven’t just tried to clone that success. “We are big fans of GTA and yes there are elements of inspiration in Gang Nations. However they are very different games. Gang Nations is certainly less violent with a more tongue in cheek approach. In terms of expanding the game and universe we have some very cool features in development that will build out the Gang Versus Gang element of the game in a way that hasn’t been done before. We will also be adding more narrative into the universe which will deepen the experience.” However, it is still very much an iOS game at the moment, but there are plans to release it on Android, although not immediately. Paul explains this by saying that they “haven’t decided the date for an Android launch just yet as we are busy optimising and expanding the features on iOS. Apple have also shown us some incredible support and we don’t think its true to our relationship to immediately launch an Android version.” They also, though, decided not to ruin the game with constant advertising which,
as a gamer, can be the major difference between me loving a game and playing it over and over, or just trying it a few times and then just leaving it alone. I am not against advertising as such as, hey, we all need to earn some money right? However, in some games the advertising is so intrusive the game becomes almost unplayable. Which defeats the purpsoe some what really. Paul seems to agree with this, and as he said, they “aren’t anti Ads and do have them in some of our other games and they can be a very good source of premium currency for those players who need more and don’t want to spend. We do very firmly believe, however, that when you do integrate a Ads solution it is done in a way that is coherent in the game universe and is always player initiated.” Gang does allow Facebook login as well as Game Centre support but Paul doesn’t “see a large adoption of Facebook in the game. Our strategic view here is
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FEATURE: Gang Nations
“This is a game type that millions of people love to play on mobile, that we love to play on mobile, so its our job to try to evolve this to offer something new to the Player...”
that it doesn’t make sense to assume your FB Social Graph will always contain the people you want to play games with. We believe that people have ‘game friends’ that they make in a particular games. These friendships are made because those players share a similar love and commitment to that experience and are happy to collaborate and compete. These can be very deep relationships and will sometimes become friends in other parts of people’s lives but in the main they are there because of this particular shared interest not because they went to School with you etc. To reflect this we have built a social network within the game allowing the players to friend and follow other players, create custom chat rooms, 1-1 chats and many other features to empower the want to work together.” It takes a long time to get a game like Gang Nations off the ground and into the app stores, though. “Gang Nations took around 1 year to make” Paul says, “and was then in Beta for a further 4 months before we officially
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launched it to all territories. In terms of financing we are lucky to have a profitable business that can support our new game developments but having run several games independent game studios I am acutely aware that financing original I.P. games is a very difficult challenge.” It has certainly been worth it though. “The response from Players and Press has been incredible we have a rating on the App Store of 4.5/5 from 15.5k ratings with the rating being 5/5 in many countries. The most important thing for us is that players are loving playing the game and are also recognising it as different which is fantastic. We get a lot of feedback from players and we have a number of features in the game to encourage this, such as our Social Hub. We are making the game for our players so their feedback is absolutely critical in allowing us make the right decisions on the future direction of the game.” « Gang Nations is available to download from the App Store.
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Save the sheep from a horde of wolves by building a fence around them, in this increasingly difficult new puzzler from McPeppergames www.mcpeppergames.com
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FEATURE: Congo
Stuck deep in the Congo jungle... and hunted by packs of demons IND13 talks to Jack Bromhead about Congo, a game that has you stuck in the Congo being hunted by demons, in this scary this top-down co-op horror game...
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FEATURE: Congo
W
e all love those co-op games. The ones where you work with your friends to solve dastardly puzzles to move from one level to the next. With Congo, though, things move on up a few notches on the scare-o-meter. At first sight it’s a fairly simple premise for a game. Which is no bad thing, by the way. A lot of the best games have a simple idea at the heart of it. For Congo the players, up-to a maximum of four, are lost and alone (amongst themselves of course), and must somehow use their wits and scavenging skills to stay alive. This is no ‘I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!’ though Ant and Dec will not be there to narrate and offer up (so-called) witty repost as you mix with someone who was once a failed contestant on [insert talent show of your choice here]. No, instead of daft but harmless challenges, this jungle offers you all manner of dark and vicious creatures whose only aim is to hunt and feast on you in the darkness. Although you are armed with the usual assortment of weapons, what the developers, The Innocent Devils have done is make sure that it is teamwork and co-
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ordination that is really needed to survive. The reason for this is that every player has a limitation, in that they only have what they can carry in their two hands. So if you are carrying something heavy, you are going to need one of your comrades on hand to protect you from the ferocious, and quick, beasts. So we caught up with John Bromhead from The Innocent Devils to find out more about how Congo came into being.
What has been your personal journey into making games? I have always been into games, but I first started getting into the world of Game Development when I was about 14 and I was trying to make mods. The first mod I worked on was actually Killing Floor and was originally developed for the Battlefield engine. I didn’t have the skills necessary to pull off such a project... but luckily I had found some people to work on it who did, and now it’s amazing to see it as the Killing Floor it is today! During university I picked up some of the skills I really needed to get stuck into game design and got involved with a number of different projects that didn’t really come to anything until I met up with Jason and
Tom at the others at The Innocent Devils and we decided to work together and start developing games together!
How did Congo get created? Where did the idea come from? Congo was born from an idea that had been floating around in my head for quite some time. I always wanted to make a coop game that used light and dark as a core mechanic. There were a number of things that fell into place that meant we could start developing Congo. The first was the release of Unreal Engine 4 which (as we all know) is a tool primarily designed to make people more bad-ass. Which is never a bad thing. We had also just released our other iOS project - The Lawless and were open to a new project. I was also just working on a portfolio piece at the time, which was simply just a Congolese militia man.. And thought, actually, this could be pretty good! So we started from there basically.
Co-op action horror, you had me at co-op. How cool is this game? Ha! :) It’s pretty cool! I’m definitely a co-op lover and I find it hard to get really stuck into a game if I can’t laugh at my
disrupts.tv
the video station for the startup scene. beta now live
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FEATURE: Congo
friend getting eaten or blown up. I feel there’s more reward if you have somebody to share it with! Almost all of the game mechanics are based around multiple players. Which is a bit of a bummer if you don’t have any mates... But of course there’s always the option of joining somebody else’s game!
