While some of you might be too young to remember (in which case get off my lawn, you whippersnappers!), Minecraft used to be pretty different from the game we know and love today. Even though it’s hard to imagine an Overworld without llamas or turtles, they haven’t always been there (yes, I’ve checked). That’s one of the things that makes it so great – and now, Minecraft Earth is following in its footsteps.

Exciting changes are coming, and that’s all thanks to you! Yes, you! At Mojang, we love player feedback, and we’ve read all of your suggestions on how we can improve the Minecraft Earth experience. I’ve also emailed Saxs some fun changes like making the interface completely gesture-based and featuring full TikTok integration. We’ve been working hard to prepare some new features that will make Minecraft Earth even more fun to play. Without further ado…

Adventure Crystals

You know what’s better than heading out in search of adventures? Staying in and adventuring on your terms. Previously, these life-sized slices of Minecraft were scattered across the map and you had to walk a fair bit to get to them. That’s usually fine, but during these strange and scary times, going outside may not be the best idea. And even in normal circumstances, sometimes you just don’t feel like leaving the house – and that’s okay. Thanks to these new Adventure Crystals, you can now mine, fight, and loot wherever and whenever you want.

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As game dev teams around the world figure out how to work remotely in a pandemic, I thought I would share a few best practices we’ve discovered in the past two weeks in the hope that it helps other teams out there.

If you just need the TL;DR, jump down to Learned Best Practices below.

Like everyone around the world, we at SMU Guildhall have been forced to learn how to team in a virtual world. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, we were roughly half-way through our “Middle TGP” course in which our 2nd semester students are making an arcade racing game on a single, cohort-wide team.

For those not familiar with our Team Game Production (TGP) curriculum, “Middle TGP” means the training wheels are still very much on. For the vast majority of our student developers, this is their first time working on a big team. All of our Agile practices are still analog and in-person as we work through all the communication and fundamental development challenges you’d expect from working on one big team. This is to say, we transitioned from a world where every wall and whiteboard in Studio 134 and the GameLab was filled with sticky notes and kanban boards to a completely virtual studio in a matter of days. This was no small feat, and the students did a truly amazing job of adapting.

We got official word that we were going to go virtual on a Friday. By the following Wednesday, our group of 6 very talented producers had converted the analog boards scrum boards to Monday.com. Two days later, we were doing dry-runs of our daily scrums on Zoom and moving tasks on virtual boards. By the following Monday, we were meeting in Zoom’s Gallery View.

In those first few days, production expectedly slowed to a crawl as we tripped over communication issues. However, by applying Agile on a daily retro scale, we quickly figured out what worked and what didn’t rapidly. This post isn’t meant as a post mortem since we’ve only been doing this for two weeks, but we learned some lessons that may be useful to your teams out there.

What Went Right:

• Zoom and Slack: Our first day back, we had a 60-person meeting (that remarkable moment is captured in the picture above). You would think it would be utter chaos, but it actually worked.
• Daily production retros, a global embrace of experimentation, and an open sharing of best practices led to incredibly agile improvement on a hourly basis. I can’t say we’re at 100% velocity, but we got up to speed within a week. The team was able to hit their 1stP/VS milestone today, and lost only 1 week to getting up to speed in virtual.
• A deep bench of support and a whatever-it-takes attitude by our technical team meant we could shift the entirety of SMU–not just Guildhall–to virtual within days. I can’t thank our tech team enough for their support, flexibility, and patience.
• In TGP, we preach Patience and Grace: have patience and grace with each other as we make mistakes and continually improve. The students have exercised this philosophy more than I could have imagined in this past month. I can’t think of a single time someone has lost their cool or gotten mad since we’ve gone virtual. This is remarkable, considering the stress and chaos this pandemic has caused.

