In case you missed the news, Sonic the Hedgehog will be running about in a pair of red and white Puma shoes in his live-action movie, due out on Valentine’s Day next year. Unlike the games, though, he might not be wearing his iconic kicks from the get-go.

You see, if a new television spot released by Paramount Pictures Australia is anything to go by, Sonic will receive his famous pair of runners at some point during the movie. So, in other words, don’t expect to see him speeding around in them from the beginning of it.

As James Marsden’s character explains in the clip above, Sonic struggles to “control” his speed and these shoes will help him channel it. It’s sort of similar to how the blue blur unlocks and receives shoe upgrades in some of his video games.

Will you be checking this movie out at your local cinema on release? Leave a comment below.

Greetings employees of Halcyon,

We want to take this opportunity to thank the incredible team behind The Outer Worlds. It is because of their hard work and dedication to this project that we received the Best Narrative, Best Performance – Ashly Burch, Best RPG, and Game of the Year nominations at The Game Awards.

To all of those who voted for us in The Game Awards, you are all fantastic and we are so grateful for your support. The reception to The Outer Worlds has been unbelievable to see, and even just being nominated means a lot. However, the journey isn’t over yet as we are excited to announce that we will be expanding the story through DLC next year! Details will be made available at a later date.

Now we would like to allow our game directors to share a message with you all:

We just wanted to personally thank our team for doing a wonderful job and our fans for their tremendous support.

And Tim would like to say what an honor it was to work with me. – Leonard

Whatever, Leonard. Now that we’ve finished, I expect that certain photographs will be destroyed, as per our agreement. – Tim

The game industry has plenty of horror stories about crunch and poor work/life balance in general — so it’s good to hear a game dev talk about attaining success without sacrificing a studio’s collective health and well-being.

Guillaume Boucher-Vidal is CEO at Quebec-based Nine Dots, which recently released the ambitious open world RPG Outward. Games in this genre often require large teams working extra hours at some point in development. But Nine Dots was able to make Outward with 10-15 people, and according to Boucher-Vidal, zero crunch.

And by all indications, it’s a commercial success.

“The two main elements that made it possible to make a large game world might sound super obvious, but it’s pre-production and not crunching. Those are the main two important elements,” he said during a recent GDC Twitch stream.

Boucher-Vidal, who also served as creative lead on Outward, defines crunch as over 52 hours of work per week, per person, for an extended period of time over two weeks. By those standards, he said, Nine Dots has never crunched.

He said Nine Dots had a “very bottom-up approach” when making Outward, meaning that the team was able to scale and scope specific elements of the game while remaining productive and efficient, all depending on what’s working during development.

“For instance, at first we planned on doing less monsters but more regions,” he explained. “And as we advanced in development we realized that we were able to make a much higher number of enemies, but we had to slim down the number of environments. We could sort of shape the game according to our own abilities while we were developing. It was more effective, and it was also a matter of maintaining the velocity.”

In this case, environmental terrain was proving difficult to get right at a larger scale. Boucher-Vidal said the team restarted terrain for a specific region about four different times, trying to get it right. This was not an efficient way to develop, so instead of concentrating efforts on that time sink, the team scaled back environment, and scaled up enemies.

“I hear so many horror stories from other studios where they throw away maybe 70 percent of what they develop, and that’s definitely not something we want to do at Nine Dots,” he said. “We are a small team.”

Boucher-Vidal said Outward‘s completion provides something tangible to show the game industry to prove that it’s possible for small teams to make big, ambitious games without exploiting developers.

“I have something to prove. When you treat developers right, you actually achieve more and [spend] less. We’re trying to lead by example, something I feel the game industry is doing wrong,” Boucher-Vidal said bluntly.

“It’s been a subject matter that’s very active recently with the whole unionizing question, and the crunch debacles that keep sparking on social media at the moment,” he said. “This is something that I’ve been trying to be loud about over the past eight years, but I’ve been thinking like, ‘nobody’s going to listen to an old fool who’s shouting at the clouds.’ But if we make something that’s impossible to make, maybe they will listen to us.”

