#I would very much bring them back into the Indie creator space conversation

[theliterarywolf]

Okay! Guys! Seriously!

Did Gumroad acknowledge the 'hosting a legitimate murderer's manifesto' thing or not?

Because I'm seeing so many indie creators and artists double-book their content on both itch.io and Gumroad that I can't help but think 'is... is it okay now?'

[entergamingxp]

Celebrating Blackness in Gaming’s Past, Present, and Future

June 9, 2020 2:30 PM EST

During times like this, it’s especially important to highlight and celebrate black heroes, casts, and developers themselves in video games.

With what’s been happening in the past and especially in light of current events, it’s important to reflect on the video games that have centered or been inclusive of black characters, as well as games led by black developers. Representation has been an ongoing conversation in video games (and other forms of media), and the desire for new stories told from the perspectives of diverse voices and backgrounds has only continued to grow.

In recent years, more games have been releasing that highlight black characters or have been created by black developers. A large chunk of those games are created by independent developers, who have far more creative freedom to craft the kinds of characters they would like to see in games. Even rarer are games led and published by black developers, with many of these narratives still being told by white creators.

But compared with the amount of white protagonists (and all or mostly white casts) that we often see in video games, there’s still so much work to be done. As we’ve been seeing in the past week, plenty of black creatives have been given the long-due spotlight to showcase their talents as opportunities from companies are finally opening up. I truly hope this will lead seeing more blackness reflected in both the games that we play and their internal development talent.

That said, there have been notable black characters and stories told through video games that are worth highlighting. Below, here are some of the most prominent games of the past several years that either star a black character, have a significant (as in mostly) black cast, or were made by black developers.

Telltale’s The Walking Dead

Many fans were enraptured by the first season of The Walking Dead, which introduced two lead black characters: Lee Everett and Clementine. Their relationship and overall story arc–backed by some seriously powerful writing–gave birth to one of the greatest narratives in gaming I have ever witnessed. After Lee’s death, seeing Clementine grow far too fast as she fights for survival while reconciling her perceived role in her father figure’s death is moving and harrowing. Most of all, Telltale’s The Walking Dead creates a sense of constant urgency and dread that completely sucks in the player and doesn’t let go until the very end.

Mafia III

Set in 1968 New Orleans, Mafia III follows the exploits of Lincoln Clay, a war veteran who aims to build a new criminal organization while seeking revenge on the Italian mob. The game holds an extremely uncompromising gaze at systematic racism while allowing for the black protagonist to empower himself and take back power from those who would strive to oppress him. The characters are compelling, and the setting and story of Mafia III offers a rare gaming experience that interweaves the experience of actual blackness in its narrative.

Chromatose

Chromatose is an upcoming indie title by a black lead developer going by the moniker Akabaka. A visual novel and JRPG blend influenced by Persona 3, it follows the protagonist as he awakens in a strange nightmare after a fall that should have ended his life. Amnesiac strangers are also trapped in this world for their own unique reasons. The haunting visuals filled with strong color contrast convey a tale filled with danger at every turn. Between a captivating and diverse cast, excellent monster designs, and a fast-paced battle system, Chromatose seems to be shaping up to be a gem of an indie game.

Watch Dogs 2

Watch Dogs 2 takes place in a fictionalized version of the San Francisco Bay Area and stars Marcus Holloway, a hacker who works with the hacking group DedSec to take down the city’s advanced surveillance system known as ctOS. Having the black hacker Marcus taking the lead role in this game adds a unique perspective on the plot that deals with fighting back in a system designed to strip away power and silence its citizens. Seeing him fight tirelessly and slowly gain traction against the city government is incredibly empowering and strengthens the overall narrative even more.

Murder By Numbers

For fans of the excellent Ace Attorney series comes an indie game with a similar approach to storytelling, over-the-top characters, and investigative gameplay. Murder By Numbers takes place in 1996 Los Angeles and stars Honor Mizrahi, an actress on a hit TV detective show. Unfortunately, her boss winds up dead just moments after he fires her and she finds herself forced to investigate his murder in order to secure her own innocence. Putting aside the harsh reality of black women being kicked out of their own careers, the game does well in emulating the fun and often ridiculous style of Ace Attorney while establishing its own charm. Much of that charm is attributed to Honor herself, who’s plucky, determined, and resourceful, as well as her interactions with her robot sidekick SCOUT. Murder By Numbers is a fun and lighthearted foray complimented by Picross-style puzzles that’s worth checking out.

Apex Legends

Seemingly (but officially unconfirmed) in response to the Overwatch controversy surrounding its lack of playable black women, the free-to-play Battle Royale game launched with two black women characters: Anita Williams and Ajay Che. Not only that, but these two were and still are front and center in the marketing of Apex Legends, which is very notable. While the game is light on lore (as games in this genre tend to be), both of them have very separate upbringings, personalities, and combat proficiencies. From what we know of them, they have well-fleshed-out motivations for why they fight. And I really love the touch that Ajay is a healer, an archetype you don’t tend to see associated with black women characters.

She Dreams Elsewhere

This indie title is a true rarity in that the entire party is black and stars a black woman protagonist. She Dreams Elsewhere is a surrealist adventure RPG where you traverse protagonist Thalia’s dreamscape along with her friends. She must come to grips with and confront her mental health conditions, and escape from a never-ending coma. One part Undertale, one part Persona, it’s a game made beautiful through its retro simplicity and haunting soundtrack that combines black music such as R&B, funk, and jazz. Not only do we have that level of diversity and culture, but the characters themselves–especially Thalia–are fleshed out and fully-developed. When pitted against the well-designed monsters using abilities grounded in reality, She Dreams Elsewhere truly ups the surrealism surrounding its setting and atmosphere.

EQQO

EQQO is a unique title, in terms of both its passive storytelling and gameplay, as well as the fact that it’s inspired by Ethiopian mythology. This game is the tale of a mother as she weaves a great story of her son born blind yet full of life and love. The puzzle-based exploration and gameplay is presented as a mythological legend slowly unfolding as the mother, playing as the narrator, tells it. Gorgeous orchestrated music complements the visuals in a harmony that gives even more depth to the narrative. Seeing this level of care and detail with a mythology that is rarely represented in gaming gives me hope that the future will bring more games like this one being created and given proper attention.

Cyberpunk 2077

It’s exceedingly rare to find a triple A title’s universe created by a black person, and yet the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 is just that exception. Mike Pondsmith is best known for his work for the publisher R. Talsorian Games, where he developed a majority of the company’s roleplaying game lines. His most recent project is the collaboration between himself and CD Projekt Red, Cyberpunk 2077, which takes place in his own Cyberpunk RPG universe. Pondsmith’s involvement in the video game’s development mostly focuses on the game world aspect and mechanics as well as his general input, such as shooting a bulletproof backpack to test just how a bullet would react with it; for implementing in the game properly, of course.

