Play the games you want, on the devices you want, whenever you want. Project xCloud has big plans, and they're kicking off this year. #InsideXbox pic.twitter.com/kyoXSjDc4W

— Xbox (@Xbox) March 12, 2019

Save 60% on Vampyr during this week’s Midweek Madness*!

London, 1918. You are newly-turned Vampyr Dr. Jonathan Reid. As a doctor, you must find a cure to save the city’s flu-ravaged citizens. As a Vampyr, you are cursed to feed on those you vowed to heal.

*Offer ends Friday at 10AM Pacific Time

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: Cambridge, Massachusetts 

Disbelief is a game development studio focusing on contracting and consulting services. We’ve worked with both AAA and independent studios to help their projects ship. Notable projects we’ve worked on include Gears of War 4, Borderlands: The Handsome Collection, and Perception.

At Disbelief, we’re problem-solvers, first and foremost. We like to dive in to figure out the reasons something isn’t working before fixing it. We take pride in solving problems others can’t. We value a sensible work-life balance and work environment. We work with leading edge technologies to make them perform at the top of their capabilities.

Currently, we’re looking for a junior programmer. This opportunity is for a full-time position in Cambridge, MA. Junior programmers at Disbelief are called on to develop and debug in a variety of areas from game play to core engine programming. You are expected to learn new systems and projects as you grow as a developer, with support and training from more senior members of the team. Most importantly, you will work to solve problems with the help of the team.

Key Responsibilities

• Clearly communicate your work to others
• Debug code
• Estimate task work
• Consider performance when writing code
• Document your code

Skills and Requirements

• BA/BS in Computer Science, or equivalent experience
• Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written
• Some type of systems programming in any language.
• Good understanding of C++
• Knowledge of version control with P4, git, or equivalent

Remote: No, but we do enjoy working from home up to two days a week, when project constraints allow.

Visa Sponsorship: No

Technologies:

Most of our work is C++ of varying standards with a sprinkling of other languages as needed for tooling. We do a lot of graphics programming work, using shader languages and platform graphics APIs. Since we often are debugging the lower levels of systems, being able to read x64 or ARM assembly is useful. Primarily we work with Unreal Engine 4, but we also work with Unity and custom game engines. Our work uses rendering, physics, audio, VR, AR, and other APIs frequently. Our primary platforms are PC, Xbox One, PS4, Switch, and VR/AR devices.

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.

Today marks one year since Deep Rock Galactic, our co-op first, dwarven mining space shooter, launched as a console exclusive on Xbox Game Preview. Developing Deep Rock Galactic alongside our community has been, and continues to be a truly awesome experience  and we have to thank each and every miner who has joined the initiative this past year. I wanted to take this opportunity to look back at our first year on the platform, update you on today’s in-game festivities, and give an insight into our experience working on Deep Rock in open development.

To celebrate our first birthday, we’ve released an update that encourages all of our space mining dwarves to let loose and party on the Space Rig, the homebase for all personnel currently in the service of Deep Rock Galactic. We’ve decorated the Space Rig with festive dressing, introduced a time-limited one-year celebration hat to the Gear Shop and called for an all day long happy hour in the Abyss Bar, meaning all beverages are half price! Outside of our one-year celebrations, the update also introduces weekly assignments where miners can earn hefty bonuses in credits and minerals, and 13 new items of stylish headgear. Today’s festive update marks the 22nd update we’ve introduced into Deep Rock Galactic since alpha testing began.

We’ve been constantly introducing regular updates to Deep Rock Galactic that have brought new biomes, new monsters, new weapons and tech, new game modes and endless technical improvements to continue refining the game. From day one we’ve worked extremely closely and transparently with our community to deliver the game developments and content that they want to see. We’ve never wanted anyone on the team to feel like should hide anything from the community so we don’t have any kind of approval process for social posts etc. as we want our players to know they’re part of the production.

As well as being constantly engaged with the Deep Rock Galactic community, we also have more systematic ways of gathering player feedback that helps make sure we’re not missing anything. We have an in-game survey that players can fill out, and we’re also beginning to do on-site testing to monitor the experiences of new miners, and we monitor reddit and other social channels very closely. When we release a new build, we often join random games with a Dev-tag inside the game and talk to players directly, so keep an eye out for us!