Boucher-Vidal admitted that development wasn’t “perfect” by any means, and there were plenty of problems the team had to overcome. But he said Outward‘s development lays the groundwork for future projects that will hopefully enjoy even more efficiency.

“Now that we know better, I feel like, with the same resources and the same time, we could actually achieve much more than what we did,” he said.

Boucher-Vidal’s thoughts on crunch don’t end there — perhaps more controversially, he thinks the concept of “finding the fun” contributes to the crunch problem. (“Find the fun” is a phrase oft-repeated by game designers, and attributed to Sid Meier of Civilization fame.)

“I think that part of the problem is that game designers are too lenient on themselves — you know that expression that I hate? ‘You got to find the fun.’ If you don’t know where the fun is, why are you a game designer?” he said.

“And that is extremely harsh for a lot of people, but if you can’t answer that question right, you’re not a good game designer and you’re actually wasting very precious development resources,” Boucher-Vidal opined. “I see the game design job as being closer to an architect or director, like you would see on movies where you actually have a plan laid out and try to execute it.”

“The closer you are to the final, the closer the final product is to the game design you had, the more it says on your ability to predict how things are going to work out,” he said.

Rather than looking for the fun during a prototyping phase, Boucher-Vidal rather asks what kind of experience does the team want to convey. Then, it’s up to players to decide whether or not that’s fun.

For Boucher-Vidal, the experience that Outward intended to convey from the start is making the game wholly-immersive, and making sure nothing in the game would break players’ suspension of disbelief. This can be seen in how spellcasting works, the game’s survival mechanics, and in the other ways that the game tries to earnestly simulate fantasy tropes.

“By understanding questions like ‘why are we making this game, why is it going to be different, what kind of experience will it be [providing]?’ we make all of our decisions according to that before even writing one single line of code. Every single line of code going forward will be directed with focus and there would be less waste. We would know where we’re going.”

“That’s one of the core aspects I feel game design is not really achieving so well — that [developers are] going to start making the game before knowing where the game is going to be. That’s extremely wasteful.”

And, to Boucher-Vidal, when time, money, or assets are put to waste, that’s demoralizing and “disrespectful” to team members during the course of development. “He won’t be as happy, and if he’s offered another job, he will leave,” he argued.

All that said, Boucher-Vidal isn’t anti-experimentation in game design, but it does have a time and a place. “Experimentation is good for when you’re in research and development but when you are in production and have a product in mind you just achieve it,” he said.

As someone who runs the company as CEO, but also served as creative lead on Outward, Boucher-Vidal simply thinks that designers should be creative, but also more business-minded. “This is something that I feel — so many game designers will hate me after [saying] this…the job of a game designer ultimately is to cut on expenses,” he said. “The more you justify your game design on paper the less random things you will have to make to make sure it sticks somewhere.”

In this 2017 GDC session, Capcom’s Kenji Kojima, Akiyuki Morimoto and Ken Usami discuss their methods to create realistic high-quality sound during the production of Resident Evil 7.

These methods not only made sound implementation more efficient; they also helped increase the quality of sound. The speakers also dug deep into how they achieved a horrific soundscape, in part by using a technique called “music-concrete” to cover a wide variety of sound texture, tones, and noises  — delivering an uncomfortable and disturbing atmosphere in the game.

The whole talk was fascinating, especially if you’re a big Resident Evil fan, and now you can watch it completely free over on the official GDC YouTube channel!

In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its accompanying YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.

Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or VRDC already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page.

Just in its name, Space Pioneer immediately conjures up an undeniable sense of awe and spectacle. There’s a feeling that you’re going to be embarking on an epic journey of discovery as you take your first steps on one of many exotic planets. Space Pioneer certainly has a whole bunch of planets to explore, but the only feeling you’re going to be getting here is one of increasing boredom thanks to the game’s repetitive nature right off the bat.

Space Pioneer is a twin-stick shooter through and through. Each level effectively takes place on a different planet and sees you taking on wave after wave of various enemies whilst accomplishing several task objectives at the same time. These mostly comprise of collecting bombs, destroying nests, escorting travellers, and defeating boss creatures. The game features twelve chapters, with each chapter containing up to eight planets, the final of which housing a formidable boss to take down. You can tackle the game on your own or with up to three additional players, with the game featuring a rudimentary class system to accommodate this.