Streets of Rage 4

The triumphant return of the wildly popular 2D side scrolling beat-em-up franchise, Streets of Rage 4 stars a cast almost entirely of black/POC fighters including newcomer Cherry Hunter. Wood Oak City falls under the control of a new crime syndicate led by Mr. X’s children, the Y Twins, who are planning on brainwashing the city with the use of hypnotic music. The plot, while simple, is a great excuse to beat up some mooks and the character designs, animation, and music are phenomenal. Also that’s not to mention that Cherry, Floyd Iraia, and Cherry’s father Adam Hunter are featured very prominently on the cover and the general advertising. It’s great to see a beat-em-up starring so many cool black characters.

Earthnight

A love letter to classic fast-paced 2D platformers (think Sonic the Hedgehog), Earthnight uses the genre to tell a tale of a bleak dragon apocalypse where humans have been exiled to space, forced to live in orbit above the planet. Protagonists Sydney and Stanley team up one day and decide to skydive back to Earth, taking out as many dragons as they can along the way. The 2D animations are breathtaking; everything from the ripples in their clothing, to the fluidity of their general movements, to the colorful and insane monsters that can take up nearly the entire screen are stunning. It’s clear there was a lot of love and effort put into this game. I also need to mention how much I love Sydney’s design and the way she’s front and center in the trailers. How can you beat a game that lets you fight dragons because a little girl and a dude had enough?

Broken Age

Broken Age released back in 2014 and 2015 as two separate acts by Double Fine and starred protagonists Vella Tartine and Shay Volta (played by Masasa Moyo and Elijah Wood, respectively). While initially their narratives are completely separate from each other, as the story unfolds you realize how intertwined they really are. What makes the storytelling so satisfying is that because the protagonists are kept separate for so long, their individual character arcs can develop in a satisfying way without interfering in the overall story. Vella, the young black girl, in particular had a very strong and compelling story worth experiencing. In Broken Age, seeing her deal with traumatic events as she fought back against a seemingly unavoidable force of destruction made for an excellent real-life comparison to black struggle.

Here are some honorable mentions of other games featuring black/POC characters that, though they didn’t make my list, are worth checking out:

Assassin’s Creed Origins

Half-Life: Alyx

Afterparty

Treachery in Beatdown City

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider

Beyond Good and Evil

Remember Me

If you’re looking for more black indie talent, check out this Twitter thread as well as this one. For a huge directory of black game developers and their projects, check out the Black Game Developers website and consider supporting them.

And finally if you’re a Black, Asian, and/or Ethnic minority, Code Coven is offering scholarships for their Intro to Game Making Course, which will be open until June 10, 2020.

Are there any games or developers you know of that deserve a mention? Feel free to sound off in the comments!

June 9, 2020 2:30 PM EST

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/06/celebrating-blackness-in-gamings-past-present-and-future/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=celebrating-blackness-in-gamings-past-present-and-future

[mst3kproject]

The Vindicator

 We’re heading back to Canada, the True North Strong and Free that brought us The Final Sacrifice.  Our indie movie scene up here is pretty weird and very cheap, and this is a prime example of the latter.  It’s a dimly-lit, badly-directed ripoff with shitty effects and a has-been headliner. The perfect thing for Pearl to throw Mike’s way in between her other cruel experiments.

A research guy named Carl is killed in a Science Accident at EvilCo, so his bosses save his brain to make into an indestructible cyborg I hereby dub RoboCrap.  Boy, that’s a great idea.  Not like he’ll escape and go on a rampage.  EvilCo’s boss decides that the only way to get him back is to hire Hunter, a ninja lady played by the closest thing this movie has to a star, Pam Grier. By using RoboCrap’s wife Lauren as bait, they lure him back to EvilCo for a final confrontation.  Somehow this all results in people being able to land on Mars.  I don’t know. I don’t care.

So despite a title that’s supposed to invoke The Terminator, this is in fact a ripoff of Robocop, and it’s very, very bad.  Almost Future War bad, where they really shouldn’t have tried to make this movie on this budget.  I can say in its favour that it did understand what was interesting about Robocop and tried to ape that rather than just showing us a cyborg killing people, but it still gets it all wrong.

Let us start with RoboCrap himself – I know his name is Carl because people keep yelling it at him.  He’s obviously the Alex Murphy of this story, the guy whose death is co-opted to create a killing machine, and who eventually turns this weapon against his creators while reclaiming his humanity.  They do this wrong at every stage.  RoboCop made sure we got to know Murphy just well enough to feel for his death and be interested in him rediscovering himself.  When we meet Carl we see that he’s at odds with his boss over funding, but this isn’t particularly compelling, and the only thing we know about him on a personal level is that his wife is pregnant.  It’s kind of like Hawkeye in Age of Ultron, where the existence of a family is treated as a substitute for characterization.

Having failed to humanize Carl, the movie then fails to dehumanize him.  RoboCop presented the title character to us very much as a machine, with very little idea, at first, how much of Murphy was left in him.  Carl still knows who he is and soon finds out what he is, and there’s never any doubt even among the bad guys that there’s still a human being under all that machinery.  This is illustrated best by the movie’s own visuals – one of the way’s RoboCop hid Murphy’s humanity was to cover his eyes.  The Vindicator covers everything but Carl’s eyes.

While I’m on that topic, the suit design is terrible.  Robocop had an easily recognizable silhouette that looked convincingly mechanical while not being distractingly complex. RoboCrap here looks like he’s made of garbage.  There are far too many little parts and the lighting is so bad you often can’t see anything but a mass of vaguely metallic stuff.  Even in daytime shots, you never really get an impression of what this being looks like or what any of this junk does.  The fact that you can see the actor’s eyes mostly just emphasizes that this is a stupid costume with a guy stumbling around inside of it.

Look at that.  This shot would be forty times better if he were standing in front of the yellow van, where he’d stand out, instead of in front of the scrap metal he blends right into.  Morons.

I guess the wardrobe department’s reasoning for leaving the eyes uncovered was that it would allow the actor to emote.  It’s too bad they hired a crappy actor.  He’s bad as RoboCrap, and worse in the early scenes where he’s just supposed to be Carl.  The worst thing he does is shout NOOOOOOO during the science accident, which is so awful it’s hilarious.  Then not only do they show it to us again in flashbacks, they also have him go off on another NOOOOOOO when he realizes he’s killed a bunch of people in a sewer. You can’t watch this and take it seriously.

