For the past five years, Sony has ruled the roost in the UK hardware sales charts. The PS4 is the territory’s undisputed champion with millions of consoles safely installed in millions of living rooms. However, it would seem that Nintendo’s recent robust performance is going to change things up a little.

Retail data obtained by GamesIndustry.biz indicates that Switch hardware sales have risen more than 30% over the past week thanks to the arrival of Pokémon Sword and Shield – which has just jumped to number one in the UK charts and has enjoyed the biggest system-exclusive launch of the year.

Hardware sales had spiked more than 75% the week prior to Sword and Shield’s release, and almost 90,000 Switch systems have been sold in the UK in November so far. While you might assume that the recently-released Switch Lite model is the reason for the jump, it is actually the original variant which is accounting for most of those sales.

All of this has contributed to Switch becoming the best-selling console in the UK this year so far, ahead of Sony’s PlayStation 4. Retailers have told GamesIndustry.biz that a host of promotions are helping Switch fly off the shelves and that more offers will become available over the Black Friday period.

The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!

Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Location: Burbank, California​

Insomniac Games is searching for its next Lead Level Designer. This should be someone who’ll lead the Level Design team in the operation of designing, developing, and polishing game levels including level geometry, enemy encounters, puzzles, and unique gameplay. The individual in this position works closely with the project Leads, Design Director, Game Director, and/or Creative Director to help ensure game levels have cutting edge features, are creatively entertaining, and well balanced. This role will schedule team through the pre-production, production, and polish phases.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities include the following:

• Works to make high level direction from the Creative Director a reality, and work with the other project leads to meet these goals
• Works with Game Director and/or Design Director to establish concrete plan/s to accomplish the design goals of the project
• Leading the team to craft unique geometry that allows for level composition to form memorable experiences.
• Communicates level design goals for the project to team members and ensure they are understood
• Manages design team and mentor individual designers, establishing goals for individuals and holding them accountable
• Works with the Director of Design and/or Design Director to establish design processes; carry out implementation of those processes across the design team
• Works with project management to schedule design planning and implementation
• Performs reviews of game levels and provide feedback to the team
• Works closely with all departments to investigate solutions that best fit with the products goals, and ultimate goals of the game
• Ensures all design and implementation deliverables are up to Insomniac’s high standards of quality
• Checks development progress against milestone deliverables and, if necessary, correct course
• Identifies design gaps and work with the design team to find solutions
• Other duties may be assigned

Supervisory Responsibilities: Directly supervises design team. Carries out supervisory responsibilities in accordance with the organization’s policies and applicable laws. Responsibilities include interviewing, hiring, and training employees; planning, assigning, and directing work; appraising performance; rewarding and disciplining employees; addressing complaints and resolving problems, in conjunction with the Director of Design.

Education and/or Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree (B.A.) from a four-year college or university; seven to ten years related experience and/or training; or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Completed work on several published game titles.
• Advanced knowledge and experience with level editing tools and scripting (Unreal Engine, Unity, or similar editors).
• Intermediate knowledge of Maya or other major 3D modeling program.
• Adobe Illustrator experience and Photoshop skills are a plus.
• Working knowledge of Microsoft Office Suite.

Other Skills:

• Awareness of emerging trends that inform modern game design. Ability to analyze these mechanics and apply them to current game designs if appropriate
• Intimate knowledge of how games work and what makes them fun.
• Mechanics and level design experience.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Proven ability to work within a team environment

If this is the opportunity that you have been looking for, we’d like to hear from you.

Interested? Apply now.

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.

Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.

Looking for a new job? Get started here. Are you a recruiter looking for talent? Post jobs here.

The 16-inch MacBook Pro is a considerable refinement of the 15-inch model’s design, but how does it compare against its smaller stablemate, the 13-inch MacBook Pro? AppleInsider takes a closer look.

The 16-inch and 13-inch MacBook Pros

Those in the market for a new powerful and portable Mac currently have two options available —the existing 13-inch MacBook Pro and the newly unveiled 16-inch Macbook Pro. Let’s talk about the differences.

