Risk of Rain 2 is Now Available on Steam!

Escape a chaotic alien planet by fighting through hordes of frenzied monsters – with your friends, or on your own. Combine loot in surprising ways and master each character until you become the havoc you feared upon your first crash landing.

When he’s not paying off a loan to Tom Nook, Liam likes to report on the latest Nintendo news and admire his library of video games. His favourite Nintendo character used to be a guitar-playing dog, but nowadays he prefers to hang out with Judd the cat.

The rhythm music game Taiko no Tatsujin: Drum ‘n’ Fun is receiving an eSports tournament update on 19th August.

It adds a competitive online mode featuring the following difficulties: easy, normal, hard, and extreme. In round one, a song is randomly selected and the second round requires the player to perform their own “My Battle” song. A winner is then decided based on each competitor’s total score.

The winner gets a gold medal and the runner-up receives a silver medal, In this mode, you’ll also unlock icons and greetings to use when you play online. Players who lose can still spectate and send supportive hearts to liven up the on-screen action. There’s new battle commentary from Master Bachio, too.

In Japan, Bandai Namco is also releasing new song DLC – there’ll be an individual Pokémon track, a rock music pack, and vocaloid music pack (Vol. 5) featuring Hatsune Miku.

• Individual (150 yen)
  
  • [Anime] “1-2-3” by After the Rain (Soraru x Mafumafu) (from Pokemon)
• Rock Music Pack (400 yen)
  
  • [Pop] “Nonsense Bungaku” by Eve
  • [Pop] “Rocket Dive”
  • [Anime] “Phoenix” (from Haikyuu!! To the Top)
• Vocaloid Music Pack Vol. 5 (500 yen)
  
  • [Vocaloid] “Otome Kaibou” by DECO*27 feat. Hatsune Miku
  • [Vocaloid] “Taiyoukei Disco” by NayutalieN feat. Hatsune Miku
  • [Vocaloid] “Alkali Rettousei” by Kairiki Bear feat. Hatsune Miku (from Sentou Setsuri Kaiseki System #Compass)
  • [Vocaloid] “Melt” by supercell feat. Hatsune Miku
  • [Vocaloid] “Coffee no Aji to” by Harunaba

Will you be returning to Taiko no Tatsujin: Drum ‘n’ Fun to try out this update next week? Leave a comment down below.

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Hi, I’m ‘how people find your game’ expert Simon Carless, and you’re reading the Game Discoverability Now! newsletter, which you can subscribe to now, a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

Welcome to the latest edition of the Game Discoverabilityland round-up. In this edition, I smoosh together all of the notable news of the week into one post, so you can consume it like dining out on a fine three-course meal.

Not that any of us is doing that currently, of course. So let’s proceed with the hastily microwaved curry which is this week’s newsletter:

The biggest game Discords in the world ever!

This week, I was chatting (electronically) to Stephen Takowsky, who works on the massive Discord for Terraria at 505 Games (and also used to be a pro Civilization player with Team Liquid!)

Anyhow, Stephen does a bunch of neat work with Discord plug-ins and collaborations between large-scale Discords. He was kind enough to share with me his daily updated list of the most popular game-related Discord servers.

I’ve talked a little bit about Discord in the past. It’s a really great tool to attract and retain a community around your game and update them on your progress, no matter how many people hang out there.

But I thought some of the trends in the biggest/most active servers were super interesting, just to peruse what games are currently popular! Here’s what I particularly noticed:

• A lot of the top servers are ‘official’, but not all of them. The ‘verified’ servers for Minecraft, Fortnite and others are run by staff or mods that are approved by the developers themselves. But you also get Discord-partnered servers like Animal Crossing and the Reddit-linked r/LeagueOfLegends – which are not endorsed by the maker of the game, but still thrive anyhow.

• The top games are pretty much what I expected. When looking at the most active servers out there, the top titles include Minecraft, Valorant (wow, Riot’s done a good job here!), Fortnite, Rainbow 6, Roblox, and so on. There’s also a few ‘big’ indies like Terraria and Risk Of Rain 2 punching above their weight. And impressed to see Deep Rock Galactic, TemTem & SatisFactory also in the Top 30.