A poorly-handled main character will kill a movie very effectively, but The Vindicator does just about everything else wrong, too.  The EvilCo boss’ reasoning for creating this cyborg never makes any sense – in fact, it makes so little sense that other characters keep pointing out how dumb it is!  When you know something in your movie is stupid, the last thing you want to do is draw attention to the fact!  Nor do we ever really know what it is Carl’s trying to achieve.  He hangs around in the sewer, leaves cryptic messages for his wife, and defends himself from a biker gang and from Hunter’s mercenaries.  Eventually he reprograms himself to remove the insta-kill mode they inexplicably installed in him, but that happens offscreen and is rather anti-climactic. The insta-kill is established for us in a scene with a lab chimp, where the CEO of EvilCo literally pokes the animal with a stick until it gets so pissed off at him it dies of a heart attack.  This is established like it should be a plot point, but we never even see anyone concerned that Carl will Rage To Death.  The movie has totally forgotten about it by the time we get that far.

Similarly, we never find out what Carl was threatening to ‘blow the whistle on’ when he argues with his boss.  EvilCo is up to some shifty stuff to be sure, but as far as I can tell from the movie we see, it’s all disguised.  The development of the robotic limbs was undercover as advanced prosthetics, the indestructible shell was a spacesuit, the mind control was only for use on animals, etc etc etc.  Even the people developing this stuff were surprised when the CEO had them bring it all together to create RoboCrap.  What did Carl know?  We never find out, because the movie never mentions it again.  I figured he would try to use secrets as leverage but nope.

Another really weird plot point has to do with the synthesizer in Carl’s house, which apparently has a short circuit or something that picks up radio broadcasts.  RoboCarp uses this to communicate with Lauren, but it’s never clear why this is necessary.  He’s perfectly able to speak, and there’s no reason why he couldn’t just phone her. Using the synthesizer doesn’t even accomplish anything in the plot – EvilCo has the house bugged, so they’re listening in on the conversations anyway!

The list of crap goes on.  There’s an annoying little kid playing in a junkyard who sees RoboCrap and asks him if he’s from outer space.  Like the ape raging itself to death in the opening scene, this kid is introduced as if he ought to be important to the plot, but he isn’t – he just stands around going ‘ooooh’ as RoboCrap lifts cars, and then he’s gone. I guess we should be glad of that, because it means we’re not obliged to put up with his ‘cute’ antics for more than a couple of minutes.  At the same time, he’s still annoying, and since he doesn’t do anything important, he’s also pointless.

One of the biggest ruined opportunities in the movie was the character of Carl’s co-worker Bert.  When they’re introduced they seem to be good friends and Carl asks Lauren to contact Bert for him so that he can ask for help.  Bert meets Carl, but it turns out to be a trap by EvilCo, who have rewarded Bert for his help with a promotion.  This makes Bert, and the conflict between his loyalty to his friend and his loyalty to his job, potentially quite interesting… but then it turns out he’s just an asshole, who only hung out with Carl at all because he was in love with Lauren.  When Lauren rejects him, he tries to kill her.

This means we don’t have to feel bad about it when RoboCrap kills Bert a few minutes later, and neither does RoboCrap himself. But honestly, it would have been a way better movie if we did.  Carl and Bert’s friendship was one of the only relationships in the movie that was properly established, and having Bert actually blackmailed into betraying him, and Carl actually forced by his programming to murder his friend, would have had far more emotional impact.  Carl is horrified by his own killing but we don’t really feel that when his victims are criminals and his evil bosses.

Is there anything good in this movie?  There’s a few things here and there.  The lab animals that escape from their cages to kill the scientist who’d been torturing them did richly deserve that revenge.  There’s a scene in which some extremely creepy dolls are used to emphasize that Carl has become an uncanny effigy of humanity or something, and it goes on way after we’ve got the idea but it’s all right.  It’s also established that RoboCrap will only kill in self-defense, when a perceived threat activates the insta-kill.  He states that he doesn’t want to kill people but cannot control this programming – so the bad guys repeatedly bring violence upon themselves when they attempt to attack him.  This is clearly intended to be ironic and kind of works.  Hunter’s suicide, when it’s very unlikely RoboCrap was actually going to kill her, functions on a similar level.

Man, this movie is bad, and it’s not even bad in a fun way – it’s just bad. It ‘got’ what made RoboCop worth watching but it still couldn’t do anything with that, and everything it could have done with what it had, it fucked up.  The result reminds me of that Fix Auto commercial where the kid flails around and ends up whacking his mom’s car instead of the pinata. They could have had something tasty, but instead they just made an expensive mess.

[michael-radi-the-glamorous-life]

Love The Art, Hate The Artist?

Society - particularly American society - loves to demonize or to “other” art and artists.

We deride people who create:

“Oh, you’re an artist? You’re one of those.”

“Oh, you’re a writer? I wish I could sit at home all day.”

“Oh, you’re an actor? You must love starving.”

These are of course specific examples using common ideas and tropes, but these kinds of reactions are common and probably sound familiar to you.

We tell people who want to go into the arts:

“Why would you to throw your life away?”

“But you have so much potential!”

“But there’s no money in the arts!”

Being a creator is clearly seen as being *less than,* but why? Less than what? Why would we consider becoming an artist or writer or performer or designer a path that is throwing your life away or not using your skills and talents?

Well, Capitalism.

But this type of thinking and behavior not only can be unlearned, but it needs to be unlearned. Art and the products of creation are everywhere, but we’ve been conditioned to have a blind spot for most of it, and what we do see we are told to feel contempt for. Let’s just see how pervasive art is, shall we?

Visual

Let’s begin with the category that most people think of as “art.”

When you say “Visual Art,” the first thing people think of is the type of painting or photography that one might hang on the wall in a home or a place of business. Or perhaps they picture “stodgy old art” that isn’t their taste, like what hangs in museums.

Okay, then let’s start here. Why was this art created? Was it to fulfill the whimsical desires of the artist? Was it an experiment? Or an off-the-cuff creation?

Likely not.

Visual art is meant to have purpose - it’s functional. What is that function? To provide a pleasing visual aesthetic for the person purchasing the art. It’s possible the art was even commissioned originally, meaning that its sole purpose in existing is to be seen and provide visual pleasure for someone. Is this not a worthy function?

And we - as capitalist consumers - hang art everywhere. We buy photographs and prints, paintings and drawings, we frame puzzles, we order canvases, we find indie art shops, we (for better or worse) purchase “Ikea art” - and all for the purpose of enriching the visual elements of our lives.