The core gameplay is pretty decent for the most part. The twin-stick shooting feels great – every weapon is effective in its own way, and they all feature a cool-down mechanic which eliminates the need to locate additional bullets. You’ll also have grenades and healing items at your disposal, both of which feature a longer cool-down that will often leave you open to attack if you’re not careful. Unfortunately, very early on in the game, you’ll start noticing the same enemy types, the same planet designs, and the same objective cropping up over and over again, and the solid gameplay simply cannot hold its own against the overwhelming feeling of repetition.

The progression system is surprisingly quite deep, but is also anchored by coin collecting and loot boxes. As you complete objectives within the game, you’ll be rewarded with a bunch of coins, and these can then be spent levelling up various stats like armour and weapon damage, along with perks such as ‘berserk’, which increases your attack damage when your health falls below a certain percentage. Loot boxes feature quite prominently but are only tied to optional objectives and trophies, so thankfully you won’t be gambling any of your hard-earned cash for these.

There’s a lot of potential within Space Pioneer that is unfortunately largely squandered by its repetitive nature. Once you’re done with one chapter, it really feels like you’ve seen it all, despite another eleven lying ahead of you. Its core gameplay really is a lot of fun, and our hope would be that if a sequel is developed, this is backed up by an engaging story and meaningful objectives.

Hey, colorblind Apex players!
We recently changed armor to support colorblind modes. However, it sounds like for some of you this change has made things worse.
I'm hoping to fix that, but to do that I need hear a description of what you're experiencing! Help me help you!

— Chad Armstrong (@ShishkaTweets) December 19, 2019

Apex Legends News

• Apex Legends' Best Gun Is Still OP, But Respawn Plans On Fixing It
• New Apex Legends Update: Level Cap Increase, Full Patch Notes
• Apex Legends Crypto Guide: Tips For Season 3's New Character

Unity have just released a new demo project the Lost Crypt.  Over the last year a large number of new 2D features have been added to Unity and this project demonstrates how to use them all together in a simple 2D game.

Details from the Lost Crypt blog post:

Highly skilled teams have been making gorgeous 2D games with Unity for years, but we wanted to enable everyone, from individual artists to large teams, to have even more 2D tools available to create great-looking games. And many of them will be production-ready as part of Unity 2019.3, which is currently available in beta.

We created Lost Crypt using the complete suite of 2D tools. This lively scene features animation, light effects, organic terrain, shaders, and post-processing, all made natively in 2D. It shows how teams and projects of all sizes, targeting any platform, can now get more engaging and beautiful results faster.

Lost Crypt should run well on any desktop computer and we have also implemented on-screen controls with the new Input System in case you want to run it on an iOS or Android device. In our tests it ran at 30 fps on common devices like an iPhone 6S.

The Lost Crypt example is available in the Unity Asset store.

In addition to the new 2D demo, Unity are also running three Mega Bundles with savings up to 90% off.  Finally a reminder that back in October Unity announced price increases, and those go into effect on January 1st.  Check out more details of the Lost Crypt videos and sales in the video below.

GameDev News Unity

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At the end of the last millennium, the board game market was dominated by a certain Dr Reiner Knizia. Within a brief three-year period, Reiner released such classics as Through the Desert (1998), Samurai (1998), Ra (1999), Lost Cities (1999) and Battle Line (2000). All of these games were massive hits and have since been converted to digital platforms. Kicking off this purple patch was the 1997 release of Tigris & Euphrates, for many, the apex of Mr Knizier’s creativity.

T&E is an abstract civ-building game with heaps of the kind of in-your-face conflict that you rarely see in modern-day euro games. Something else that you should know about Dr Knizia is that he likes nothing more than to tinker with his designs. Indeed, these variations on a theme can exasperate even the most diehard of his fans, who yearn for a return to the good old days of original, demanding games. So, twenty years after riding a tyre down river Euphrates, Knizia has seen fit to release a sister game entitled Yellow & Yangtze (brought to digital by the fine folks at Dire Wolf Digital, of Raiders of the North Sea fame).