• There’s some very active game Discords I was surprised about. If you were to tell me the Top 30 included Spellbreak (a game I clearly need to pay more attention to), Escape From Tarkov and GTFO, I admit I would have been a little surprised. And a Beat Saber modding Discord almost in the Top 10? Yup, that’s reinforcing its position as the breakout VR game – not surprising that Oculus bought the studio.

So that was what I personally took from the rundown of the top Discords! Feel free to read over it yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Which came first – the discount or the wishlist email?

Something that came up on Twitter today that I thought was worth passing along. I made the point that, at least on Steam, it’s not just the fact that a game is on sale that makes people buy it – it’s also Valve’s outbound marketing efforts:

Random discoverability note: when people put their game on sale on Steam, the ‘X% off’ is what helps people to make a decision. But it’s the email to existing wishlisters of the game which is the real (push marketing!) impetus to buy, imo.

— Simon Carless (@simoncarless) August 5, 2020

And as if by magic, somebody turned up in the comments to validate my opinion. (I always love it when that happens.)

can confirm. most of the steam games i’ve bought in the last couple years were because i got that email. i wishlist and wait patiently (because i have so many games to play already)

— rinv (@rynvie) August 5, 2020

Obviously, this isn’t the only way that people find out games are on sale. For higher-profile titles, they will see it on Reddit, social media, or via dynamic deal-finding websites like the SteamDB sales tab. And for the larger sales, people will often browse for a while.

But the email is important – and it’s worth looking into those stats further. If you go to the bottom of your ‘Wishlist Actions’ page on the Steam back end, you’ll see a list of all the ‘Wishlist Notifications’ (emails!) sent, with the dates and 1-day and 7-day conversion numbers. (Though I believe this stat only tracks purchases directly from clicks, so you real number is going to be quite a lot higher.)

Oh, and bonus note from me: “Also, you have to discount your game by at least 20% to get the wishlist email sent by Steam!” You all know that, right? It’s on the Steamworks wishlist page documentation, but that’s not necessarily somewhere that we all reference all the time, haha.

Other Stuff…

As always, there’s plenty of other things going on here. In fact, I’m already filing things to post in NEXT week’s Game Discoverabilityland round-up. So let’s get going on this one, shall we?

• There’s going to be a new Microsoft Store on Xbox rolling out soon, with redesigned search functionality, a more prominent wishlist feature (interesting!), and a whole new, faster interface. I actually think the existing Xbox store interface was in the ‘good enough’ category for me, and so perhaps this one will take it to ‘great’. (Hoping for ‘Hot New Games’ real-time charts, too, but a boy can dream…)

• Liam Twose, who does the #pitchyagame tag on Twitter, also has a Global Games Industry directory he’s hosting for free on Itch (PDF) and Trello. I know directories can be unwieldy (and get outdated!), but I was impressed with his publisher list in here – there will almost certainly be indie pubs you don’t know.

• In case you missed it, and SteamDB on Twitter didn’t, Valve “has recently made changing your store country more strict, which requires completing a purchase using a payment method from that country. This should hinder [those] using VPNs to buy games cheaper.” Some rumblings of reduced sales because of this, but it’s a bit early to tell, and I imagine the revenues will equalize (if not units).

• Epic noted that mod support is now in beta on the Epic Games Store, starting with Mechwarrior 5. This is interesting, and not a feature I was expecting as an Epic-exclusive integration. IMO, the ‘mods on PC’ situation is starting to get messy, given there’s Steam Workshop, third-party solutions like Mod.io (which you can use on Steam!), and then Microsoft’s Game Store on PC requires specific moderation standards for mods… maybe a subject for another time!

• There’s an MCV Develop interview with Inkle’s Joseph Humfrey & my bombastic No More Robots compadre Mike Rose about the state of the eShop for discoverability. I’ve already gone on about this at length, but Nintendo needs to think about the ‘charts/eShop interface encouraging 90% off discounts’ thing. (I think NMR might be sharing Not Tonight eShop discount results abstractly soon, that was an experiment that worked irritatingly well.)