How long have you been working on it for? We started developing Congo at the beginning of June 2014, and we got Green-lit on Steam by August. Great times for everybody involved! The three of us all work day jobs, so it’s been developed at weekends, evenings and any spare time!
What’s been the game’s journey to market? We put our game out on Steam Greenlight in July and got green-lit by August which is great. We then managed to release in November and, to be honest, the journey has been shockingly quick. We also got to attend EGX 2014 on the Epic booth thanks to the awesomeness of Epic and their support to small indies like us. It’s our first time on Steam and it’s been fantastic so far. We just need to get more people playing :)
Tell us about the game play, tell us about lights, tell us about monsters? The game-play is coop-central! It’s all about the multi-player experience for us
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and we have channelled this into virtually every aspect of Congo. Essentially, you and your team are stuck in the dark, demoninfested jungles of the Congo. The demons that inhabit this rugged environment are vicious and aggressive but their main weakness is their fear of light. It’s an ace card that you, as a human, have against them. You must use torches, flares and floodlights wisely in order to fend off the attacks! So there are also two game modes to choose from Objective and Defence. Defence mode is a simple, horde-style game mode where you and your team mates must defend an objective whilst also scavenging for supplies out in the jungle. It’s a really fun, classic experience for everybody! The other mode is Objective mode where you must complete a number of objectives to get rescued. This mode is much more of a test of endurance and planning than Defence.
Tell us about the weapons available? Currently each weapon available to you is quite different and must be played in different ways. You always start off with the trusty machete. It’s a strong, brutal, one-hit kill weapon that is probably one of the most valuable tools in the game but it’s weaknesses show when the demons start swarming or they have grouped around you. You can find yourself easily overrun! You then have a couple of pistols out there
in the jungle. A semi-automatic pistol with a reasonable ammo capacity but doesn’t deal much damage or a harder hitting revolver that is more powerful, but slower to fire and only rocks 6 bullets.. Difficult decision, definitely a personal taste choice! You may also stumble across a Mac-10 which shares its ammunition with the pistol family. This is a fast firing and very useful weapon in the jungle, although it burns through ammo a lot faster than you may want. The pump-action shotgun is my personal favourite and is a brutal combination of power and functionality. It is equipped with a flashlight which can scare away smaller gatherings of demons and can cause area damage to a group that are running towards you. The rifles currently in Congo are the AK-47 (which is of course a classic among every game ever made!) and is arguably the “best” gun in the game. It is powerful, fast-firing and rocks a heavy duty flashlight that is capable of fending off more demons than other flashlights available. The rifle ammunition is also shared by the hunting rifle. Which is a very powerful weapon, but is slow to fire and can only have 5 shots in a magazine. All these weapons have their own strengths and weaknesses which is why it’s important for you to manage the distribution among the players. A good example of this is arming one player with a pistol or Mac-10 which can fend off a majority of attacks with it’s
plentiful ammo while one player rocks a hunting rifle that can take out the odd one that gets through in one, well-aimed shot.
Have you been working with Unreal on the game, what has this made possible? The guys at Epic have been amazing at supporting our development with both the game AND in our own personal development as game designers. We got to go to EGX 2014 with them last year and it was an amazing experience. The Unreal Engine is an incredible tool. I will swear blind that choosing UE4 was one of the best decisions I have ever made. It was inspiring to see what we could create in such a short time. Our concept of light vs. dark is only possible with the epic-ness (ha!) of UE4. The atmosphere just sings with all the features made possible by UE4.
What’s next for your studio? We will continue working on Congo for the rest of the year and hopefully get it out on to it’s full release by 2016! After that is a little hazy right now, but there’s always some great ideas bubbling away in our minds! «
“We put our game out on Steam Greenlight in July and got green-lit by August which is great. We then managed to release in November and, to be honest, the journey has been shockingly quick...”
From a financial / business view, it has also been an easy choice. 5% royalties on any released game is a really, really fair deal for the amazing tools you get.
What platforms is the game being released on? And when is it released? Congo is out now! It’s currently on Steam Early Access here - http://store. steampowered.com/app/317530/ It’s only on PC at the moment, but we are looking to expand out our Mac and Linux versions soon.
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REGIONAL: South Africa
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‘You don’t know about Nam man! You weren’t there!’ …but now you can be, and learn more about the famous battles ‘for Hearts and Minds’, with strategy title: Vietnam ’65. IND13 caught up with the lead Developer at Every Single Soldier, Johan Nagel, to find out more about this war game with a twist and hear more from this Independent Studio making games out of Johannesburg.
H
arry spoke with Johan Nagel, Producer/Game Designer, who has a team of nine people covering the games development from the artwork to the coding. The publisher backing the game is Slitherine.
Based in Johannesburg, South Africa. The team consider themselves Indie but have “ambitions to become a full game studio.” Johan spoke about the game, making games in South Africa and the studio. We also asked if there was any controversy in creating a game about Vietnam and to hear more about this unique strategy game play. “Making this game in South Africa is very easy in fact, we have a wealth of talent in the game development space in South Africa, a thriving community, albeit it rather small by world standards.” “Our location had no influence on the game design. The Vietnam War is a passion of mine, I played every game (electronic and board) on the subject, even visited all the major battlefields personally.
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Currently very few good Vietnam War strategy games, esp. on iPad, so decided to take this counter-insurgency (COIN) model and develop the game.”
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REGIONAL: South Africa
“I have been board/table top gaming since the 70’s and enjoyed playing the war games as they transitioned into the electronic form. I have been working on this COIN model for many years and decided to develop it as with the modern distribution methods (App Store, STEAM) it has become feasible.” “Vietnam’65 is a very unique game, centred on the hearts and minds of the local population, as opposed the building up of blue forces to destroy red forces (the conventional model). COIN warfare is all about Intelligence, combat and the local population, this game covers all three of these elements in depth.” “I grew up playing the WWII model games, soon became a little bored with it as it became more like a maths lesson than an entertaining gaming experience, soon latched onto the Vietnam War, especially the air-mobile aspect of it. Follow the exploits of the 1st Air Cavalry Division in particular, my passion for the war and the lack of any title got me to develop this title.”