Design

Each machine is primarily based on the 2016 unibody design with only minor tweaks since the original unveiling. Closed, they look almost identical to one another —other than the obvious size difference.

Comparing the sizes of the 16-inch and 13-inch MacBook Pros

The 13-inch model is far more portable than the 16-inch, coming in at more than a pound lighter, slightly shorter, more than two inches narrower, and more than an inch shallower. If portability is most important, there is a clear choice here —though the MacBook Air remains lighter and smaller than either of them.

When opened, you can see more of the differences and similarities.

Both machines have the Touch Bar sitting above their respective keyboards. The 16-inch MacBook Pro has larger speaker grills sitting to either side of said keyboard.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro keyboard arrow keys (left) compared to the 16-inch MacBook Pro version

Speaking of the keyboards, there are a variety of differences here. The 16-inch has the new independent physical escape key and Touch ID sensor whereas the 13-inch has both incorporated into the Touch Bar. The 16-inch also has a more defined inverted “T” design for the arrow keys.

Different mechanisms are also used —the 13-inch still relies on the possibly-flawed butterfly design and the new 16-inch has an updated scissor-switch design Apple has called the Magic Keyboard.

16-inch MacBook Pro display

Looking at the displays, the 16-inch model has noticeably smaller bezels around the screen versus the slightly aged look of the 13-inch which has chunkier bezels.

13-inch MacBook Pro display

Of course, the displays are also different sizes —13.2 inches versus 16 inches —but have very similar pixel densities —227 versus 226 PPI.

Pros do have an option on the larger model to specify their refresh rate, something new to the MacBook Pro feature set.

Other standout features for the 16-inch include vastly better speakers and a new set of incredible microphones.

Specs

The 2019 13-inch MacBook Pro

Apple’s 13-inch MacBook Pro starts with a 1.4GHz quad-core 8th-gen Intel i5 processor, Intel Iris Plus Graphics 645, 8GB 2133MHz RAM, and 128GB of SSD storage.

The 16-inch MacBook Pro starts with a 2.6GHz 6-core 9th-gen Intel i7 processor, AMD Radeon Pro 5300M with 4GB of GDDR6 memory, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of SSD storage.

The new 16-inch MacBook Pro editing with Logic Pro X

The former can be maxed out with 2.8GHz 8th-gen Intel i7 processor, Intel Iris Plus Graphics 655, 16GB RAM, and 2TB SSD storage. The latter goes all the way up to a 2.4GHz 8-core 9th-gen Intel i9 processor, 64GB RAM, AMD Radeon Pro 5500M with 8GB of GDDR6 memory, and 8TB of SSD storage.

Price and recommendations

While there are often ongoing sales, the base model 13-inch generally starts at $1,299 and the base 16-inch starts at $2,399. If you max out either option, the 13-inch can cost as much as $3,099 and the 16-inch goes all the way up to $6,099.

MacBook Pro

Needless to say, maxing out the 16-inch machine yields far more performance than the 13-inch ever could achieve.

The 13-inch is still no slouch, and there are decent upgrades available in the more compact body. But, as it is a fresh addition to the lineup, the 16-inch is exceptionally capable. If you want the most power, the best choice is the 16-inch model.

If you do lean towards the 13-inch unit, we may recommend holding off until early 2020 before picking one up. The machine was updated earlier in 2019 and rumors point to an early-to-mid 2020 update with improved performance and an updated keyboard mechanism to match the 16-inch.

Save money on both options

Apple resellers are accepting orders for the new 16-inch MacBook Pro with a variety of incentives. Expercom is knocking up to $438 off select new configurations with coupon code appleinsider, while Adorama is taking up to $250 off retail models with promo code APINSIDER (prices start at just $2,199 with code). Details can be found in this 16-inch MacBook Pro deal roundup.