• Scourgebringer director Thomas Altenburger has an excellent Twitter thread about pitching to publishers that I recommend you read. Basically: know your publisher, have a playable prototype, have a short/sweet 5-page pitch deck, maybe even make a 5-minute ‘this is us and our game!’ video, be very specific about production budget and schedule. (But read the thread!) Some people get a bit, uhm, overblown with their pitches.

• More asset guidelines for game devs, the sexiest thing in the world! This time, Steph H. & the smart folks at Evolve have done one for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Discord, Twitch, LinkedIn (!), YouTube and Steam. Twin this with Derek Lieu’s game trailer specs, and you may be tearing your hair out marginally less.

• Microlinks: Epic’s Tim Sweeney talks about the metaverse (& game platform costs!), xCloud gaming streaming with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is out on September 15th on Android (and probably not at all on iOS, hah), ‘make a game in our game’ service Core announced a Dungeons & Dragons IP hookup/contest, Switch eShop game releases in July were up by almost 30, year on year.

Finally this week – I was amused, following my piece about sales/reviews ratios and the Steam UI change, to have someone point out this amazing example:

Great article as always, thank you ? If you need another example of “when did Steam change their UI to encourage reviews”, check out Farming Simulator 19 ?https://t.co/gcSDKkRVdx pic.twitter.com/LSydSbto8E

— Markus Rosse (@ssero) August 3, 2020

(Subtext: Farming Simulator fans like ploughing fields a LOT. So they’ve been getting Steam reminders galore to review the game, following their daily tractor ride.)

Until next time, hope you enjoyed that curry!
Simon

“Even if we don’t want to, we need to start asking ourselves: what kinds of communities are we building?”

With that Kitfox Games communications director Victoria Tran opened her talk at GDC Summer this week about how game devs can better design game communities for kindness.

Tran pointed out that most developers do have some idea of the tone they’d like the communities around their games to have, but they too either don’t act on it or couch that goal in vague, “fluffy” terms like engaged, positive, or nice.

“That’s a really great goal, but it doesn’t concretely describe what actions to take,” Tran said. This is where she sees a need for community developers, people who take your vague community goals and figure out what that actually looks like, then work to build and nurture your community in that direction.

“You may think a violent FPS game will only attract violent, aggressive people, but that’s wrong,” said Tran. “Some of the nicest people can be found here. And the ultimate final tone [of your game’s community] is dependent on the structure of the space you set out.”

To help you better understand your role as a community developer, or to try and think like a community developer when nurturing your own game’s fanbase, Tran shared five key traits and questions to keep in mind.

Ambition: “Do I plan for and demand the best of my platform and community?”

Goals are important, says Tran; if you don’t set clear goals (in collaboration with your team) for your community, you won’t be able to achieve it.

Decisiveness: “Do I make decisions quickly?”

Building a healthy community means being willing to act quickly and decisively, and it will sometimes require you to ban some people.

Clarity: “Are my community expectations expressed and consistent?”

Tran emphasized the importance of “soft skills” in community development, noting that clear expectations are vital and must be communicated to your community in an effective, consistent manner.

Collaboration: “Am I working with my community?”

You’re not a lone wolf, even if you do happen to be a lone developer; Tran encourages devs to keep in mind that the community is their collaborator, and should be respected as such.

Energy: “Do I bring positivity to my community and lead by example?”

Leading by example and bringing the energy you want to foster among your community is key to Tran’s methodology.

Since the goal of her talk was to raise awareness about how to create kinder communities she focused on kindness as the example you want to put forth, defining “kindness” as a verb (not a noun) that requires continual practice and effort.

“Kind community design doesn’t mean chanting positive aphorisms into your community every day (though you can if you want to),” she said. “What it really means is creating a safe, low-pressure, helpful, and encouraging interactive space among the players, who in turn want to help each other.”

Tran is clear that kindness doesn’t mean thoughtlessly forgiving bad behavior or saying “we just need to be kind to each other” when a player does something offensive like use a slur; it means we “need to hold people accountable, think of the realities of the world, and set up our spaces to be both warm and progressive.”

She also pointed out that effectively designing your game’s community for kindness won’t necessarily be easy, quick, or a guaranteed path to big KPI growth and a huge fanbase; it will probably be hard and frightening at times, but the goal is to create a safer, more welcoming space for your players.