“Vietnam’65 is a very unique game, centred on the hearts and minds of the local population, as opposed the building up of blue forces to destroy red forces...” “The conventional wars have been modelled to death, in my opinion, it’s time to find something new. Vietnam’65 is an attempt at a start of modelling COIN wars. The appeal lies in the experience of formulating strategy to capture the HM of the local population as opposed to mere massing and then destruction of opposing forces. This is a unique and fresh approach to strategy games.” “The player is tasked with securing a province in Vietnam, consisting of 10 villages. The HM score is the average score across the villages. This HM score effects almost every component of the game as mentioned above.”
“The primary objective of this game is to win the Hearts & Minds of the local population, this is at the centre of the game, it determines how much Intel they will offer, the level of insurgency activity in the area, whether and when offensives are launched etc.
“As an example, the Vietcong infiltrate from the Ho Chi Minh trail and make their way towards these villages, upon reaching them the HM of that village drops. The player is tasked with searching for and destroying them before they get to their objective, thereby raising the HM score of the closest village.
“The level of victory is determined by the level of the H&M score at the end of 45 turns, in addition the player needs to also manage the political support, which is vital, in order to procure reinforcements and build supporting infrastructure. These two elements are at the core of the COIN model.”
This is achieved by not only patrolling the area, but gathering intelligence from the local population, who will be more inclined to give such intelligence if the HM score is high, you see the loop or pattern? This type of interdependence on the HM score is built into the fabric of the game.”
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“It is designed to simulate the Vietnam War in a sandbox, so to speak. Almost a micro simulation of the war encompassing all the iconic characteristics and features including, inter alia, Fire Support bases, training ARVN troops, air-strikes, mines, ambushes, NVA offensives, Special Forces operations, search and destroy mission, logistical supply, intelligence gathering etc.” With the Vietnam war still a controversial topic, I asked Johan how this affected Development. “I think enough time has elapsed for this conflict to be re-examined, in fact, the launch of this game (in March 2015) has been timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the ground war in Vietnam. To conclude I asked Johan about his and the studios plans for the future. “There is so much work to be done developing this COIN model, and not just for the Vietnam War, but also adapting it to other COIN wars. Definitely on top of the list of expansions is the addition of multi-player functionality, this game is ideally suited to that. So I think the future is bright for our studio and indie gaming as a whole, as making and distributing games is now more accessible/feasible than ever before, it’s now down to good content!” «
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FEATURE: Raging Justice
Raging Justice... ...a modern take on the 2D scrolling brawler that pulls the classic genre kicking and screaming into the 21st century. IND13 talks to Anna Makin, the Director of Making Games, about making the ultimate retro beat-em-up.
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aging Justice has been a labour of love for a small team of ex-Rare developers. They’re ardent fans of the classic scrolling beat-em-up brawlers of the 1980s and ‘90s, developing what seems to be a perfect homage to a golden-era of game-play. Essentially, you are in a city held to ransom by a mysterious crime lord. Two renegade cops, Nikki Rage and Rick Justice, fight to prove that no-one is above the law. Whether you dare to take on the criminal world alone, or enlist a friend in a co-op attack, Raging Justice delivers a multitude of ways to defeat your enemies. As you are smashing through a bar fight with a bar stool, mowing down enemies on a lawnmower, or battling terrifying bosses, you can choose to play as good cop or bad cop. Will you arrest the criminals, 50 SPRING 2015 ISSUE FIVE IND13.COM
or pummel them to the ground? The path you choose has consequences and leads to alternate endings. Raging Justice is a modern game born from a classic era. With online multiplayer, stylistic stop-motion effect HD graphics, and bombastic soundtrack, Raging Justice doesn’t hold back. But this type of game isn’t developed unless there is a real passion for it. The team behind it, and Making Games, the studio, was formed from a group of exRare friends who used to meeting up to watch classic Segal films once a month. They all “have a passion for the classic scrolling beat-‘em-ups too, and got talking about how much fun it would be to make one of our own. Work commenced as a hobby on a part-time basis. Even with
years of experience working on AAA titles such as; Perfect Dark Zero, Viva Pinata and Kameo: Elements of Power; it was a bigger undertaking than we first realised.” As usual, though, as with any true development project, it wasn’t done quickly. It soon grew to be a real labour of love that would take four years to get close to release! Nic and Anna Makin set up MakinGames this year to launch Raging Justice and they have been spurred on by the amazing reception the game has had so far. Their aim for the game was to “make the scrolling beat-‘em-up that we had always dreamt of playing. Taking inspiration from all the classics that we loved playing as kids, we designed characters, objects, and backgrounds that reminded us of the games we felt so nostalgic about, while
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FEATURE: Raging Justice
making the most of the technology now available. We also added elements we felt would be fun to play such as; the ability to decide whether to be a good cop or bad cop through how many you arrest, facing over thirty fightable enemies on screen at once, and mowing down enemies with ride-on vehicles. People have commented on how we have kept the nostalgia while making the characters, look, sound and feel so much better. That’s what we have spent so long trying to perfect.” There are, of course, similarities to games such as Golden Axe and Double Dragon, but does this represent a renaissance of the classic beat-em-up genre, which is sorely overlooked in quality gaming. “If we could inspire others to follow our lead and bring classic-style beat-‘em-ups back into fashion” Anna says, “we would be immensely happy. Think of all the games we could play…” She goes on to prove her pure gaming credentials by saying that they “always dreamed that when we were grown-up we would have at least one arcade cabinet (in fact we wanted a whole room dedicated to them). What better excuse than to showcase our own arcade-style game!” There’s a very unmistakable British feel to the game; Sledge Hammers, Baseball Caps, Union Jacks, Pubs? Britain is most definitely a them in Raging Justice, which sets it apart from the other, aforementioned, game. Anna explains this by saying that: “Raging Justice is set in a fictional city, but
it’s inspired by a mix of 1990s British and American culture. We love the fact we can include so many nods to Britain, such as the Union Flags, especially since all the classic games that have inspired Raging Justice had a distinct American setting.” The side scrolling beat-em-up is a favourite of retro game play, always was and, I suspect, always will be. Anna and the rest of the team are fans of this too, and this is why they chose this style? “There aren’t many out there with a true retro feel – that’s why we decided to build one. It’s a present to our inner twelve year-olds” But it does have something that is different to other games of this genre, in that it has a tractor? It is obviously just a little bit unexpected, so we just had to ask. Anna’s response was simple that: “Why has a tractor not been used in a fighting game before?? It’s so much fun! Not only do we have a tractor but you can mow down the enemies in a ride-on lawnmower too!” And their plans for distribution? “After working on the game for so long we are proud of the results and would like to share it with as many people as we can. Everyone has their favourite platform that they would love to play the game on. We aim to please so we hope to release across as many platforms as possible in March 2015. Raging Justice will be a digital download game, distributed through the major App Stores and online video-game stores.” «
The fighting sound of Raging Justice Steve Burke, the composer and audio designer for Raging Justice, was a prefectionist in his pursuit of the right sounds for Raging Justice: “All the sounds for the characters in the game were recorded specifically for Raging Justice. We brought in a bunch of people to grunt, yelp, mumble, shout and squeal. A little bit of animal sounds were blended in with some of these voices for the Boss characters, to help make them more gritty and scary. Also we hit things. Mostly inanimate objects in my studio, to get some of the crunchy impact sounds. Some people lost their voices temporarily through the pure exertion of screaming in to the microphone for the benefit of the game.”