What Went Wrong:

• For me, my co-faculty, and the project leadership team, situational awareness was completely cut off. We went from gathering a ton of signals from the room simply by listening and observing to seeing the project through a single straw. In the Before Times, we could listen to multiple conversations, pick up on emotional flareups, and generally read body language around the room to maintain an innate understanding of how the team was doing. In a Zoomed-out world, all of those signals are cut off. It’s getting better, but it’s still a big problem.
• What was implied and understood is now missed. By now, we’re all familiar with Zoom’s gallery view. In our first days working remotely, there were a lot of open-ended questions (“What do y’all think?”) that were met with crickets. People didn’t realize you were talking to them. Misunderstandings abounded.
• Be wary of accidental Zoom meeting attendees. There’s a middle school teacher out there somewhere that has mistyped my personal Zoom link for their class in their syllabus. So several times this week, we’ve had very confused kids pop into our meetings. It hasn’t been a problem and we just laugh, but be aware this might happen to you. The alternative is to password protect your Zoom meetings which introduces some overhead. Your mileage may vary.

Learned Best Practices:

Here’s the good stuff. We’ve collected a set of best practices we learned in the past two weeks. Hopefully this helps you, too:

• Call and Response: Our 6 producers have their sub-teams check in two or three times a day, depending. Each person Slacks what they’re working on and sends a screenshot of their work. This keeps folks accountable, and it also lets those of us at the exec level graze the information passively to keep up on what’s going on.
• Assume nothing. Be explicit in your Zoom meetings. If you’re talking to/or about someone, use their name. Over-use reflective listening to ensure you understood what people are saying. Also be explicit about action items: Who is responsible? Who is following up? What are the deliverables? How will we know it’s done?
• Be super-, extra-, triple-explicit about your Definitions of Done. It is almost a given that two people to have a conversation in Zoom or Slack and be coming from two completely different sets of understanding without realizing it. Again, reflective listening and explicit coverage of action plans helps.
• It’s a requirement that all cameras are on in Zoom meetings. This keeps people accountable and present. We also require they wear pants. Really. This helps maintain a sense of professionalism and literal hygiene on the team.
• Pin daily schedules in your team’s Slack channel with embedded links. Giving everyone on the team an idea of the times and virtual places they needed to be in is critical.
• Get in the habit of providing links to zoom meetings frequently and redundantly. In other words, don’t make people dig. Instead of “Meeting’s starting, y’all” (we’re in Texas), be explicit: “Team Meeting now: https://smu.zoom.us/j/1234512356”
• Record and share everything. Relevant to not having situational awareness and not being able to attend multiple meetings at once, reviewing recorded meetings is the next best thing we found. Zoom’s cloud recording feature is a godsend here.
• Check in often. This isn’t on the team level (though we check in often there too). I’m talking about personal wellness checks for everyone. We’re in this together, and it’s a scary time for many. The power of simply checking in and letting people vent goes a long way to keeping overall morale up and staying positive as a team.
• Provide a way for teammates to commune and just “be” together. To facilitate this, we encourage team members who aren’t bouncing from meeting to meeting to host a Zoom meeting of their own where their coworkers can join. This approximates what it was like to work together at a table or in a workgroup. It’s not perfect, but it provides a little bit of a psychological safety net, especially for those who are living alone.

Still to be Sorted Out:

We still haven’t found a good way to do multiplayer testing or playtest sessions. We’re exploring Zoom’s shared screens, but it’s hard to talk and play and control the game volume in Zoom. Introducing Twitch and Discord might seem like a natural solution, but then you get away from the group aspect afforded by Zoom. We’re figuring it out still.

So there you go. I hope this helps. Share your best practices in the comments below.

Stay safe, and be well. We’ll see you when this is all over.

Alex Hutchinson started Typhoon Studios to make more lighthearted, hopeful games that were different than the ones he creative directed at Ubisoft, such as Assassin’s Creed III and Far Cry 4.

He didn’t get to finish his final project at Ubisoft, a lighthearted sci-fi game codenamed Pioneer after a disagreement with higher-ups at the Montreal branch of the publisher and he subsequently left in 2017. Hutchinson wanted to do something in a similar vein for his Typhoon’s first project, Journey to the Savage Planet, an irreverent exploration game inspired by science fiction comics of the 1950s.