Both games see players competing for points, in Y&Y the four areas of influence are; farming, trading, military strength and administration. However, each player’s final score will be the sphere with the lowest total. The twist is one seen in many of Knizia’s games and it prevents players from gunning for a lopsided strategy. It also makes thematic sense; there is no point having a massive military force if you haven’t got the resources to feed your soldiers. Players can also earn gold, which is allocated to improve their lowest scoring sphere at the end.

Each player begins the game with a set of different coloured leaders; Governor, Soldier, Farmer, Trader, and Artisan, and a random hand of tiles. The board shows the two eponymous rivers and seven warring cities, each with their own black governor tile. In a move away from T&E, this time the map is divided into hexagons rather than squares. On each turn players can perform up to two actions, a quick tap will toggle between your leaders and tiles, and the first thing that you will want to do is to drag a leader into play. Leaders must be placed next to a black tile, and doing so will create your first state, defined as a leader with one or more linked tiles. Now, that leader can start you on the path to victory. Place a tile matching the leader’s colour in the same state and you will earn a point in the corresponding area of influence. Some tiles have their own special rules, the blue farming tiles are limited to placement on rivers, but you can place all of them for just one action. Place a green commercial tile and you can choose a tile from the market, rather than drawing blindly.

One key difference from T&E is that the building of monuments has been replaced with pagodas. Pagodas are easier to build, just place a triangle of three tiles of the same colour and a pagoda will magically appear. The disadvantages are that they have a lower point-scoring potential and they are not permanent. There can only ever be a maximum of two pagodas of the same colour in play at any one time. As soon as someone builds a third then they must also remove one of the two previously placed form the map. There are also more direct ways of messing with your opponent, namely revolts and wars. A revolt is triggered when two like-coloured leaders end up in the same state. The winner is decided by how many black governor tiles each leader is adjacent to, this total can be boosted by playing extra black tiles directly from your hand. Wars are initiated when the placement of a tile causes two states to join together that have opposing leaders of the same colour. This time strength is determined by the use of red military tiles. Victory results in points for each opposition leader that was defeated. Losers have to remove their defeated leaders and tiles from the board.

Wars can be very chaotic affairs. A leader will put loyalty to the state before their allegiance to you, so you will sometimes have your leaders on different sides in the same battle. Then, you have the tricky decision of deciding which side to support. Even neutral players can add supporting tiles to the battle to try and manipulate the outcome. Overall, the stakes in Y&Y are lower, there are fewer points on offer, and losing doesn’t feel so harsh. This does mean that conflict is frequent, making the game feel more dynamic.

There are a couple of extra bonus actions to mention. Two green tiles can be discarded to build a new pagoda in an already prepared area. Whereas, two blue tiles can be discarded to initiate a peasant’s riot, leading to a tile being removed permanently from play. Even those leaders that are yet to be placed now have a use. They do not just sit on the sidelines, instead, lending their strength in conflicts or reducing the cost of bonus actions.

At first, distinguishing between symbols and colours feels a little counter-intuitive. The colours signify different things depending on the context. Red, for instance, could represent your military leader, soldiers or swords. In most games you select a colour to play, here you select a symbol such as a lion or an archer or, wait for it – a pot. Playing as the pot is the equivalent of being lumbered with the iron in Monopoly. Far more serious is that the solo game has an annoying tendency to freeze during wars. I’m sure that this is an issue that will be addressed shortly, but it may be worth holding back until the inevitable update hits the store.

The interface is simple and instinctive and the graphics bright and bold, although the map looks a little washed out. Watching your lavish pagoda spring into existence is a real feel good moment. There are plenty of options, too, including pass and play, online and a solo campaign mode. The nine-stage campaign is cleverly realised, with its own special rules and victory conditions. All the stages are linked in an overarching story, giving new players the chance to hone their skills against challenging AI opponents.

Y&Y is a clever, clever game. On the surface, it looks fairly straightforward and old-fashioned. The random tile draw may give the impression of a game with quite a large element of luck. The relentless conflict will have Care Bear gamers scurrying for The Kingdom of Caring. However, it is a design that has stood the test of time and offers just as much enjoyment today as the original game did over twenty years ago.