Meanwhile, at B&H, shoppers can save $100 on the retail systems and select between no interest financing when paid in full within 12 months with the B&H Financing Card or a sales tax refund in eligible states with its Payboo Credit Card. The latter can save many shoppers anywhere from $200 to $500 on average.

Amazon is also offering instant discounts on the 16-inch MacBook Pro, matching B&H with prices as low as $2,299.

Those looking for the best deal on a 13-inch MacBook Pro can find prices as low as $1,199 and savings of up to $200 off.

Be sure to check out the AppleInsider 16-inch MacBook Pro Price Guide and the 2019 13-inch MacBook Pro Price Guide for the latest deals and product availability on Apple’s current hardware.

Hello KubeCon and welcome to San Diego! It’s fantastic to have the chance to get some warm California sun, as well as the warmth of the broader Kubernetes community. From the very first community meeting, through the first KubeCon and on to today, it’s been truly amazing to have been able to watch and help the Kubernetes community grow. As KubeCon arrives, I’m excited to note how we are continuing to innovate and empower cloud-native developers on Kubernetes anywhere.

In the spirit of innovation, I’m thrilled to announce our new open source effort to enable trusted execution environments for Kubernetes. Trusted execution environments or “enclaves” are a hardware-backed secure execution environment that can ensure processes and their memory are secure while they execute. Today, we’re enabling trusted computing on Kubernetes anywhere via the Open Enclave SDK.

We’re also releasing a resource plugin that makes Encrypted Page Cache RAM a resource that the Kubernetes scheduler can use to make scheduling decisions. The number of enclaves on a CPU is limited, and this plugin ensures that Pods that need enclaves will be guaranteed to land on a node with an enclave available. This scheduler support is critical to running trusted compute environments in cloud-native applications via Pods.

Beyond these innovations for secure computing, I’m incredibly proud of the work that the Helm community has done to build and release Helm 3.0 last week. The vast majority of workloads deployed to Kubernetes are deployed via Helm, and Helm 3 is the next step in this journey. Over the past few years, the Helm team has carefully listened to user feedback about what was working and where changes were needed.

Of the many fixes and improvements, the most popular is probably the removal of Tiller from the cluster, making Charts more Kubernetes native and more secure by default. Speaking of security, the recent glowing independent security review of the Helm code base shows how dedicated and careful the Helm community has been in building a tool that is not just incredibly useful, but also secure as well. Many congratulations to the Helm community on this important milestone.

Just like the Helm team, in Azure, our open source work begins by listening to our customers. In particular, our customers in IoT and telecommunications. This feedback led us to understand how important it was for Kubernetes to support both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for the same Pods in Kubernetes. Major kudos are due to Kal Henidak for his dedicated and tireless work in engineering both the code and design changes necessary to support multiple addresses per Pod. As you might imagine this change required careful work and coordination across the entire Kubernetes code base and community. Kal’s hard work in collaboration with the SIG-Networking community is being recognized with a shared keynote with Tim Hockin. Plan on attending the keynote to learn more about IPv4 and IPv6 in Kubernetes!

Finally, by combining both open source community and innovation we have a remarkable collection of open source projects reaching important milestones at KubeCon. The newly announced Buck (Brigade Universal Controller for Kubernetes) project shows how Cloud Native Application Bundles (CNAB) with Brigade radically simplify the development of new operators. The Kubernetes-based Event-driven Autoscaling (KEDA) has shown incredible community interest. It’s a great collaboration between Azure Functions, Red Hat, and others. Here at KubeCon, the KEDA community is hitting the 1.0 milestone and is stable and ready for production use. I also want to congratulate the Cloud Events community on their recent 1.0 release and I’m excited that Azure Event Grid has correspondingly added support for the 1.0 version of Cloud Events. Cloud Events is a CNCF project for an open and portable API for event-driven programming and it’s awesome that it is available in a managed environment in Azure.

Of course, containers and DevOps are a year-round focus for my teams beyond KubeCon. We’ve been busy this fall.