“I’m a fan of golden age science fiction,” Hutchinson tells me as he sits in a room decorated with comic books. “I was excited by the idea that people had only kept the dystopian angle of science fiction. They had forgotten there was this big arc of hopeful, ‘we can go anywhere’ sort of fiction. That strangely feels more valuable right now.”

Hutchinson’s time at Ubisoft greatly influenced his view on and approach to game development. It led to Typhoon Studios applying lessons they learned working on major franchises to their work on Journey to the Savage Planet. They didn’t want to crunch and they wanted to build off the skills they developed while working on games like Far Cry 4.

The combination of Hutchinson’s fondness for science fiction and the team’s eagerness to build on their past experience let them “set a box around what we wanted to make,” he said. “Then we just iterated and iterated for a few months. Then we found the team was in love with humor, so those three things came together to create Savage Planet.”

Hutchinson had serious burnout from crunch at Ubisoft, working long hours to make sure the massive worlds of both Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed were full of things to do. He, and many members of his team that jumped ship from Ubisoft, didn’t want to go through that again.

“It’s half inspiration and half practical,” he said. “It’s a new team with new technology so we didn’t know what we could achieve. We wanted to be both practical and reasonable and keep it as a focused experience.” The team knew their game would be “feature-lite,” as Hutchinson put it. It was the first project they were working on as a small studio, so they wanted to refine a single idea rather than spend more development time trying to make a bigger game.

Journey to the Savage Planet is a first-person survival adventure game whose setting is established by purposely corny live-action videos about how megacorporations have endangered humanity. You explore an open area of an alien planet that is gated off metroidvania-style, fight aliens with different weapons, and solve various environmental puzzles. The game incorporates systemic, sandbox gameplay elements along with handcrafted components.

“You can have thousands of hours of gameplay if it’s purely systemic,” Hutchinson said. “You can do that, but if you want to have any sense of narrative you’ll need to do it by hand. If you want that you need to tailor your ambitions.”

Far Cry 4, as well as other Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed games, is also a mixture of handcrafted narrative and systemic content. Handcrafted missions take much longer to develop than systemic combat scenarios and puzzles that players naturally run into while exploring the worlds of those games. Hutchinson was interested in the idea that Far Cry 4‘s systemic content took “a tenth of the time to build” than story missions but took up just as much of the player’s time.

“People were laughing, we put the cooperative mode in and people were really enjoying [Far Cry 4],” he said. “Their friend was being eaten by a bear on fire, that’s the example that always comes up. I thought there was something to mine there. This is an unexplored space, we could take out the narrative and add our own systemic parts.”

Journey to the Savage Planet came from Typhoon Studios’ urge to expand on those elements of Far Cry. Savage Planet is similar to Far Cry gameplay but only 10-15 hours long. It’s narrative light (it was originally going to have even less narrative), letting the player explore the world at their own place while encountering different creatures and puzzles. “We just needed to put the narrative into it to add a framework,” he said.

Hutchinson emphasized that this is what he and the rest of his team felt they could do between 2017 and when the game launched earlier this year.

It has light difficulty as Hutchinson wanted players to be able to cruise through it and have fun. They also wanted to create everything themselves, so they knew it would be smaller. “Our level designers and artists were excited to build everything by hand,” he said. “Not a tiny part of a game. Not a texture for something but a whole, smaller game.” The entire in-game world was built by five artists and Hutchinson wrote the game himself, so a lot of the design process came down to time.

Most of your time in Savage Planet will be spent exploring the planet freely while hunting collectibles, cataloging all alien life, and fighting different enemies as you encounter them. Even with a list of tasks that need doing, most players will still spend far less time in Savage Planet than Far Cry 4.

“We didn’t want people to see it as a liability,” Hutchinson said of the game’s lighter difficulty and shorter length. Running a studio with fairer labor practices had an impact on the actual game they released. Hutchinson knew that, saying that’s why they didn’t release it at full price. “We’re also asking people to take a risk with a new IP,” he said.

Reception for Journey to the Savage Planet was mixed when it launched in January. Some reviews, including Eurogamer and GameSpot, applauded the shorter length, lighter difficulties but still found an issue with the game’s reliance on repetitive combat–something that critics have blamed on the studio’s history with Far Cry.