Whilst open development has been an amazing system for us, it does present challenges. Being in constant communication with your community takes time, and whilst it’s absolutely worth it, we could have done with a dedicated Community Manager early on. We also need to ensure we have a constant stream of assets that we can release with immediacy as updates happen to keep the community engaged. It can also be tricky to do larger system/feature updates, we prefer to integrate smaller updates to be released every 3-6 weeks to maintain visibility and feedback.

Outside of constant feedback, our approach to open development has also meant we’ve built an amazing network of die-hard fans who act as spokesdwarves for Deep Rock Galactic. Our players know they’re being listened to and can have a direct impact on the development of the game which builds very high levels of trust. This has also come with some amazing opportunities, our QA is partly done by the community and we’ve also used community-driven localizations from fans passionate about making Deep Rock accessible to their region. Having our community play such an integral and continuous part of development is also a constant morale booster to the team through positive engagement on social media.

We’re so proud of what we’ve achieved this past year with Deep Rock Galactic, and open development has meant we’ve been able to work collaboratively and transparently with our community to keep improving the game. We still have a lot that we want to deliver, and we’re so excited to keep building Deep Rock Galactic together in the run-up to full release.

Hopefully see you for half price drinks at the Abyss Bar!

Alien Escape is set to launch on Nintendo Switch this “spring/summer” and an announcement trailer has been shared to show off its gameplay (check it out above).

The game tasks players with thinking in 360 degrees, solving challenges inside a dark tower. You play as a group of aliens who have been kidnapped and jailed; the puzzles are your means of escape, but you’ll have to do a whole lot more than just jumping and running to get out.

You’ll need to keep in mind each stage’s rotation, using gravity and various objects in each room to work your way around. “Gravity, fire, water and a lot more” are all present to throw you off course and, as the game’s press release states, “you have to think around the corner”.

We’ve got some screenshots for you to check out below:

Do you like the look of this one? Will you be keeping an eye out for it appearing on the eShop? Let us know in the comments below.

Outlaws of the Old West is Now Available on Steam Early Access and is 25% off!*

Outlaws of the Old West is a massively multiplayer survival MMO with a huge world, thousands of items and a modular building system. Survive the wild, build your own homestead, defeat villainous bandits and work with others to tame the Wild West.

*Offer ends March 19 at 10AM Pacific Time

We’re slowly entering the “bug fixing and polishing” phase of the 1.14 Village & Pillage update, but that didn’t stop us from sneaking in a few cool features like Leather Horse Armor (it’s dyeable!), making Invisiblity Potions actually useful in survival, and best of all… wait, oh dear, I’ve forgotten what that last thing was. Oh well, it’ll come to me later. 

A full summary of the content available in this snapshot can be found in the changelog on Minecraft.net.

• One Iron Golem now spawns in all villages upon generation
• Improvements to invisibility to allow it to correctly work in many cases where it didn’t but you’d expect it to
• Added Leather Horse Armor
• Textures for potion effects are now split into individual files
• Command parser now accepts ' as string quotes. Inside '-quoted string " is handled as normal character and requires no escaping (and vice-versa) – so now it’s easier to input text components in NBT.
• Stopped foxes, dolphins, and pandas from having armor equipped onto them via dispenser
• Changed bounding box and eye height of foxes (prevents them from drowning when swimming)
• Foxes that trusted you in the previous snapshot will unfortunately no longer be trusting

LEATHER HORSE ARMOR

• Added a new armor type for horses
• Dye it in lots, yes LOTS, of different colors

To get snapshots, open your launcher and go to the “launch options” tab. Check the box saying “Enable snapshots” and save. To switch between the snapshot and normal version, you can find a new dropdown menu next to the “Play” button. Back up your world first or run the game on in a different folder (In the “launch options” page).

Please report any and all bugs you find in Minecraft to bugs.mojang.com.

Snapshots can corrupt your world, please backup and/or run them in a different folder from your main worlds. 