We adore this art - so why would we deride the people who created what we love?

And Visual Art is not just the things I’ve mentioned above. It’s a gigantic category covering things that we see around us everywhere, all day every day. Here are just a few examples:

Advertisements - Posters, online ads, business cards, etc.

Logos - For businesses, for individuals, for podcasts, for the app on your phone, etc.

Cards/Invitations/Mailings - Wedding invites, birthday cards, charity solicitation mailings, theater season announcements, etc.

Design - Book covers, the shape of a Febreeze bottle, the pattern on your tissue box, etc.

Theatrical - Set, lighting, costumes, direction, performance, etc.

I could go on and on. Everywhere you look is something that some has put time, thought, and design into. That is art. And we use this art. So why deride the artist?

Auditory

First thing people think of? Songwriters.

Not composers, of course, but songwriters. People whose music we hear on the radio. People who create sound and music for the purpose of money and fame. People we worship, people we hate, people who are publicly visible, people who acquire awards, people who fill our ears through radio and streaming and headphones and coffee shop speakers.

Do some of these people make money? Yes - though not nearly as many of them as you think.

Do we love these musicians and often make idols out of them? Yes - some of them at least.

“So that’s not derision, this a a category where we celebrate art!”

But all Auditory Art? And all artists?

You may know the singer-songwriter of that song you love, but do you know the name of the person or company that produced it? How about the sound engineer? The person who mixed it? Or who edited it? Or who created the underlying beat track for the radio version?

There are far more creators on any one radio song than we ever think about.

And where else is sound created other than for the radio?

Theatre

Film

Dance

Lobby/Reception Areas

Elevators

Public Spaces

Websites

Video Games

And what about other types of sound design?

Whether or not you think about it, the lack of sound (or even silence) in a space has been purposefully created for you. Someone said “I don’t want there to be too much sound in this space” and a creator made that happen.

There are also publicly available sounds, tracks, and effects that have been created for users of programs and apps like Musical Notation Software, Recording Software, Sleep Therapy Software, etc.

Someone made everything you hear that isn’t a natural sound. And we use these sounds to create an atmosphere - a pleasing environment.

We love Auditory Art. So shouldn’t we love the artists?

Functional

People come to New York City and buy pictures and renderings of the skyline.

Why?

‘Cause it’s beautiful. It’s been designed to be beautiful.

Functional Art is a broad category that covers the pleasing artistic aesthetic of things that also serve a functional purpose in our lives - well, other than the function of being artistically pleasing.

Here’s a smattering of what could fit in this category, just from an architectural and mechanical point of view:

Building Design

Interior Design - This goes for office space, retail space, and residential space.

Bridges

Roadways

Vehicles

Airplanes

Boats/Ships

Piers

Island Barriers

Canals

Farmland

Large Machinery

Everything has been designed, whether or not you’ve noticed.

And plenty of other types of everyday objects are also included in this category:

Clothing - I’d say this is a pretty big one, especially considering diversity and range.

Furniture

Household Objects

Kitchen Gadgets

Perfumes

Scent Products - Candles, plug-ins, incense, etc.

Small Machinery - Printers, copiers, etc.

Sometimes people argue that - for things such as scent - it is scientists who find these elements and put them together to create pleasing aromas. Or engineers who created the machinery that makes the engine of a car work properly.

Yes. And we wouldn’t dare label these creators as “artists,” would we? The products are far too functional to be given that lowly title, right?

We love Functional Art. We use it. We need it. So we should love the artists as well.

Technological

We rely on technology all day every day. We carry small computers in our pockets. We use larger computers for work and for pleasure.

And someone created that. Both the insides and the outsides.

Technology is something that was created for the purpose of being functional, but that the public also demands to be constantly aesthetically pleasing. And everything that has to do with technology was imagined and created by people.

Another list:

Phones

Computers

Tablets

Hardware

Software

Apps

Programs

Cameras

Film

Coding

Websites

CGI

Electronic Instruments

Medical Equipment

Electricity Reliant Objects

Lighting -Of all varieties.

And a billion other things. And if you notice, much of this crosses over with Functional Art. These days it’s very difficult to create something useful that doesn’t rely on technology in one way or another.

The people who created all of this are artists. Why deride them?

Experiential

Now, more than most times, humans are all about experiences.

We search out activities, places, and recreations that will provide us with pleasant environments and experiences worth remembering or revisiting.

And…you guessed it…artists created it all. Top to bottom, left to right, forward to back, and in a thousand other ways we didn’t even know existed.

Some of these include:

Movies

TV Shows

Theme Parks - Disney anyone?

Theatre

Concerts

Dance

News Articles/Papers/Programs

Books

Sport Stadium Interiors - You can go to a Mets game just for the experiences at CitiField!

Gardens

Parks

Bowling Alleys

Rock Climbing Walls

Dining Spaces

Food

Alcohol

Travel Excursions

Anything that you go to, or bring to yourself, in order to engage in an experience can be considered Experiential Art.

We fill our lives with this stuff. We discuss it all regularly. We create cultural norms and build conversations around this art. We argue about episodes. We share our favorite meals.

It’s all art. So why deride the artists?

It’s Everywhere

Art is not a high concept that can be boxed into a corner. Art is not created in a vacuum. Art is not purely aesthetic. Art is not something only the wealthy experience.

Art has function. Art has meaning. Art enriches lives. Art allows us to live. Art helps us survive.

Art is all around us and we use it every day. And we love it - we don’t put it down or tell it to go away. We don’t call the art around us a waste or time, or life, or potential.

So why deride the artist?

[robotloveskitty]

Good news and Bad news!

Ahoy there! It’s been awhile since you’ve heard from us, we’ve been very quiet on here since trouble began. 

Thank you for sticking around, we have really lovely fans, I don’t know what we did to deserve you all!

I have good news, and I have bad news, I’ll give you the bad news first. We are putting Upsilon Circuit into the “Cupboard of Lost Games” indefinitely.

The good news is that we aren’t giving up, and have a new game we’ve been working on called Super Tony Land that brings some elements of UC with it. ..But more on that later.

It was incredibly hard to write anything about UC. It’s been nearly a year since we initially halted production, but it still makes my chest tighten up thinking about it all. It took me 6 tries, but I did my best to write this, because I feel like I owe everyone the best explanation I can muster. I tried to really be open, because so often game cancellations offer very little real information.

Since this was a 3 year journey, it’s a long tale, so get comfortable!  

The concepts for UC grew from a small idea we had because I really enjoyed watching people livestream our (then) newly released game Legend of Dungeon. It grew into an exploration of mortality in games, and so much more. We loved and still love all the things that UC was supposed to become.