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“Our aim for the game was to make the scrolling beat-‘em-up that we had always dreamt of playing. Taking inspiration from all the classics that we loved playing as kids, we designed characters, objects, and backgrounds that reminded us of the games we felt so nostalgic about...”
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FEATURE: Wild Factor
Freaking Meatbags... Freaking Meatbags is the new game from Wild Factor. The IND13 Printer caught up with Lautié Alexandre, the developer behind it. Firstly, please could you introduce yourself and the studio? I’m Alexandre Lautié, the programmer. I’ve been in the video game industry for the last 10 years. I’ve made games from retro pixel to next gen console games. One day I was eating alphabet soup and saw this message in my bowl: strt a gma cmpiny. “Close enough”, I said, and Wild Factor was born. Three new humans joined the team to help me make the first game as indie a reality: illustrator/pixel artist Robert Lopatto, sufficient level designer Kevin Buchet and writer John Bardinelli.
How long have you been working on this title? Do you love it like a man loves a human child?
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We have worked on it for the past 2 years. It is always hard to let it go. It was even harder because we released it in Early Access first and we needed to decide when the game was finally finished.
Where are you based? We are based in Paris (France). Kevin the Game Designer is also French, but all the other team members of Freaking Meatbags are from around the world. John our writer live in US, Robert the Artist is Canadian.
Freaking Meatbags, what a great title, where did the idea come from? Bender from Futurama is our role model. But it’s overall a classical Sci-fi expression. You can hear it in Star War from the droid HK-47 which use it all the time. We really wanted the player to be in a robot-mind right from the title.
Humans are useless bags of meat, do you share this opinion? Why do they get so hot and cold all the time, like what? Humans surely have some design flaws. Why do they need to eat fuel every 6 hours ? And they even need to go in stand by mode every days, for 7 hours at least! They really should update their Bios.
What is the aim of the game? We try to make a game that can be played in different ways. People who are more into action, will improve the fire power of their robot, while people playing strategically will try to improve their towers and their humans. It was kind of making several games at once. This was hard to do because we had to balance difficulty for both play styles all at once.
A platformer with a
unique mechanic USD $9.99 EUR €7.99 CAD $11.49 GBP £6.49
You can dive into the ground. Momentum is conserved but gravity is reversed, letting you fling yourself high into the air or deep beneath the surface. The goal is always straightforward - collect the three orbs in the level and jump into the wormhole - but spikes, endless drops and impossible heights make this more and more difficult.
“Overall winner of Ludum Dare 29.” April, 2014
PC / Mac / Linux Steam
www.daniellinssen.net
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FEATURE: Wild Factor
Please tell me some of the back story? So we’re protecting the humans right? Classic humans, so weak and squishy. You need to protect squishy creatures you find on the planet you landed on. It’s your robot corporation policy to protect wildlife. And most of all, your boss’ wife likes those squishy creatures. So don’t hurt them, ever.
What’s Chip like to hang out with? Please explain to the ignorant human readers who he is. Chips is a low end robot specialized in planet cleaning. He works at Robot Corp and spends his free time listening to Funky chiptune Music. Unfortunately, one day, he was 0.003 seconds late at work. All the safe and good jobs were already taken. So his angry Robot boss sent him to clean a solar system just before it explodes. And that’s where your adventure begins.
Machines are clearly superior, why are humans are being used to fight machines? Have you seen humans cry? It’s hilarious. Humans are simply more expendable than machines. You find them everywhere on each planet, duplicating themselves without even needing a factory.
Humans struggle to change an ink cartridge, it’s tragic. Is this the moment you realised this species needs improvements? Yes they clearly need a robotic arms for that, with an auto ink loader. They could refill hundred of printer every hours, not that we really need it.
How much fun was it to better humans with things like laser eyes? And DNA splicing? Cool. It’s pretty cool. It’s even cooler to combine those new skills. A brain slug and 4 arms are the best when you need your humans to gather some minerals.
In game, what other ways are there to improve humans? They 56 SPRING 2015 ISSUE FIVE IND13.COM
are pretty useless. You can give them some equipment like a jet pack or an hover-board. So they don’t stumble on their own feet all the time.
How are Aliens involved in the game? Aliens are cool. They live on different planets like any respectable aliens do. Some may want to hug you. Don’t do it, believe me, just don’t.