To achieve that goal, she again laid out five steps you can take to design social systems optimized for what she sees as kindness.

Rules: Social systems that shape and influence behavior

“Rules that aren’t as helpful you think they are are things like don’t be a dick, or just be nice, just be respectful, et cetera,” says Tran. “These aren’t really that productive or informative, and often result in people disputing the rule’s meaning when they break it.”

To build a better rule, says Tran, understand what social systems are: the relationships between individuals, groups, and institutions. Social systems in place at libraries, hospitals, and workplaces have their own sets of unique rules which help everything function smoothly, and game communities are very similar.

You can see how rules flow out from a game’s stated goal by looking at a classic like Monopoly: greed is what Monopoly wants its players to cultivate, and all the game’s rules are designed to encourage players to compete for the most money. If someone breaks the rules, they’re out of the game, and the game continues to flow smoothly.

So what makes a good rule? Tran recommends five principles, taken from the World Justice Project’s expectations for the rule of law: rules should be clearly defined, publicized, stable, just, and applied evenly and quickly.

If someone breaks a rule, Tran recommends you contact them privately first with a warning; a public remonstration can often

“Shame and embarassment in public is usually more effective for making the person feel defensive, rather than receptive to change,” said Tran. “Give people a chance to improve and learn.”

If they just don’t understand, Tran encourages you to think of membership in your community as a conditional privilege that can be revoked. If they’re not getting the message, or they’re just a toxic troll, ban them.

“Basically, just nip toxic members in the bud; don’t keep toxic members around because they talk and contribute to a space, and you’re afraid of silence,” said Tran. “They actually take up more space and drive away more genuinely interested members.”

Respect: Foster respect for boundaries between you, the players, the devs, and more

“A good community shouldn’t collapse because you’re not around,” said Tran. “So the next step in community design is creating a baseline of respect of you as a person in the community.”

Tran recommends that first, you be offline whenever you need to be so you create a communal expectation that you have off hours and won’t always be able to respond immediately.

Also, cultivate a culture of respect in your community; on Discord and in forums, allow yourself to be called out (politely) for your mistakes, and make sure that when others in the community disagree with or criticize each other, they do so respectfully.

“You need to separate people from their behaviors,” said Tran. “Address what they’re doing, and not who they actually are.”

Basically, try not to hold bad behavior against people; Tran recommends trying to offer community members who voice something undesirable a “golden bridge” which lets them get out of a conversation or your community entirely, without rancor. We all make mistakes.

“Basically, just don’t be petty,” said Tran. “Be someone they can look up to.”

Norms: Acceptable ways of communication

Establishing acceptable ways of communicating in your community is key to long-term success. Tran laid out two ways of thinking about this: mores and folkways. Mores are the expectations about important communications, and folkways are how people behave in casual, daily interaction.

“Mores we understand really well: rules should not be broken,” said Tran. “Folkways distinguish what we think is rude or polite, and often in community development that’s overlooked, but can plant the seed of unkindness when broken.”

As a community dev, says Tran, you have to decide what are the acceptable mores and folkways your community uses when talking to each other. Folkways are especially hard to define through anything other than example, so think through how you speak and chat

“You’ll become the de facto leader for setting the folkways, even if you don’t feel like you are,” Tran said. “So keep in mind how you interact and the jokes you make, because this will automatically be seen as the acceptable way to communicate.”

The better your fans understand the mores and folkways of your community, argues Tran, the better they’ll interact with each other.

Trust: Facilitating cooperation

“I don’t think I’m a perfect community developer; far from it,” said Tran. “But what matters is that your community trusts that you’re doing your best with the resources you have.”

Often, you are the primary and perhaps only window inside your game and your studio. So you need to build and keep trust; to do that, Tran recommends you stick to the core tenets of integrity, openness, action, and intimacy.

To show integrity, admit your mistakes when you make them, be honest (even when you’d rather not be), and keep promises. To demonstrate action, show a willingness to follow through on your promises and do things for your community. Show compassion and share your thoughts to be more open with your community, and try to find common ground with your community to build rapport and establish intimacy.

“This is partly dependent on your own studio acting responsibly; some things are out of your control,” said Tran. “Also, this will take time; you cannot rush this. This is a continual circle of events that needs to happen constantly.”