So, if we loved it, then why did it get cancelled?

If passion was all it took, I’m sure many other games would exist. Money, time, and luck seem to be big factors based on what we’ve seen and experienced. And the bigger your project, the more you need of each.  

It was an incredibly ambitious project for the two of us. We knew failure was very possible, and I’m proud that we tried anyway.

Why did UC fail?

The oversimplified answer would be that the scope of the game was too ambitious and we underestimated the time and money needed. In reality, for any project, there are many things that can go wrong that influence these things.

As with anything, it’s.. ..complicated.  But the big troubles for us were: Scope, pushing beyond our capabilities, jumping into a partnership for funding, and overwhelming stress.

The scope:

UC’s concept had many game elements highly intertwined and reliant on each other, so cutting features without changing the functionality and direction of UC was impossible. It was also difficult to explain fully to people, including our team.

Pushing beyond our capabilities:

We are just two self taught indie game devs. To make UC, we hired people, signed with a partner/incubator near the end, and then managed a large team, all for the first time.

In hindsight, these were things that we not only didn’t know how to do well, but also made the two of us very miserable.   

Jumping into a partnership:

Instead of scaling the project back when we realized our money would run out long before release, we pushed ourselves harder and kept going, and eventually signed with a partner to help fund the last leg of UC’s journey.

Signing with a partner or publisher and bringing in a larger team are very normal things to do in the industry. However.. they were entirely new to the both of us. Learning (about setting and meeting Milestones, dealing with various issues, and managing a large team) on such a complex project turned out to be very bad for us and UC. No one really did anything markedly wrong, but nothing seemed to go the way it was supposed to. Which in part led to the next point..

The overwhelming stress:

New to running a team stress. New to having partners stress. Crowdfunding stress. Partners pulling out mid failing crowdfunding stress. Having to tell a team “sorry and goodbye” stress. So much stress.

We felt like we had something that could change the gaming world forever, and we were so passionate about it. When things went belly up in the third year, the emotional hit was debilitating.

Bleh!

We really wanted to find a way to finish Upsilon Circuit anyhow, but the truth is, even if it wasn’t saddled with stress and emotional burden.. we’ve already put too much of our money into it. We can’t even support ourselves for long enough to complete a game this big right now.

Looking back on it all now, it’s hard not to feel like we were making a game that the world didn’t want. We knew that it was an out there idea, but that was why we felt that making UC was so important.

We knew publishers wanted something less experimental and risky.. But it was a bit surprising when the gaming community showed so little interest, since articles about UC had reached millions. 

When we lost our partner and shut down our crowdfunding campaign, we made a Patreon, and reached out to the tens of thousands of people on our newsletter. We didn’t get enough pledges to cover the cost of our shared office space, let alone paying even one person.

While there were people who were very generous and amazing, it felt pretty terrible to see something people had seemed so excited about struggling so much to get support when it was truly needed.

When we finally shut everything down, we both thought we might never enjoy making games again. We felt like garbage. We drowned in that for a long time.

You can learn a lot from failure, and we certainly did.

Things we learned from our failure (your own mileage may vary):

Take the project’s timeframe, and triple it. Then triple it again.

A unique idea can add an “I need to get this out before someone else does it” feeling. Let. That. Go. No good choices were made from that feeling.

Don’t bring on full time artists or audio people until the project is really ready for them, use placeholder art and sounds, when you can. Things change, and we redid a lot of our art.

Make sure all contracts clearly state what happens if things get cancelled, or situations drastically change.

Hiring more than one or two people means managing them part time, or full time. We now know that we hate managing people, and are terrible at it.

No matter how smart and awesome your team is, if you can’t get someone 100% behind your idea, your project will suffer.

Having a partner or publisher is a lot like having a boss while also being a boss. Some people like it, but we will likely stay indie or die trying.

Don’t sacrifice your own well being or happiness for a dream. Yes, we’ve sacrificed a lot in the past, we lived in a tree house in the woods so we could keep making games before. But there is a limit, and we found it with Upsilon Circuit, and we stubbornly ignored it and payed the price mentally.

Kittens make things a lot better.

If we had it all to do over again it would have been a very different game, but maybe we could have finished it, or at least avoided some of the worst moments.

So what now?

It’s been a year, and after many conversations, we have found no solutions for bringing back UC. ..But we have healed a little, so we are taking the ideas, story and world, and building them into our future games

We started working on a new game called Super Tony Land this year, and it will be part of UC’s legacy in its own way.

Super Tony Land is a physics platforming adventure game that has many worlds, a story, and easy access to user created levels and entire game worlds. Imagine if Cave story, Mario Maker, and Besiege had a dynamically lit baby.

In Upsilon Circuit the story was something we wanted the players to unfold and influence.. To give creation to the audience, experience it ourselves, and encourage Streamer/audience connectivity. To give real power to the players.

For Super Tony Land we’ve designed an extensive level editor, with visual programming blocks and NPC/Story tools. Anyone can build worlds or challenges in the free editor that we will be releasing alongside the game. We hope that communities and content creators will build and share their own universes, and we are looking forward to playing them!

Here’s the teaser trailer we just released! 

If you’ve been with us for the long haul, you might notice that this is actually a sequel to Tiny Plumbers!

This new game won’t be a lot of things that UC was, but it will be the game that the two of us made that helped us remember how important making games is to us.

It will be available on Steam this spring!

That’s about it for news!

Both of us are thankful to our team during UC’s development, and to our community and friends that have been there encouraging and supporting us throughout this journey. 

We will keep doing our best to make the games we want to see exist, for as long as we are able to make games.

Here are a few links you might want:

If you want to stay up to date on all things RLK, jump on Twitter!

If you want to chat with us or catch streams we have Discord

If you want to support development we have our RLK Patreon here

Thanks for your continued support and understanding!

Your co-pilot, 

Kitty

[gamerzcourt]

How John Wick Got Turned Into A GameHow John Wick Got Turned Into A Gamevideo games

New Post has been published on https://www.gamerzcourt.com/how-john-wick-got-turned-into-a-gamehow-john-wick-got-turned-into-a-gamevideo-games/

How John Wick Got Turned Into A GameHow John Wick Got Turned Into A Gamevideo games

When thinking about a game adaption of the incredibly popular John Wick films, Bithell Games might not be the developer that first comes to mind. Co-founder Mike Bithell and his team are known for emotion-tinged platformers, old-school stealth adventures, and interactive narrative stories. Appropriately so, Bithell Games chose an unexpected target for its John Wick mission: a turn-based strategy that feels like a mash-up of XCOM and SuperHot.