Are robots the greatest of all creations? Yes of course. But who was the first ? The robot or the humans ?
The game was recently updated for its full release, what extras have been added? We made a big update called Philae, after the comet rider bot, with a lot of new things: »» Revamped DNA system with hundreds of alien/human combinations. »» Seven new genes to get all splice-happy with. »» Equip meatbags with jet-packs, hoverboards and... ROCKET LAUNCHERS! »» Stick humans in towers to power-up the buildings. Because of science. »» Over-clocking ability lets you see the world in slow-mo. »» Brand new boss that jumps around a lot. Shhh, that’s all we can say! »» Hidden zombie planet. Go ahead, try to find it. »» Over 50 game-play, sound and interface improvements. »» New platforms: Mac & Linux.
Philae is a good friend of mine, I mean we met once, well a mate of mine said he mentioned me to her… It’s sad to see her go. What inspired you to name the updates after her? Philae made the mistake of using the Robot boss’ oil. Never take something that
doesn’t have your name on it in your office fridge. He got sent to a 10 year mission on an isolate rock, without any electrical plug nearby. Chips kind of get the same story, so that’s why we made a homage to the Robot Philae by naming the update like him.
Have you seen humans in space, like, what a waste of time. Let’s AI already and takeover Earth? It’s already started. Robot are already in every human pocket. Their dependency to us grow bigger every days.
Zombies are just humans that are more interesting, how do they feature in the update? You have to discover their secret Zombie planet. They kind of fix some problems you have with your humans. The bad side of them is that they are slow and like to bite other human to spread their disease. They just can’t stop themselves.
Please can I star in a game? I want to be famous. We wish, but we didn’t make the system to change humans name yet. We have to engineer a new DNA Machine and it’s a long work. «
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NEXT GEN: Freemium Games
Something for nothing, not in the games world... The low-down on paying for mobile – Ophelia Matthews-Smith, IND13’s next gen gamer gives some input on freemium mobile gaming.
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here are many different games in the world. A lot of them call themselves ‘free’. Why? You may ask. To lure people into spending money. One of them is a horse game called Star Stable. A bit of a catchy title, good quality graphics, exciting game stories however, it’s only free until level 4. Level 4 may seem like quite a high level. It’s going to take weeks, maybe a month or two to get to level 4. No. In fact, it takes around two to three days, one day if you’re concentrating. Just when things start to get a little more interesting… you’re a level 4, already! Maybe every once in a while a new mission will come out for non-members, but nothing too big because you can only go up to level 4. Normally, the scammers base the games on children, thinking they’ll be easier to fool and their parents will have to give in; most of the time they are correct. Children find a game they like… but it costs money so they beg their parents. They nag and nag, even putting on a sad face or a tantrum, so the parents give in. Money made. Yes, this is quite a horrible thing to do, making parents spend their money on a game which they’ll eventually have to
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pay for again… if the child doesn’t get bored of it. Normally, they would make their game so exciting so that people keep on paying. Have their prices low so that more and more people get persuaded do buy and eventually they would have spent more than £50 on one account out of what could possibly be hundreds of thousands of accounts. Not all games try to trick you, but try not to be fooled. Freemium games are normally popular and are quite fun… for a while. Some Freemium games are different and are fun at first but become boring after a while. This gives them a chance to say that the game will become fun again, if they pay for something. It can be something as little as 40p or as big as £100, however they’ll always make it look as if it is worth the money… it isn’t. Other Freemium games have little codes that give you something which you have to pay for, for free so that you can see the differences in the game. It’s still a scam. These are just a few of the many sly techniques that the Freemium games use. Most people still wonder why to not just give in. Well… there are many different reasons. It’s a bit like paying money to have access to a website which turns out not to be as exciting as it seems. Would you give your bank account details
“Normally, they base the games on children, thinking they’ll be easier to fool and their parents will have to give in; most of the time they are correct....”
to somebody who you don’t know for very little in return? Not many people would do if they were doing it in person, that’s because they don’t realise that is what they are doing. Sometimes there are discounts on and people get excited because they don’t have to spend as much money, but it’s like going into an expensive shop and buying something worthless and small, all because it’s possibly £7 instead of £14. It’s still a lot of money. Next time you come across a Freemium game and an ad appears on the screen, ignore it. There’s better games out there. Free games, and even games that cost as little as £1 which let you play the game without interruptions. They’re the games that should be played. «
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FEATURE: Cities: Skylines
Build the City of your Dreams Create the city of your dreams in a sprawling landscape dominated by cloud hugging structures and jaw dropping architectural. IND13 talks to Karoliina Korppoo, the Lead Designer on Cities: Skylines, about the new game.
I
’m Karoliina Korppoo, lead designer on Cities: Skylines. I’ve been working in the industry for seven years and at Colossal Order for some time now.
testing was a great place to start.
We have a great team of 13 experienced people who really want to give a project all they’ve got! Colossal Order was found in 2009 has previously made two titles: Cities in Motion and Cities in Motion. Simulation is our passion.
When working as an in-house tester at a studio with many production lines I got to see all the titles they worked on and became very familiar with what sort of problems and bugs usually appeared and at what point of the project. I’ve always played games and enjoy new challenges, so the then relatively unknown games industry seemed like a good choice for me.
What got you into making games?
In your own words, how would you describe your game?
I started out as a mobile game tester. I wanted to get to know the industry and
Cities: Skylines is a great big sandbox with lots of toys. Your city is a living,
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FEATURE: Cities: Skylines
breathing entity and you, the player, get to choose how to tackle problems and what sort of a city you want to have. Actions have consequences and there’s always things to do.
What is the back story to the game? What was the inspiration behind the game? From the very beginning of Colossal Order as a company we have been drawn to city builder games. For a first project a full-fledged city builder would have been too big, so we decided to focus on a smaller area to simulate at first. That’s how Cities in Motion was born. But since city builders were always the thing we aimed for, making a second Cities in Motion was a good idea, because it had a focus on evolving cities so we could try out how making the world react to player actions visually would work. In every city builder the end game has to do with traffic, so making public transportation games has prepared us for the challenge we face with Cities: Skylines.