Home: Coziness for warm, personal experiences among members

“Say it with me: soft skills are valuable, they are so valuable,” Tran said. “Especially online when you’re missing most of the non-verbal cues that give context to how a person is feeling, your soft skills are imperative to creating a warm, relaxing space. Home, if you will.”

She acknowledges it’s hard to do this in one-way communications like email; forums and Discords are a better place, but they can be overwhelming.

Communication with others doesn’t actually guarantee connection; to create cozy spaces where community members can build a sense of home, Tran recommends you create small areas where fans with similar goals or interests can build community through repeated interaction.

She points to Kitfox’s own Discord as a good example: it has pronoun rolls, offshoot rooms for smaller groups to chat about a variety of topics (like what’s cute and good, or what’s yummy), and little servers and secrets for community members to discover and enjoy.

“You may find other ways to foster a kinder space in your places; this is by no means the only way to create home-like feelings,” said Tran, suggesting fun themes, metagames, or whatever your community enjoys.

“As you solidify your community pillars and uphold your community to the standards you set, the better their reputation becomes,” she added. “We’ve had people join Kitfox purely because people said it was a positive place to be.”

Ultimately, “Kitfox and any other studio exists to sell products,” concluded Tran. “But while we’re at it, we might as well do our best to make the places we touch a little bit more positive.”

Summary: To match a pattern in a given text using only a single line of Python code, use the one-liner import re; print(re.findall(pattern, text)) that imports the regular expression library re and prints the result of the findall() function to the shell.

Problem: Given a string and a regular expression pattern. Match the string for the regex pattern—in a single line of Python code!

Example: Consider the following example that matches the pattern 'F.*r' against the string 'Learn Python with Finxter'.

import re

s = 'Learn Python with Finxter'

p = 'F.*r'

# Found Match of p in s: 'Finxter'

Let’s dive into the different ways of writing this into a single line of Python code!

Exercise: Run the code. What’s the output of each method? Why does the output differ?

Do you want to master the regex superpower? Check out my new book The Smartest Way to Learn Regular Expressions in Python with the innovative 3-step approach for active learning: (1) study a book chapter, (2) solve a code puzzle, and (3) watch an educational chapter video.

Method 1: findall()

The re.findall(pattern, string, flags=0) method returns a list of string matches. Read more in our blog tutorial.

# Method 1: findall()

import re; print(re.findall('F.*r', 'Learn Python with Finxter'))

# ['Finxter']

There’s no better way of importing the re library and calling the re.findall() function in a single line of code—you must use the semicolon A;B to separate the statements A and B.

The findall() function finds all occurrences of the pattern in the string.

Method 2: search()

The re.search(pattern, string, flags=0) method returns a match object of the first match. Read more in our blog tutorial.

# Method 2: search()

import re; print(re.search('F.*r', 'Learn Python with Finxter'))

# <re.Match object; span=(18, 25), match='Finxter'>

The search() function finds the first match of the pattern in the string and returns a matching object

Method 3: match()

The re.match(pattern, string, flags=0) method returns a match object if the regex matches at the beginning of the string. Read more in our blog tutorial.

# Method 3: match()

import re; print(re.match('.*F.*r', 'Learn Python with Finxter'))

# <re.Match object; span=(0, 25), match='Learn Python with Finxter'>

The match() function finds the match of the pattern at the beginning of the string and returns a matching object. In this case, the whole string matches, so the match object encloses the whole string.

Method 4: fullmatch()

The re.fullmatch(pattern, string, flags=0) method returns a match object if the regex matches the whole string. Read more in our blog tutorial.

# Method 4: fullmatch()

import re; print(re.fullmatch('.*F.*r.*', 'Learn Python with Finxter'))

#<re.Match object; span=(0, 25), match='Learn Python with Finxter'>

The fullmatch() function attempts to match the whole string and returns a matching object if successful. In this case, the whole string matches, so the match object encloses the whole string.

Where to Go From Here?

Enough theory, let’s get some practice!

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Practice projects is how you sharpen your saw in coding!

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Then become a Python freelance developer! It’s the best way of approaching the task of improving your Python skills—even if you are a complete beginner.

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