In the four weeks since we launched the Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) project, we have seen strong interest from the community and have been listening to the many stories of how people are using Dapr in their projects, including modernizing Java code, building games, and integrating with IoT solutions. The breadth across different industries is amazing to see. The interest in the Dapr runtime repo has grown beyond our expectations. It’s been awesome to see the community come together and continue the momentum. We are excited to announce the release of Dapr v0.2.0, focusing on community-driven components, fixes across the Dapr runtime and CLI, updates to documentation, samples, and the addition of an end-to-end testing framework. You can find out more about the v0.2.0 release at the Dapr repo.

Just building distributed systems isn’t enough, you need to be able to observe how they are running in production, and the CNCF Prometheus project has emerged as a de-facto standard for exposing metrics on all sorts of servers. But it’s still easier to integrate with cloud-based monitoring rather than run your own metrics server. To enable this, Azure Monitor for containers can scrape the metrics exposed from Prometheus end-points so you can quickly gather failure rates, response per secs, and latency. From Log Analytics, you can easily run a Kusto Query Language (KQL) query and create your custom dashboard in the Azure portal dashboard. For many customers using Grafana to support their dashboard requirements, you can visualize the container and Prometheus metrics in a Grafana dashboard. Azure monitoring combines the best of open technology with the reliability of a cloud service.

In the last few years, KubeCon has grown from a single-track to many tracks and thousands of people. For me personally, and the community in general, it’s been an incredible journey. I’m excited to see people in San Diego – please stop by the Azure booth and say hello!

Luigi has long since moved on from being a palette-swapped second player to a fully-fledged hero in his own right – heck, he even has his own series of video games these days – but he sadly isn’t a playable choice in Super Mario Odyssey, the most recent mainline Mario title.

However, while he merely plays a bit part in the Switch exclusive, he very nearly sported a ‘drastically’ different look.

Speaking in The Art of Super Mario Odyssey, character art lead Sho Murata said:

Luigi hosts the Balloon World minigame. We wanted players to feel welcome in this minigame, so we gave him a cheerful and casual attitude, like a performer passing out balloons on the street. We wanted to make it seem like he came directly from the Mushroom Kingdom, so in contrast to the sticker-laden Odyssey, his satchel sports only stickers from the Mushroom Kingdom. One of the stickers is actually out of circulation…

We considered a drastic costume change for Luigi at first, but we ultimately went with a simple look, since it would work well against the background of this game’s world. I wonder… including the Luigi green, did you notice his balloons are the same colors as Super Famicom controller buttons? To the many fans who were looking to his appearance in the game, know that the designer in charge put a lot of effort into Luigi’s development.

Do you think Luigi would have looked right with a completely different costume, or are you glad that the designers ultimately decided to stick with tradition? Post a comment to share your thoughts.

Please note that some links on this page are affiliate links, which means if you click them and make a purchase we may receive a small percentage of the sale which helps support the site. Please read our FTC Disclosure for more information.

Pokemon Go News

• Pokemon Go: Shiny Meowth Now Available As Part Of New Team Rocket Event
• Pokemon Go Adding First Gen 5 Legendary, Cobalion, Next Week
• Pokemon Go Is Getting A Special Research Quest Featuring Team Rocket
• Pokemon Go's November 2019 Community Day Announced, Features Chimchar

OGMO is a free and open source level editor, written in Haxe by Matt Makes Games the makers of Celeste among other games.  The level editor is available on GitHub under the MIT open source license.  OGMO 3.1(.1) was just released.

Details of the new release from the changelog:

• 3.1.1
  
  • Added entity image to entity palette
  • Move broken levels to trash instead of deleting them permanently
  • Fix image previews leaking out of the popup
  • Fix a typo in the popup box-shadow
  • Don’t show the “delete” option for image popups
  • Added .ogmo file association metadata
• 3.1.0 
  
  • Improved non-json file handling in the level manager panel
  • Added the ability to use an image for Entities

If you are interested in checking out OGMO, be sure to check the documentation, which also includes instructions on how to build the Haxe code yourself.  If you would like to see OGMO in action, be sure to check out the video below.