“We were satisfied with the results. It felt like the emotion of the reviews were positive,” Hutchinson said. “We were not being aggressive with the scope, we knew it wasn’t going to be an A+. We made a piece with that idea. We wanted people to be happy. We wanted people to enjoy the process of playing.”

Hutchinson and many members of his team are experienced developers, so after a certain point in development, they knew they wouldn’t have time to fix certain shortcomings. “The reviewers and players would be surprised how often the teams know where their game is during development, especially closer to the end,” Hutchinson said. “You can make big changes at the start but once your two-thirds of the way through you become aware of the problems that will ship with the game. You know what doesn’t work and what’s great.”

Typhoon Studios, which was purchased by Google to be part of its Stadia Games and Entertainment division at the end of 2019 right before Savage Planet launched, is happy with the final version of Journey to the Savage Planet. The team managed to ship the game with no overtime and only one few-month extension that their publisher 505 Games agreed on.

“We’re all a bit older now, and many of us have small children, so nobody wanted to do crazy hours. We all wanted to make a great game, stay small and enjoy the experience, which meant still seeing our families,” Hutchinson said. “So we just kept making steady progress, trying to scope continually and not changing our minds too much on what we’d decided to achieve. We just wanted to keep it under control to make it polished and tight.”

Nintendo recently confirmed that the next fighter joining Super Smash Bros. Ultimate will be from the company’s other colourful Switch fighting game ARMS. The IP may not have taken off quite like, say, Splatoon, but we’ve got a soft spot for the limb-y scrapper’s energy and sense of humour, and in all honesty we’re just relived we’re not getting another sword fighter.

ARMS launched back in 2017 with 10 playable fighters and that roster grew to 15 over time. Below we’ve listed them all followed by a brief bio from the (now-defunct) official ARMS website to give your memory a jolt if it’s been a while since you brawled with Spring Man, Ribbon Girl and company. At the bottom of the page you’ll find a poll to vote for the fighter you think should be the first to come in Smash Bros.’ Fighters Pass Vol. 2.

ARMS was free to play for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers from 26th March to 6th April, so even if you didn’t catch it at launch, many of you will likely be more familiar with the faces below than you were before the Nintendo Direct Mini. The announcement and release is scheduled for June, but in the meantime take a look at the roster and tell us which one you’d most like to see get that prestigious Smash invitation.

If your preferred ARMS fighter is different from the one you think Nintendo will pick, go out on a limb and let us know your prediction below.

Over the weekend we experienced a few XP and progression issues. To thank you for your patience while we got everything back up and running, we'll be leaving the 2XP, 2XP Weapon and 2XP Tiers event on until Tuesday, April 7th at 11PM PST.

— Infinity Ward (@InfinityWard) April 7, 2020

eastasiasoft is bringing its upcoming bullet-hell twin-stick shooter Null Drifter to Nintendo Switch later this week and a brand new trailer has been released to celebrate.

The game promises “simple yet nostalgic presentation while shooting and dashing through single-screen bullet-hell action”. Players will be able to test their skills in a series of gradually evolving challenges, aiming to challenge high scores in worldwide online leaderboards as they go. We’ve got an official description and feature list for you below:

Blast into a 1-bit lo-fi simulation that will gradually train your skills up to become the ultimate space-fighter pilot! Secretly part of the Project Starship world, this twin-stick shooter is designed to prepare pilots for their mission against the awakened forces of the void. By slowly introducing new challenges and more frenetic battles, the Null Drifter simulation will push the limits of any pilot to the next level!

Features:
– Shoot and dash through single-screen bullet hell action!
– Experience simple yet nostalgic presentation.
– Customize video effects and color palettes.
– Test your skills in a series of gradually evolving challenges.
– Upgrade weapons on the fly!
– Enjoy an AI-composed lo-fi soundtrack.

Here’s a better look at that minimalistic art style:

The game’s scheduled to be available on Switch from 9th April, with pricing set at $4.99/€4.99.

Think you might give this one a go? Fire a comment our way below.