The game looks beautiful, elegant and simple, why did
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you choose this direction of artwork? The focus for the visual style was to have a miniature feel with colours, but have a hefty dose of realism too. Finding the right balance has been hard and we have worked a lot on the visuals to find just the right mixture of the different styles.
What do you think is our fascination with building and creating? People are drawn to having their own spaces that they can control. Whether it’s your desk at work or a virtual city, you want to have control, see how your choices affect things and yearn to streamline and optimise things. It’s a very human need and one that city builders fill well. A sandbox game also gives room to be creative and playful, which I personally like very much.
The simulation genre is huge, from creating Roller Coasters to ploughing fields, where do you think this fascination to simulate real life comes from? In sometimes more mundane activities!
Games need to have things people can relate to. Making a game about an alien race doing something that no one has ever heard of in a place that is not familiar would be very difficult, because just explaining what the game is about would take forever. You would have to explain what the alien race is, how they look and live, what sort of physics affect their planet and such. Simulating things from reality is easier, because pretty much anyone can guess at what the consists of and think of something interesting in that setting. Taking an existing activity and choosing the fun parts to become a game is always interesting and it takes skill to find out how much realism should go in the game for it to be easily understandable but still fun to play.
There are other City building simulations, what makes yours different? While there are other city builders currently available, we have taken our inspiration from older games, like SimCity 2000. We feel that the concepts from old games can be polished and combined with new features to bring players new experiences that still have the best parts of
the old games but enough of new content that the game is modern.
Is there multiplayer? If not, is it planned for the future? Multiplayer for a city builder is a tricky concept. Since a sandbox game basically has no competition or clear goals, it would be very hard to make players compete. Coop playing would be an option, but it has not been very popular. In my opinion city builders work best as single player games. It’s your city, your sandbox, you wouldn’t want anyone to come and mess up your things!
How would you like to see people playing the game, what would like to see players doing? How I see it is that we have tried to make a good sandbox, with lots of sand that has the right consistency to make great sand castles and good buckets and spades so playing will be easy and fun. What ever the players do with the sand and playthings is up to them. There’s no right or wrong way to play, I’m just eager to see what features players enjoy the most and what kind of creative ways to play they will come up with.
“People are drawn to having their own spaces that they can control. Whether it’s your desk at work or a virtual city, you want to have control, see how your choices affect things and yearn to streamline and optimise things...” It looks like living in Borton sucks, can you tell us more about this plotline? Ha ha, Borton sure is quite a place! It was a map created solely for a trailer. Borton shows how if you wish, you can build a horrible city and have miserable citizens. It’s a sandbox, so you can play any way you want.
What have you learnt from your experiences creating games? My main guideline in designing games is to listen to the players. If it would happen so that I made the greatest game ever, but no one would play it for some reason, it would not be a great game or even maybe a game, since it would lack players.
I want to make games for an audience and find out what they want. My greatest skill as a designer, aside from writing excel sheets with balanced numbers, is listening to what players say and deciphering what they really mean. I personally like city builders very much, so it’s been a pleasure to work on Cities: Skylines, but I’ve still read a lot of discussions on city building games to see how other players talk about them, what their wishes are and which parts they enjoy most. For this particular project working on Cities in Motion games previously has been a great way to learn about traffic, evolving cities and to try out concepts in smaller scale. «
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EVENTS: VR LA 2015
Recently at the VR LA Spring Expo 2015... Richard, IND13’s VR evangelist, headed over on a (real) jet plane to catch up with the movers and shakers of the VR world and see what is on the virtual horizon.
I
have to admit, I felt a bit like a child in the candy store at the VR LA Spring Expo. Held in the posh JW Marriott LA Live Hotel in Downtown LA. Being a VR Evangelist defiantly helps to keep that excitement going. Cosmo and his team did a great job organising the event and the speakers.
The Hardware First lest talk about the hardware HMDs etc. The Oculus Rift DK 2 or Samsung GearVR were used almost everywhere, well except at the Sony and FOVE stand. The FOVE HMD always amazes me and shows that I was right from the beginning, that eye tracking is so useful in VR. Well or maybe I am just a few of those weirdos who use their eyeballs to check out the ladies. This skill came (finally) very handy in the game they demonstrated. Shooting flying robot drones with your laser eye, errr beam feels like you are one of those cool Marvel Super Heroes. It was great fun and a realization of a new paradigm shift, like in the early days with VR. Now you can move your head (paradigm shift 1) AND your eyes in different directions (paradigm shift 2). It felt a bit like magical to shoot without a trigger and I want that in my own Gear VR asap! FOVE plans to Crowdfunding soon. Get yourself on the waiting list now and also
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check out the eye play the piano showcase. Sony Project Morpheus showed of their 2 new prototypes and two games. They had by fare the longest queue, right after CryTek and their “Back to Dinosaur Island” demo. Google gave their Cardboards out for free at a stand. We heard that over 500K where given away in the last 6 months and they hit the 1 million mark just recently. Razor demonstrated their Open Source VR HMD, called OSVR in short. The OSVR Hacker Dev Kit will be available for 199.99 USD and Shipping in June 2015. OSVR is fully open source for Hardware & Software, which is good news for people who like to tinker with those kind of things. The claim that they got some industry leaders and big names such as Unity, Unreal, Bosch, Razer, Sixense, and Leapmotion involved. It is interesting to see that there seems to be some kind of polarization to emerge. We will see if there will be more exclusivity in that space as we will have happen with People who are missing the real walking part in VR will probably like Stompz. Clip two small wireless devices to your shoes and keep on walking … on the spot obviously. Otherwise you would not get far with an Oculus Rift on hour head. If you are more into vibrating haptic
“The FOVE HMD always amazes me and shows that I was right from the beginning, that eye tracking is so useful in VR...”
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EVENTS: VR LA 2015
gaming vest, then Kor-FX might be the solution for you.
