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The 2018 Game Developer’s Conference will feature an exhibition called Alt.Ctrl.GDC dedicated to games that use alternative control schemes and interactions. Gamasutra will be talking to the developers of each of the games that have been selected for the showcase. 

Windgolf offers players a relaxing round of mini golf, only instead of using a putter, they’ll be blowing on the ball. By breathing into two different tubes and rotating a screen to get a better orientation on the ball, they’ll be able to slowly guide the ball to the hole. Not that taking their eyes off the ball to blow it in the right direction makes that easy.

With this new take on minigolf being playable at GDC’s Alt.Ctrl.GDC exhibit, Gamasutra reached out to developer Pepijn Willekens to learn about the creation of this wind-based golf game, and some of the challenges that came up using such an imprecise input like breath.

What’s your name, and what was your role on this project?

I’m Pepijn Willekens (@PepijnWillekens). I developed all parts of Windgolf. I did the programming, electronics, 3D, gamedesign, etc. I did get some carpentry help from Thomas Devillé though (Who runs a business building custom made wooden arcade cabinets called Devillé Arcade). 

How do you describe your innovative controller to someone who’s completely unfamiliar with it?

In Windgolf, you play minigolf, but instead of having a club, you control the wind by blowing into the machine, which creates wind in the game. You are like a god of nature that only cares about getting a ball into a hole ?

What’s your background in making games?

I am currently in my graduation year of a Bachelor in Multimedia Technology. Over the past years I became more involved in the Belgian game industry. I co-organised an international indie game festival called Screenshake 2017, co-organised a Global Game Jam location for 3 years, and co-organised monthly game developer meetups for the past 1.5 years. I haven’t released any commercial games yet, but I’m currently (also) working on a mobile puzzle game called Boa Bonanza.

What development tools did you use to build Windgolf?

Windgolf uses Arduino for the sensors, which sends this data to Unity over USB. 

What physical materials did you use to make it?

The arcade is build out of wood. For the blow sensors, I used 2 small speakers that I use as if they were microphones. So, you actually blow directly on the speakers’ membrane which creates a tiny electrical signal. I amplify this so the Arduino can read it. 

For the rotation, I currently use a rotary encoder, but I am planning to change this into a gyroscope or accelerometer. I am also looking into taking some parts from a watercooker to be able to power the upper rotating part of the arcade. The game itself runs on a laptop with an external screen.

How much time have you spent working on the game?

I estimate that the prototype that is visible in the video is made in approximately 12 days, spread out of 2.5 months. The game will have progressed a lot by the time I show it in the GDC expo, though.

How did you come up with the concept?

Windgolf started off as a school assignment where we had to “combine sound and Arduino and Unity”. I loved this assignment, so I went way further with the project that the school assignment required.

What difficulties did you face in combining blowing and a moving screen to create challenging puzzles?

Windgolf is a rather clumsy game to play, because rotating around is quite a physical effort compared to other games where you look around by moving your mouse or joystick. The players reflexes are much slower. You have to look away from the screen to blow, after which you realize that the ball wil roll just next to the hole, and you have to get to the other side of it in time. The game is aimed for an expo context, so people are free to try to control the arcade in a combined effort ?

Windgolf allows players to change their perspective by moving the screen as well. What drew you to add this element on top of blowing on the ball?

I imagine the arcade as a sort of window into another world. If you would want to blow a ball in real life in one direction, and after that in another, you would also have to move around the ball to position yourself first.

Was harnessing breath a difficult thing to do as a gameplay mechanic? How did you get it just right? 

Blowing isn’t the most precise input method, but in Windgolf, your precision in rotation is more important than how hard you blow. So, it’s more a matter of giving player a clear sense of what is happening.

How do you think standard interfaces and controllers will change over the next five or ten years?

I think that haptic feedback in controllers will be given much more attention. Nothing is as satisfying as moving your finger over the pads of Vive/Steam controllers, or feeling the virtual balls roll in your Nintendo switch controllers (in 1-2-Switch). Game developers have been mastering the art of wobbling and squeezing characters, shaking screens, and all sorts of audio-visual feedback, but being to decide what the player feels when they make their his input to a game allows for a direct way of teaching your player how they interact with it. It allows for more experimentation through standard interfaces. Imagine that the touchscreens of future phones would offer the same feedback of the Vive/Steam controller pads. 

Preview Alpha Insiders can expect another new update today, complete with brand new fixes. This update (1802.180129-1625) will begin rolling out at 10.00 p.m. PST and will become mandatory shortly after that.  Read on to learn more about the fixes and known issues related to this build.

New Features:

Installation Progress in Guide

• In-progress installations are now visible from a tile at the bottom of the Guide. When selected, this tile opens a new interface showing items in the queue and their status, and allowing some basic functions like pausing or cancelling the installation.