We sat down with Mike Bithell after playing his new game for the first time, and dove into how he secured the project and ultimately convinced Lionsgate to go along with his vision. John Wick Hex will launch on PC (exclusively through Epic Games Store first) and MacOS, and does not yet have a release date.

GameSpot: Were you approached, or did you approach someone to make a John Wick game. What was the first idea for the project?

Mike Bithell: They were like “we need Thomas was Alone’s creator to reinvigorate projects.” [Laughs] No, it was interesting. So basically Good Shepherd, who’s the publisher, and Lionsgate movies, they were already talking about doing something with John Wick. Lionsgate’s whole thing with John Wick is they still see it as the weird Indy movie that did good. It’s growing and doing so big so they specifically want to do interesting John Wick games, they don’t want to just do straightforward person action kind of things.

So not recreate the movies?

Well, they want to recreate the movies but with creativity. The thing with third-person shooters, just as an aside, is that I’m a clumsy idiot. When I play a third person shooter, I can be in a suit but I’m going to be just running around aimlessly firing. It’s not John Wick.

So, going into that strategy thing, lets you do the whole think-and-react thing and work your way through a space. But to go back to your answer, they were thinking: how do we do this more interestingly? They bring in Ben, who is the producer, and they say, “go find something to do this,” basically. And me and Ben, just a couple of weeks before, watched John Wick around my place–we go way back–he was like, “what would you do with John Wick?” And I said a strategy game, because to me that’s the only way to capture that character. Completely expecting that to be the end of the conversation.

But he got back to me and said, “well, make a prototype and see if it’s fun,” and it just went from there. And when Lionsgate saw it, they were super into it, they loved the idea of doing something like this with [John Wick]. The turning point was when I showed it to a guy called Jason Constantine, who’s the executive producer on the John Wick franchise of Lionsgate. The whole of this most important meeting, I’m in a room that looks like something out of Entourage. Lots of glass, they love glass [laughs]. And I’m at one end of this table, he’s at the other, it’s very scary and I just demoed this game, which at that point, was kind of this XCOM with one character kind of thing, like what you expect from [Hex] until you play it.

And he said, “Why does John keep waiting? Like, John Wick does not wait his turn, he just fights”. And I was like,” Jason, the turn-based strategy games, that’s how they work”. And I literally load up YouTube and put one of these kinds of games up on the screen, and I’m like, “look they’re waiting…”

Did you show him Mario + Rabbids?

I showed him everything.

That’s funny to think about.

I was like, “they’re waiting their turn, it’s fine”. And about halfway through that sentence, I am explaining to an executive why John Wick is letting people shoot him in the face. It’s just gone terribly wrong. And I went back from that trip and just got chatting to Nick over there who’s the lead coder and co-designer, and was like, “we can’t do turn-based John Wick. This sucks. It’s just not how you capture that gameplay”. And that was the point where that timeline you saw came from and we called it timeline strategy, I don’t know if that’s what we’ll end up calling it, but that’s lovely.

And that idea of making it, giving you the time to think through a choice, but also making it so that everything’s concurrent and everything’s coming together nicely. So it becomes a game about finding your chance and you’re not just letting everyone shoot you in the face. What’s really cool about it and what excites me about it is that as you get more and more acquainted with it and understand it’s systems more, it gets faster. It moves at the speed you think.

That was the moment where it all started to come together. We kept collaborating throughout the process, working with Chad, the director of movies, who came up with fog of war. I credit him entirely for that.

But that’s what’s fun, that was what was so cool with Chad, because Chad doesn’t play video games but he obviously gets everything about fight choreography and how you tell a story through an action scene. And working with him, with those different languages, finding where the overlaps were, that was so much fun.

What sort of rope has Lionsgate given you to build on the John Wick mythology? And where does Hex sit on the timeline?

Mike: They’ve been awesome. They’re really good collaborators. They give us the freedom to make the choices. Ultimately, it’s similar to how we design our own choices. They’ve given us all the information so that we don’t come to them with stupid ideas. Very short version. It’s a collaboration and we’ve definitely pushed some things in interesting directions, you’re going to be surprised by some stuff, stuff I’m not allowed to talk about right now, but there’s some stuff in there that will be cool and surprising. But yeah, on the whole the focus for us has been to expand their universe in a way that’s respectful. And they’ve responded well to that.

I can’t think of a time they told us not to do something we want to do. Just, we’ve asked for things that are cool, and they’ve gone, yes. And Hex takes place before Helen.

So it’s during John’s time as a prolific assassin?

That could be a logical answer to the question, but I can’t give away any details about that right now.

GameSpot – All News

[jessicakmatt]

What is a Music Producer? Culture Club Producer Steve Levine Explains

What is a Music Producer? Culture Club Producer Steve Levine Explains: via LANDR Blog

Every musical project is the result of a group of collaborators working together.

Even when the artist is the star of the show, there’s always a handful of skilled professionals to support their vision and make it work.

Behind the scenes you’ll find mix engineers, session musicians and most importantly, producers.

But the producer’s role is one of the most frequently misunderstood in music.

One person who knows the producer’s craft inside out is Steve Levine. He’s known as the producer behind Culture Club’s massive 80s singles and the only person other than Brian Wilson to produce the Beach Boys.

We sat down with Steve to talk process, collaboration and the core of the producer’s role.

In this article you’ll learn what a producer is and find out how connecting with one can make a difference in your music.

Let’s get started.

What is a producer in music?

  A music producer can have several different roles depending on the genre of music and type of workflow.

In the traditional recording process, a music producer acts in a similar way to the director of a film.

“A film director decides the location, the actors and cameras the same way a music producer chooses the instrumentation, musicians, or recording gear”

They create a vision for the material and advise the musicians artistically on how to achieve it. During a recording session the producer acts as a coordinator and provides organizational help. They also offer creative input and notes on the musicians’ delivery and the technical choices made by the engineer.

Producers often have skills and experience in all the different phases in the life cycle of a song. That means that they can make contributions on everything from songwriting details to equipment choices and delivery notes.

After the sessions, the producer provides feedback and direction during the mixing and mastering stages to ensure that the musical vision they’ve created with the artist gets realized.

“Historically, the reason we were called producers rather than directors goes back beginning of rock’n’roll with people like Sam Phillips. The early creators of music acted as studio owner, sound engineer, mastering engineer and the physical producer of the record as well. That’s where the title came from—those very early pioneer rock’n’roll days where the person that ran the session was the central hub.”

What does a producer do in a session?

 Facilitating creative relationships is the core of a music producer’s work. Most of it happens during the session itself.