Ryam Holmes all the best with this project, as it sounds quite cool.
All devices should work with it as it just uses the audio output to convert it into vibrations to the vest.
On the other hand the “Houston, we have a problem” demo aka ADR1FT by Three One Zero and 505 Games, is an immersive First Person Experience (FPX) that tells the story of an astronaut in peril. Well we know that eventually we would end up with a Gravity type of experience eventually.
I was a bit surprised not to see Microsoft HoloLens or SteamVR at the event though. Seems that what are not ready yet for the Expo. Hopefully we see them coming out out the woodworks next time.
Lets talk Games and Stuff The Expo had some exciting games and demos to show. I small summary about the highlights. I have to say the Dino demo was quite impressive and made me sweat a bit after the T-Rex is getting closer to my hiding point. With featuring the Crytek Engine I was really amazed how detailed the graphics was. It felt like being directly warped into a Jurassic Park movie! It is definitely a demo with potential. We had the chance to interview Lead Programmer at Crytek, Dario Sancho about this project. SpaceVR (spacevr.co) is an ambitious project to get us all to the ISSS soon. Well for now just in VR terms and with an array of GoPro cameras attached to the Space Station. First this will be a recorded 360-degree film experience, but there are potential plans to live stream it in the future (hopefully). With a little bit of luck we don’t hear the famous line “Houston, we have a problem”. We wish the founder
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Like myself, I did a quick mobile experience on the Train Jam last year in 2014. I guess no one of the people who tried my game got my joke. Playing “Take My Breath away” by Berlin, when floating in space like George Clooney. Well, I guess you can’t have it all… But ADR1FT looks really cool and gives quite a close feeling how it must b, floating in space alone. Reload Studios, a group comprising ex Infinity Ward and Disney veterans demo their multi-player VR shooter World War Toons. It is a humorous toon first person shooter and tank combat game set in WW2. I struggled a bit with the controls, but the game itself was good fun for my first multi-player VR game. Speaking about social games, Cymatic Bruce and the guys from AltspaceVR were showing a new version. I meet those guys on an early beta for the Super Bowl Game and it was quite an experience, while I was in the UK talking and sharing the game in the same Cyberspace with people all over the world. It is kind of like Destiny, but with out the ugly enemies and all the trigger happy shooting. You can still join the beta for free. The game Caldera Defense sounds promising. First person Tower Defense
“It is awesome to see so many talented people working on new hardware and games to move VR forward...” game for Gear VR where you are the tower! It is out now for free on the Gear VR App Store. Next VR showed a recording of a Basket Ball game in this row. They well aim for live and on-demand virtual reality experiences in true broadcast quality. This will avoid the hassle of getting physically to your sports game and stay home instead. It might be a bit of a torture if the guy next to you has a Hot Dog and you don’t. Well I guess there will be a solution for that in the future too. That is all in a nutshell. It is awesome to see so many talented people working on new hardware and games content to move this medium forward the next years to come. It seems that we have really exciting times, with a really new medium of VR and AR experience ahead of us. I am still impressed how many people are still new to this medium. It is easy to see as they have this district smile and/or jaw dropping / open mouth VR syndrome. «
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EVENTS: GDC 2015
The Independent Games Festival (IGF) Awards & Game Developers Choice Awards The Independent Games Festival, or IGF for short, is always a highlight of the GDC. This time with Hosted by Mr. Tim Schafer and his Sock Puppet plus some real Waffles, seriously! Here are all the Award winners, and nominees, from the day. Seumas McNally Grand Prize Winner: Outer Wilds (Team Outer Wilds) Finalists: 80 Days (inkle) Invisible, Inc. (Klei Entertainment) Metamorphabet (Patrick Smith of Vectorpark) Outer Wilds (Team Outer Wilds) The Talos Principle (Croteam) The War of Mine (11 bit studios)
Nuovo Award Winner: Tetrageddon Games (Nathalie Lawhead) Finalists: Become a great artist in just 10 senconds (Andi McClure and Michael Brough) Bounden (Game Oven)
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Desert Golfing (Captain Games) Elegy for a Dead World (Dejobaan Games & Popcannibal) How do you Do It? (Nina Freeman, Emmett Butler, Jonathan Kittaka, and Deckman Coss) Plug & Play (Mario von Rickenbach and Michael Frei / Etter Studio) Rooftop Cop (Stephen Lawrence Clark) Tetrageddon Games (Nathalie Lawhead)
Best Student Game Winner: Close Your (Goodbye World Games University of Southern California) Student Showcase Finalists: a•part•ment (Team a•part•ment University of Southern California) Close Your (Goodbye World Games University of Southern California) Downwell (Ojiro Fumoto - Tokyo
University of the Arts) Even the Stars (Pol Clarissou Supinfogame / Nicholas Gavan University of Bialystok) Gemini (Echostone Games - Tisch School of the Arts, New York University) Interloper (Monogon Games - HKU Utrecht School of Art and Technology) Rooftop Cop (Stephen Lawrence Clark NYU Tisch School of Art) Stellar Smooch (Alec Thomson and Jenny Jiao Hsia - NYU)
Lifetime Achievement Award The Lifetime Achievement Award recognises the career and achievements of a developer who has made an indelible impact on the craft of game development and games as a whole. Winner: Hironobu Sakaguchi
Pioneer Award The Pioneer Award (formerly known as the First Penguin Award) celebrates those individuals who developed a breakthrough technology, game concept, or gameplay design at a crucial juncture in video game history - paving the way for the myriads who followed them. Winner: David Braben
Ambassador Award The Ambassador Award honors an individual or individuals who have helped the game industry advance to a better place, either through facilitating a better game community from within, or by reaching outside the industry to be an advocate for video games and help further our art. Winner: Brenda Romero
Audience Award Winner: Elite: Dangerous (Frontier Developments)
Game of the Year The Game of the Year Award recognises the choice of game developers for the overall best game release. Winner: Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (Monolith Productions/Warner Bros.