Fixes:

Profile

• Fixed an issue which caused some elements in Profile to appear misaligned.

Home and Dashboard

• Resolved an issue which sometimes caused unexpected crashes.

Miscellaneous

• Miscellaneous fixes and improvements.

Known Issues:

Games Installation

• Games that are installed fail to launch. Workaround: If the games are installed to an external drive please copy the game to the internal drive or attempt to delete the title and redownload to fix the launch error.

Display 

• We are investigating the inaccurate RGB colors that have been reported when displaying in 4K HDR mode when playing a UHD disc.

Tournaments

• The left and right navigation for selecting date and time during Tournament creation is currently reversed when the console language is set to Arabic or Hebrew.
• Left and right navigation in Tournament twists is reversed when the console language is set to Arabic or Hebrew.
• Left and right navigation in the bracket view of Tournaments is reversed when the console language is set to Arabic or Hebrew.

Avatars on Home

• Users wishing to represent themselves as an avatar can do so by changing their settings under My profile > Customize profile > Show my avatar.

Nintendo Labo turned plenty of heads when it was unveiled back in January, and whether you’re sold on the premise or not, there’s no denying it’s peak Nintendo. There was, however, some concern that users were going to be limited to the Toy-Con templates designed by Nintendo. Well, Nintendo has firmly quashed those fears with the unveiling of the Toy-Con Garage.

The in-built software feature works like a basic programming tool, enabling you to take the functions of the Toy-Con and combine and tweak them to suit whatever idea is floating about in your imagination. It’s just the kind of open-ended creativity we’ve seen from Ninty countless times before, and as long as you’re able to provide the right cardboard parts, there’s no limit to what could potentially make. We saw the feature back at our first-hands on event with Nintendo Labo and it’s left us really impressed with its scope.

But what do you think of Labo’s newly revealed open-ended structure? Is this a great way to get younger Nintendo users into programming? Let us know!

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Being the team lead of a project can be daunting, especially if there aren’t any clear directions on what that actually means. After being made team lead, what happens next? 

In this 2016 GDC talk, Double Fine’s Oliver Franzke shares the lessons he learned while settling into a leadership position at Double Fine and provides practical advice to will help new team leads get started in their new role.

Franzke also discusses the struggle he faced while adjusting to his new leadership role at Double Fine. Eventually after talking to fellow developers, it quickly became clear to him that most team leads were expected to pick up the necessary skillset of the job themselves. 

Devs who are new to leadership positions may appreciate that they can now watch the talk completely free via 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. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas.

For venerable U.K.-based studio Creative Assembly, Total War: Warhammer II represents a massively ambitious undertaking.

Not only is it one of the deepest strategy games currently available, the recent (free) Mortal Worlds update integrates almost all of the content from the first game into the newest iteration — including the stitching together of two massive, sprawling campaign maps, and bringing all of the diverse factions, units, and leaders from the original forward into the sequel.

The team also recently launched the first major DLC expansion, Rise of the Tomb Kings, which incorporates yet another race and another handful of factions to bolt onto the staggering 117 already present in the game. 

Managing all this content and making it behave together is a huge undertaking and one, according to Creative Assembly’s Al Bickham, and Scott Pitkethly, that’s taught their team a number of important lessons along the way.

“So much extra effort went into the development of Warhammer II,” Bickham says, “with attendant changes in so many areas. The databases and codebases for both games had diverged to the point where merging content from one branch to the other caused us a great deal of errors.”

Teaching an old dog new tricks

This was a particularly nettlesome issue when the team was integrating the Norsca Race Pack from the first game, which added a host of marauding northern tribes. The divergent codebases “pushed back our plans to integrate Norsca into Warhammer II and Mortal Empires, as we now have to re-implement all those individual content, data and code components by hand over time,” adds Bickham. “An annoying – if useful – lesson learned!”

“The databases and codebases for both games had diverged to the point where merging content from one branch to the other caused us a great deal of errors.”

It’s a very specific example of the sort of issues that trouble such a huge project, but some of the initial hurdles were much more banal and commonplace.

One of the big challenges of a game of Warhammer II’s scale is rendering thousands and thousands of units on screen at once, preferably with as little a performance hit as possible. According to Pitkethly, in designing the game they tackled the problem with a multipronged solution.

“[Dynamic] environment and unit LODs [Levels Of Detail] obviously help a great deal from a GPU-load perspective, and we have some clever LOD techniques to reduce our resource requirements,” he said. But level of detail solutions only partially resolved the issue, and in a game that enables dynamic zooming and camera rotation, additional techniques were mandatory. “Total War: Warhammer also saw us switch to multicore processing in earnest, so we distribute tasks across a greater number of CPU threads, and run them in parallel.”