On a recording date, the producer has to organize and direct everyone on the project to keep things running smoothly.

Getting good results from a diverse group of people in a high pressure environment with the clock ticking on an expensive session is an art. For Levine, the key to success is a solid foundation of good social skills.

Good people skills are what separates the wheat from the chaff. 80% of the job is dealing with people and 20% is the technical part. We can all buy the same gear—to a certain degree—but how we use that gear and how we communicate with artists is what sets successful producers apart.

Maintaining these sometimes delicate interpersonal dynamics while still keeping an eye on the technical details is a balancing act. At the end of the day, the producer has to deliver solid tracks to the mix engineer to make the project a success.

Every session is unique, but Levine maintains that the most stubborn technical issues a producer encounters are common across many types of music. Experience, intuition and strong instincts are what it takes to overcome it.

For Levine, that experience is the key ingredient for a successful session.

“Most of the problems that sessions encounter are the same regardless of genre. The same technical problems could happen on a hip-hop track or an indie track on a folk track or even a jazz track. A producer that can manage those problems doesn’t necessarily have to be pigeonholed in one genre.”

“When a session goes smoothly, it’s like a swan gliding across a pond. It takes a lot of experience to get to that level. When things go wrong you start to see how much experience matters.”

An evolving role 

The producer’s role continues to evolve with modern developments in music.

In R&B and hip-hop, the term producer most often refers to the person who created the beat the artists are singing or rapping over. In EDM the words “producer” and “artist” are often used interchangeably, with most artists producing their own material.

Levine has seen these developments first hand as music production work becomes more distributed and accessible.’

“Today it’s not unusual to have a producer that just does the beats or vocals on a track. A studio might produce the backing track with one team of people, a top line would be written and someone else would produce the vocals. And of course in the dance world the producer might have had nothing to do with the original sessions whatsoever. They act as a remixer and could do anything from adding new drum tracks to reinventing the whole thing.”

  Collaboration and results

 No matter what genre you work in, productive sessions are a team effort. 

Bringing out everyone’s best work and playing each collaborator to their strong points is crucial for a producer.

As Levine is quick to note, each contributor has strengths and weaknesses. It’s up to the producer to recognize them and act accordingly.

That mix of factors can make the end result pretty unpredictable. Even with the best intentions and preparation, not every set of collaborators are perfectly matched.

“It’s impossible to be a master of every discipline in music. As a producer, collaboration is still something that I really champion—even if it’s virtual. Someone else can reinterpret your ideas or bring something to the party that you haven’t even thought of. That’s extremely valuable.”

No one sits down and says, “let’s make the worst record we possibly can!” Most people want to create their best work from the start, but so many things can weigh on a project—lack of money, lack of time, lack of talent… “

That’s why connecting with the right people is just as important as any other phase in the development of a song. Choosing the right producer is no different. LANDR Network connects you with top tier producers who know how to get the job done.

Be adaptable

A great producer has to stay focused on the human element, but there’s no substitute for solid technical skills.

For Levine, the development of technology and music production are deeply intertwined.

But the changes brought about by modern tech aren’t limited to developments like DAWs and VST plugins.

“I’m one of the group of producers who had their success during the massive change in technology in the 1980s. I had to navigate the switch from analog tape machines to digital recording and analog synthesizers to digital synthesizers—with all the processes involved there. Many of the producers of my era grew up with technological change so modern tech is second nature.”

Technology is changing the fabric of collaboration itself, and producers need to be ready.

As more and more work moves online, marketplaces like LANDR Network are carving out a space in the conversation.

“Until now there hasn’t really been a home for professional work online. There are plenty of places where people can exchange ideas, but the quality isn’t always there. I think now the opportunities are much greater.”

For Levine, it’s about creating a hub for trust and quality.

Network is where top tier talent and aspiring artists collide, levelling a playing field that was once restricted by gatekeepers.

The post What is a Music Producer? Culture Club Producer Steve Levine Explains appeared first on LANDR Blog.

from LANDR Blog https://blog.landr.com/what-is-a-music-producer-steve-levine/ via https://www.youtube.com/user/corporatethief/playlists from Steve Hart https://stevehartcom.tumblr.com/post/623808915910590465

[awesomeblockchain]

You don't own your items. That lucky knife skin you scored in CS:GO? The cool Halloween-themed Overwatch outfit? Nope. Property of the developers who let you use it. That value is destined to stay within the game's ecosystem, and we've never had a better technical solution. That's the problem Enjin is trying to solve.

It didn't take long for the blockchain to enter gaming. The two tech-savvy crowds form a solidly joined Venn diagram, and we're already losing track of all the startups aiming to use the new technology to carve out their little niche in the gaming space.

While most of the esports focused cryptocurrencies focus on betting - some legitimate, some less so - Enjin is focused on true ownership. Whether that be ownership of games, or items, or persistent character traits, or whatever else the developer can think of. It's a platform for others to get creative with.

Having flirted with entering the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalisation for months, Enjin Coin moves from gaming show to gaming show, preaching the word of adoption. If developers don't adopt, none of the cool stuff happens. If they do, the sky is the limit. The difference is Enjin has some great ideas about how to get people on board.

We sat down with Enjin's head of dev tech Pat LaBine to chat about what the blockchain could bring to our space. His background is gaming, not crypto. A 13-year veteran of Bioware and IO, he's worked on titles like Mass Effect, Jade Empire, Dragon Age, Hitman, and even a much older version of Anthem.

His expertise reflects the team. They're mostly game developers, not just mathematicians. And perhaps that's why they have what we think is the best strategy for getting people started.

Enjin Coin - or blockchain tech in gaming, for that matter - has no killer app. Enjin is focused on making a platform, and letting developers use it in all the innovative ways they can think of. There's no roadmap here - it's all new.

But seeing as he ditched his life as a videogame executive, we figured LaBine would have some crystallised ideas about where the tech could take us.

-Provable scarcity," he told us. -It's good to show people sometimes that there are only ten of these in the world. And you can actually go on a blockchain scanner and see - you don't know who they are - but you can see only 10 people own these things.

-I look at it like, you're going to have this digital garage of stuff you collect from playing games over and over. You could have tokens from a game you played five years ago, and maybe some of them are worth something."

But what ensures those items will have value beyond the game's lifecycle? Isn't the value still tied to the game? What happens if people just stop playing it?

-Every token you create, you actually have to give it a value, and you have to spend real-world value to craft that," explains LaBine. -So it would be like spending real-world materials like metal. Like you need to buy the metal - in this case, it's Enjin Coin - to forge the sword out of it. So there's always a minimum back value for it out there.