Design GameDev News Applications Tools 2D

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There is definitely a right way and a wrong way to announce a game. Not just mobile games – any game, really. The context of the game, and the events around the game is important. We won’t rehash the exact hilarity around the Diablo: Immortals announcement last year, but that was definitely the ‘wrong’ way to announce a game (despite all reports indicating Immortals is quite good, for what it is).

Last Friday, Path of Exile developer Grinding Gears Games announced a mobile version of their flagship title. In case you’re not familiar with what that is (it’s not one I’ve played myself either) Path of Exile is a Diablo-like free-to-play Action RPG that was first released in PC in 2013, and was later brought to PS4 and Xbox One.

It was (and still is) unusual because there is no in-game currency, instead there is a barter-like system that uses ‘currency items’ to pay for things. The business model also bases itself on so-called “ethical” micro-transactions. Largely cosmetic-based, but here are certain late-game quality of life features (like automatic trading) and things like custom serves that are gated behind a paywall. Here’s the video that announced that sequel:

It’s quite on the nose, and definitely a commentary on how Blizzard announced Immortals. Path of Exile itself is well known to have taken a lot of inspiration from Diablo II, so the comparison is an easy one to make. Path of Exile Mobile is also being made by GGG themselves, and not someone else, and the company seek to bring their same ‘ethical’ business mentality that they brought to the free-to-play Browser/PC space in 2013 when PoE originally launched.

You could argue that the strength of this announcement wouldn’t have been as powerful had Blizzard not botched their own announcement, but then GGG also announced Path of Exile 2, AND continued support for Path of Exile 1, in the same stroke as announcing the mobile version.

Although they do use the word “Bull****” twice in the video when talking about mobile gaming. That’s a little bit harsh.

There was no release window or confirmed platforms given for Path of Exile Mobile, so we’ll keep you posted.

The way we work has changed. Today, winning in business requires constant innovation, and this innovation in turn requires collaboration across disciplines, geographies, and cultures. Prior to this seismic shift in the workplace, the atomic unit of productivity was the individual. Now it’s the team. A high-performing team brings together talented individuals and operates as more than the sum of its parts. It draws on the strengths of each member and compensates for individual limitations. But in an increasingly distributed and fast-paced world, even the perfect team chemistry isn’t enough. Today’s teams also need collaboration tools that help them put that chemistry to work. They need technology that can reach across space and time and help team members feel like they’re just a few feet away, even when they’re worlds apart.

At Microsoft, we’re on a mission to help every team become a successful team. And so, we partnered with IDEO, a global design company known for its human-centered, interdisciplinary approach. Together, we researched successful workplace teams to find out what they had in common. Then we used what we learned to create The Art of Teamwork—a new digital curriculum built around the five attributes of a successful team.

And that’s not all. We’re also using the findings from the research to refine Microsoft Teams, the hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365. What’s clear from the data is that the future of workplace collaboration won’t be defined by any one technology. Instead, successful teams need collaboration tools that combine a wide range of technologies in new and innovative ways. Teams brings together chat, meetings, calling, document collaboration, and workflow into a single app—and this unique combination is catching fire.

In fact, today Teams has more than 20 million daily active users. What’s more, while these users start with simple text-based chat, they quickly move on to richer forms of communication and collaboration. For instance, last month Teams customers participated in more than 27 million voice or video meetings and performed over 220 million open, edit, or download actions on files stored in Teams.

The five attributes

Partnering with IDEO, we researched diverse workplace teams—including astronauts, chefs, television producers, and nurses—to understand what high-performing collaborators have in common. With a variety of workplace teams as our subjects, we used in-context observation, expert interviews, secondary research, and prototype activities to identify the specific dynamics that high-performing teams had in common. We found that successful teams shared five attributes:

1. Team purpose—Keeps teams focused, fulfilled, and aligned on achieving their objectives.
2. Collective identity—Fosters a sense of belonging and helps team members work together as a unit.
3. Awareness and inclusion—Enables teams to navigate interpersonal dynamics and value everyone’s perspective.
4. Trust and vulnerability—Encourages interpersonal risk-taking in teams.
5. Constructive tension—Serves as a generative force for new ideas, driving better outcomes.