The real secret weapon in Creative Assembly’s arsenal, however, seems to be a brilliant sort of prognostication.

“In Total War, the battle logic and animation pipelines (both of which are very CPU intensive) have also been decoupled from the display, allowing them to run simultaneously,” Pikethly says. “In a battle scene, the logic generates the ‘future’ whilst the display renders the ‘now’. This future logic-state can be created over many display frames, allowing us to calculate complex interactions without impacting frame rate.”

Another difficult quandary presented itself as the team was designing and integrating units of different types. When your game includes flying units, infantry, cavalry, artillery, commanders, and fantastical beasts ranging from animate stone giants to ravenous horned demons, it becomes a delicate, complex balancing act ensuring they all interact appropriately with one another on the battlefield (and sell the damage done to them by other units in believable ways). Unsurprisingly, it’s another problem that requires a suite of solutions.

“There’s quite a number of techniques we employ, often with bespoke approaches to cater for different situations,” says Pikethly. “Some solutions are based on animation-set choices for example; we may author – or choose to cull – specific animation-sets for units fighting atop, say, a castle wall, in order to avoid weird-looking situations or extreme movements which would otherwise be fine on open ground. We may then capitalize on certain situations by authoring matched fighting animations between specific entities.”

For Bickham, sprinkling in these little moments is a crucial way to make players feel as though they’re witnessing a real, dynamic fight, as opposed to a lot of complex math.

“A good example in Warhammer II is when a Carnasaur [basically a giant T-Rex!] fights a grounded dragon,” he says. “In general they’ll trigger their usual attack animations, but in rare situations you’ll see the dragon clutch the Carnasaur and try in vain to fly off with the thing, before being dragged back down to the ground and counterattacked with a hefty head-butt. These occurrences are rare enough to make them feel special and epic when they do happen.”          

The issues surrounding unit interaction are further compounded, however, when uneven terrain or structures are involved, particularly in the case of some of the game’s enormous, signature sieges. There’s a colossal amount of data to process in these situations, particularly, Pikethly says, because of the way Warhammer II models combat.

Matching up what the engine sees with what the player sees

“We physically simulate every projectile fired by each individual soldier or entity, and accuracy is variable according to the firer’s quality and the target’s situation. And every building and terrain-feature provides a potential obstacle. Calculating those shots en-masse is expensive, so we have to be clever about how we request such checks in order to keep performance high.”

And it’s not just a matter of properly optimizing, managing, and queueing combat result checks, there’s also the issue of line of sight. Pikethly asserts that one of the biggest problems for their team is the difference between what a player sees and what the engine is actually rendering.

“We physically simulate every projectile fired by each individual soldier or entity, and accuracy is variable according to the firer’s quality and the target’s situation…Calculating those shots en-masse is expensive, so we have to be clever about how we request such checks in order to keep performance high.”

“From a sky-eye view with your whole army visible, a tiny wrinkle in the landscape between your riflemen and their quarry may be barely discernible; to the player, the riflemen appear to have line of sight. From a soldier’s-eye view however, that wrinkle may actually be a low hill the height of a bus-stop, blocking their line of sight. So when the player orders them to fire, they begin moving forward into a position where they can draw a bead on the target, leaving the player baffled as to why they’re marching blithely towards the enemy instead of firing as ordered!”

And that marching bit presents its own difficulties in the form of AI pathfinding, specifically when a unit has to pick its way through broken terrain or a complicated urban environment.

“Our Battle AI relies on hint-lines (invisible to the player) around hills, for example, to tell it that the hill is a desirable feature to hold, and where best to position its forces,” Pikethly adds. “Likewise, a poorly-connected network of city-streets might be impossible for the AI to negotiate. The player may see an open junction between two roads, but the AI sees an impassable area, and when ordered to move, may take what seems to the player to be an inefficient route.”

The solution to all of these problems comes largely down to design. The advantage of hand-crafting maps rather than relying on procedural generation is that, while more production work is involved, every piece of terrain can be sculpted and placed and assessed according to how it fits with every other piece of terrain, structure, or pathway. Linking streets in an orderly, sensible way is key, as is placing impassable terrain so that it won’t halt an AI unit marching around it, or avoiding terrain features that present significant LoS challenges but aren’t visible from a bird’s-eye perspective.

“Battle-maps and the terrain features on them require diligence in execution,” Bickham says. “We code the AI to understand how to negotiate terrain and buildings and are very mindful with map design from both a gameplay and a technical perspective.”

Throughout the process of integrating old with new, it’s clear that Creative Assembly can chalk up a good bit of its success to careful planning — as well as thoughtful analysis of what’s most key in giving players the intended experience (in this case, simulating believable, massive skirmishes) and making design choices that support those priorities.