Share your thoughts on how 1.14 is shaping up in the comments below!

Drifter scowled at a notch on his glaive as he buffed the blade with a heavy cloth. A large attaché case rested heavily at his feet.

He and Joxer were back aboard the Derelict. The Titan held his head in his hands. His glowing armor suffused the room with a blood-red warmth.

“Cheer up, brother,” Drifter said. “That didn’t go too bad.”

“Three Guardians are dead,” Joxer replied, looking up to stare straight at the rogue Lightbearer.

“That’s right,” Drifter quipped, continuing to clean his weapon. “In the dirt. Never comin’ back. Their Ghosts got sloppy. You give Taken the chance and they’ll snuff out your Light. The fact that you’re alive means your Ghost knows what he’s doin’.”

“You said this was a test run.”

“Where do you think you are? The Crucible? Gambit Prime is for keeps, test or no.”

“You son of a—”

“Leave the name-calling to me, hotshot. Let’s wrap up this debrief and get you paid.”

“You could’ve helped them.”

Drifter stood, slamming the butt of his freshly polished glaive on the attaché case at his feet. 

“You got yourself out,” he said, leaning on the weapon. “You didn’t need help.”

“You could’ve stopped those Taken. You could’ve saved them all.”

“I paid you to try on that armor. How’s it treating you?”

Joxer was silent. “It worked exactly like you said it would,” he finally responded. “I invaded the other side. The armor locked the Bank down, and I took their Motes right out of it, like they were mine.” He looked down at the deck. “We wiped them out.”

“Yes. Yes, you did,” Drifter said, nodding along fiercely with each detail.

“You’re giving everyone a set of these?”

“If they can build it themselves. I’ll gladly provide the engram prints.” He half-smiled. “Your fireteam—may they rest in peace—they help you out?”

Joxer took his helmet off, rubbed his eyes. “We didn’t use names, just like you told us. The… the Warlock watched our Bank.”

“Like a one-man private security company,” Drifter nodded.

“He always seemed to know where the other Invader was.”

“A Sentry worth their salt always does.”

“And the Hunter. She was a beast. Tore those Cabal up like they were made of paper.”

“Your team’s Reaper,” Drifter clarified. “She’s like you, a born killer. But specializing in the enemies of humanity. Your Collector’s best friend.”

“Yeah, the Collector, one squirrely Titan. Hid a lot, grabbed a bunch of Motes.”

Drifter snickered. “You thought he was useless, didn’t ya?”

Joxer sighed. “‘Til he dropped the meanest Taken I’ve ever seen on the enemy side.”

“Brother, if you manage to summon a giant blocker?” Drifter shook his head, grinning. “That thing’s gotta eat.”

“We had them. We gutted the opposing team. It’s just…” The Titan stopped speaking. He didn’t lift his head, still staring at the deck.

“The Primeval,” Drifter said, with a touch of… pride?

“That Primeval took us apart.”

Drifter shrugged. “You found one that matched your strength. Lesson learned. Make sure your Ghost stays on his toes.”

“They’re all dead,” Joxer said again.

“Yeah, in a town full of immortals,” Drifter said. “Who’da thought? Their cut goes to you. And a little extra to keep, you know, the details outta sight from the Vanguard.”

The rogue Lightbearer kicked the attaché case across the deck. Joxer picked it up without opening it.

“More where that came from, if you want the work,” Drifter said, leaning on his glaive again.

“You’re on your own.” Joxer stood and walked past the Drifter. He left the chamber, massive case in tow.

“You can keep the armor,” Drifter called after him, not bothering to turn around.

As the Titan’s footsteps echoed down the hall towards the Derelict’s hangar, a Ghost emerged from a dark alcove.

“How much data did you pick up?” Drifter asked.

The Ghost’s eye glowed a dark red as it projected patterns across the metal deck: scrolling streams of statistics and figures for each candidate in their roles. Three Ghost-feeds hung in the air, playing on loop. Each one restarted as the same massive Taken came into focus.

Drifter took it all in, his eyes reflecting the blood-red of his Ghost’s Light. His smile was all teeth.