To learn more about the framework, check out the video below:

Teams customer success stories

With Teams, our customers are breaking through the artificial boundaries created by standalone or loosely coupled collaboration tools and working together in new ways. Their stories bring the five attributes of successful teams to life and paint a picture of what is possible.

Bold beauty: L’Oreal

At L’Oreal, the global beauty company, Chief Technology and Operations Officer, Barbara Lavernos explains, “Our momentum is driven by people interacting, putting ideas on the table, and jumping on them through spontaneous discussion. The new technology that allows for personality, contributions, and real innovation is Microsoft Teams.” With Teams, L’Oreal employees have a space to be creative while moving at the speed and scale needed to deliver over 7 billion products to customers annually.

From the factory floor to the C-Suite: Alcoa

Firstline Workers at Alcoa, a global leader in bauxite, alumina, and aluminum production, have embraced Teams to access business information on their own mobile devices while working at their remote Iceland facility. Before using Teams, when managers needed someone to come in for a shift, they had to call them, often late at night. Now with Teams, managers schedule plant employees using Shifts, which they can access on their mobile devices. With Shifts, the problem of workers missing scheduled assignments has resolved, with the absentee rate falling to nearly zero. “Shifts in Teams is much more efficient for organizing people,” says Friopjófur Tómasson, a plant supervisor. “If I had to use one word to tell you what Teams means to me, it’s ‘efficiency.’ Shifts saves me at least an hour a day.”

Simplified collaboration: Telefónica

At telecommunications company Telefonica, employees conduct business-building projects in Teams. An offsite meeting of executives can now be coordinated in a highly secure, centralized hub. This simple meeting used to be a coordination nightmare, with up to 20 colleagues from several departments focusing on various workstreams. “Before Teams, we had to integrate different aspects of a project that had been created in isolation from each other. Now, a group of colleagues can build on the documents in a collaborative way and edit the project directly. This process used to take four weeks, now we can accomplish it in a matter of days,” says Jamie Rodriguez-Ramos Fernandez, Director of Strategic Analysis at Telefónica.

Putting patient care first: St. Luke’s University Health Network (SLUHN)

St. Luke’s University Health Network providers are replacing different third-party collaboration apps with Teams, simplifying their lives with a single workspace for anytime, anywhere conversations about patients. “Even as we look to secure text messaging as one of the advantages of the ubiquitous cellphone, we still have to comply with HIPAA and other privacy requirements,” says Dr. James Balshi, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer and Vascular Surgeon at SLUHN. “But we don’t have to worry about that with Teams. It’s equally functional on the smartphone, tablet, and desktop computer. I use the camera technology on the phone to share patient information in a more secure and HIPAA-compliant manner with colleagues during a Teams video call. I’ve also shared EMR notes and X-ray images.”

Connecting across the globe: Trek

Trek is a leading bicycle designer, manufacturer, and retailer that is adapting quickly to a fast-changing environment. Some U.S.-based employees work in locations other than the company’s Waterloo, Wisconsin, headquarters, including at other facilities, home, or retail locations. Trek’s international business has also grown quickly with the company expanding its operations to 17 established offices around the world. “Having good connectivity and digital meeting experiences is critical in making the way we work a success,” says Nathan Pieper, IT Business Applications and Collaboration Manager at Trek. The meetings capabilities in Teams “was the carrot that got people in,” says Pieper. “Teams adoption grew because people used it, told other people to use it, and invited them to online meetings on it.”

A high-performing team can do what otherwise would be impossible. And with Teams, there’s no limit to what you and your team can achieve at work. To improve teamwork in your organization, check out the digital teamwork guide at the Art of Teamwork home page. And if you’re not using Teams yet, get started today!

Note: Customers are ultimately responsible for their own HIPAA compliance.