Interactive Entertainment) Finalists: Alien: Isolation (Creative Assembly/Sega) Bayonetta 2 (Platinum Games/Nintendo) Destiny (Bungie/Activision) Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft (Blizzard) Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (Monolith Productions/Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment) Honorable Mentions: Titanfall (Respawn/Electronic Arts), Valiant Hearts: The Great War (Ubisoft Montpellier/Ubisoft), Far Cry 4 (Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft), Dragon Age: Inquisition (BioWare/Electronic Arts), Super Smash Bros. for Wii U (Sora Ltd. and BANDAI NAMCO/Nintendo)
Innovation Award The Innovation Award recognises the single game that demonstrates true innovation, advances the state of the art, and pushes the boundaries of games as an expressive medium. Winner: Monument Valley (ustwo) Finalists: Bounden (Game Oven) Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (Monolith Productions/Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment) Monument Valley (ustwo) This War of Mine (11 bit studios)
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (The Astronauts) Honorable Mentions: Crypt of the Necrodancer (Brace Yourself Games), Extrasolar (Lazy 8 Studios), Elite: Dangerous (Frontier Developments), Elegy for a Dead World (Dejobaan Games), 80 Days (inkle)
Best Audio The Best Audio Award recognises the overall excellence of audio in a game - including, but not limited to, sound effects, musical composition, sound design, orchestration, etc. Winner: Alien: Isolation (Creative Assembly/Sega) Finalists: Alien: Isolation (Creative Assembly/Sega) Destiny (Bungie/Activision) Hohokum (Honeyslug/Sony) Transistor (Supergiant Games) The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (The Astronauts) Honorable Mentions: Child of Light (Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft), Far Cry 4 (Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft), D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die (Access Games/ Microsoft), Bayonetta 2 (Platinum Games/ Nintendo), Crypt of the Necrodancer (Brace Yourself Games)
Best Debut The Best Debut Award recognises the best
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EVENTS: GDC 2015
game from any development studio which released its first publicly available title.
Dark Dreams Don’t Die (Access Games/Microsoft), Hatoful Boyfriend (Mediatonic/Devolver Digital)
Winner: Stoic Studio (The Banner Saga)
Best Technology
Finalists: The Astronauts (The Vanishing of Ethan Carter) Respawn Entertainment (Titanfall) Stoic Studio (The Banner Saga) Upper One Games (Never Alone) Yacht Club Games (Shovel Knight) Honorable Mentions: Dynamighty (CounterSpy), Hinterland Games (The Long Dark), 1337 & Senri (Leo’s Fortune), MachineGames (Wolfenstein: The New Order), Hipster Whale (Crossy Road)
Best Design The Best Game Design Award recognises the overall excellence of design in a game - including, but not limited to, gameplay mechanics, playability, play balancing, and level design. Winner: Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft (Blizzard) Finalists: Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (Nintendo EAD Tokyo and 1-Up Studio/Nintendo) Dragon Age: Inquisition (BioWare/ Electronic Arts) Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft (Blizzard) Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (Monolith Productions/Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment) Shovel Knight (Yacht Club Games) Honorable Mentions: Mario Kart 8 (Nintendo EAD Tokyo/ Nintendo), Alien: Isolation (Creative Assembly/Sega), Destiny (Bungie/ Activision), Monument Valley (ustwo), Far Cry 4 (Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft)
Best Handheld/Mobile Game Best Handheld Game Award recognises the overall best game commercially released on any handheld platform. Winner: Monument Valley (ustwo)
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The Best Technology Award recognises the overall excellence of technology in a game - including, but not limited to, graphics programming, artificial intelligence, networking, and physics. Winner: Destiny (Bungie/Activision) Finalists: 80 Days (inkle) Hearthstone (Blizzard) Monument Valley (ustwo) Super Smash Bros. 3DS (Sora Ltd. and BANDAI NAMCO/Nintendo) Threes! (Sirvo) Honorable Mentions: Bounden (Game Oven), Bravely Default (Silicon Studio and Square Enix/Nintendo and Square Enix),Desert Golfing (Captain Games), Velocity 2X (FuturLab), Fantasy Life (Level-5/Nintendo)
Best Narrative The Best Narrative Award recognises the overall excellence of storytelling in a game - including, but not limited to, scenario, plot construction, story, dialogue, and other major factors. Winner: Kentucky Route Zero: Act III (Cardboard Computer) Finalists: 80 Days (inkle) Kentucky Route Zero: Act III (Cardboard Computer) Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (Monolith Productions/Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment) This War of Mine (11 bit studios) The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (The Astronauts) Honorable Mentions: Dragon Age: Inquisition (BioWare/ Electronic Arts), Valiant Hearts: The Great War (Ubisoft Montpellier/Ubisoft), Tales From The Borderlands: Episode 1 (Gearbox Software/Telltale Games),D4:
Finalists: Destiny (Bungie/Activision) Elite: Dangerous (Frontier Developments) Far Cry 4 (Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft) Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (Monolith Productions/Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment) Wolfenstein: The New Order (MachineGames/Bethesda) Honorable Mentions: Assassin’s Creed Unity (Ubisoft Montreal/ Ubisoft), The Last of Us: Remastered (Naughty Dog/Sony), Sunset Overdrive (Insomniac Games/Microsoft), Alien: Isolation (Creative Assembly/Sega), Infamous: Second Son (Sucker Punch Productions/Sony)
Best Visual Art The Best Visual Art Award recognises the overall excellence of visual art in a game including, but not limited to, art direction, animation, modeling, character design, texture creation, and so on. Winner: Monument Valley (ustwo) Finalists: Alien: Isolation (Creative Assembly/Sega) Bayonetta 2 (Platinum Games/Nintendo) Child of Light (Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft) Hohokum (Honeyslug and Sony Santa Monica/Sony) Monument Valley (ustwo) Honorable Mentions: Never Alone (Upper One Games/E-Line Media), The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (The Astronauts), Transistor (Supergiant Games), Broken Age: Act 1 (Double Fine Productions), Destiny (Bungie/Activision)
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