-So, the Black Lotus, which is a Magic: The Gathering card, it's an extremely popular and rare card. It's only five cents of paper. But it could be worth thousands of dollars. Same with these tokens."

Pat LaBine fully expects that many gamers won't even know about the crypto side of the coin. They'll just know that they can trade their items, and if need be, melt them down to the raw Enjin Coin value to be used elsewhere. But you won't have to be a developer to benefit monetarily from the crypto side.

With item rarity being not only provable but enforceable, it's even possible to attach items to a one-time event or achievement. The winners of a DOTA 2 tournament could merge their team skin with an Enjin Coin and trade it like a signed Messi jersey. A world record speedrunner could offer something similar to their streaming audience.

-That could be a good way for an esports team to create revenue," says LaBine.

The cryptocurrency space is prone to outlandish claims, and we've already seen a few in the gaming space. Much of the time, it comes in the form of inflated numbers. -We serve 3 billion gamers!" is a real boast currently made by one coin unaware of its self-parody.

One such claim that caught our eye was GameCredits' proposed strategy of creating its own game-making engine to create games around using the coin. We weren't sure what was more arrogant: reinventing the wheel, or the assumption people will abandon their favourite developer environment to make a game involving one proprietary crypto.

Far more realistic is Enjin's strategy of integrating into existing engines. Tools are on the way for both Unity and Unreal - the two most popular engines - which require no coding to use. It even recently announced support for Godot.

-You need some basic knowledge of how they work, but you don't have to code the smart contracts," says LaBine. -So theoretically the target user we're looking at is a technical designer. Familiar with the tools but won't necessarily know how to code."

While there's certainly an overlap among developers and those interested in crypto, keeping the learning curve small is key. To borrow Unity's motto, modern engines have somewhat democratised game development, and those walls between creators and their vision should stay levelled.

To that end, Enjin Coin wants to have a developer portal in the future that shows off different use cases. Much like the Unity Store's example projects, Enjin's portal will have a -game as a token" project or an example of a token-enabled collectible card game.

Unity users will soon be able to download the tools for free, and Enjin won't take a cut of transactions made through the technology. The barriers to entry are low to facilitate maximum experimentation. And should any promising projects emerge, Enjin has earmarked 10% of its coins for partnerships and developer incentives - it can effectively fund them.

We've seen enough -top wallets in crypto" articles to see the Enjin wallet mentioned a few times. It's touted as one of the most secure in the world, and we wondered what the strategy was behind a gaming crypto investing so much time and energy into a wallet.

-It's to get people into the ecosystem," explains LaBine. -It's a place where you can see all of your games and items. We'll open source it at some point but for now it's closed source. But who knows, we might have skinned wallets, like a Blizzard wallet or stuff like that, if they allow it."

LaBine opened up his own wallet full of gaming items for us to see. It's currently a minimalist UI and will be expanded before it hopes to shoulder the burden of your entire game item collection. But it works - LaBine can send you a sword in Minecraft on demand.

As for wallets themed on other companies? While possible, they may already be making their own moves into the space. LaBine expects early adopters to be mostly indie, but now that he's known as the -gaming crypto guy" to his career's worth of triple-A contacts, he's had executives picking his brain.

-Yeah, we've had a couple of conversations with them," he says. -Don't count the big triple-A studios out, because they all have skunkworks departments, and they are definitely working on blockchain stuff. They're just not telling anybody about it.

-They don't know how they're going to use it yet, a lot of the time. But it's going to happen at some point. One of the big publishers is going to come out with Ubisoft Coin or something like that. Steam Coin, or whatever."

The big question with any cryptocurrency is -what can this do that a database can't?"

-I think traditional systems do a good enough job most of the time. But databases can't provide true ownership of the tokens to you," he says. -They're basically just leased to you, at their whim. So you could be banned - we see that in esports. As a value proposition, I don't know that that's compelling enough.

-For a developer, you don't require as much infrastructure because you're leveraging the Ethereum network and all the properties of that network. You don't need a huge security team, or DevOps, to administer. That removes the customer service element that you might traditionally need, running your own giant databases.

-But again, it depends on where the market goes, right? Like, what players think is valuable. Some of my friends are like, 'Yeah, I don't care.' So you put 200 hours into Overwatch and you don't care that you don't own the skins? And they're like, 'Nah.'"

In the case of Enjin Coin, there will be interesting use cases made newly possible. But much of its appeal is doing the same things with increased confidence. The idea of a digital collector, for instance, is less likely to occur if the collector is technically leasing items behind mountain-sized EULA agreements.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect is the fact that separate systems can be designed to interface with any token. It's rare enough to see your RPG characters carry over into a sequel. But what if they could carry over into any game? Progress in one game could affect the world of another. If the receiving software knows how to interpret the token, anything is possible.

For all the bluster in the crypto space, LaBine is refreshingly frank about the issue.

-We know it's going somewhere, but I don't what form it will take," he says. -Blockchain isn't as sexy as AR/VR. Those techs have been around for 30 years at least, as an idea. But blockchain hasn't been around very long, as Bitcoin and whatnot. As an idea, it's very new. You'll see some people doing wacky experiments with them, and mostly crash and burn, but somebody will figure something out. And people will be like, 'Cool, I get it now!'

-So I don't know which way it'll actually go. It may not even take off at all. But I can easily think of a world where my son is playing Fortnite or PUBG, and all these items are things he could own and give to his friends. I could easily think of people saying 'How was it not like this before?' I worked at big studios for a long time, and this time I actually feel like I'm slightly ahead of the curve. So that's exciting, but it's also kind of scary."

https://ift.tt/2u6qoAo

[vash4592-blog]

Hello friends, you all know about the hot new game that’s going around called “Little Red Impact” well I started asking myself how this kind of game got so popular in a landscape full of triple A games and indie success stories. I mean, there’s not much to it. It’s just a simple bullet hell called “SpaceImpact” with a Little Red Riding Hood skin overtop.

It’s basically a flash game, but you can’t play it unless you download it onto your phone. What other flash game makes you do that?

Well as it turns out there’s a reason for this. A reason they don’t want you to know. Hear me out: buried deep within the game’s code is a program that seeps into your device and watches everything you do like a fly on the wall.

Far-fetched? Maybe. But that’s what they want you to believe.

In a world where everything is digitized, some people have resorted to downgrading their means of communication in order to keep the government out of their business, but these are the exact type of people who they want to listen in on. They want to know how much of the truth we’ve found out.

This game is their way of doing that.

But that got me thinking… why Little Red Riding Hood of all things? Think about it, all the other bullet-hell’s of that nature are all space themed. You shoot aliens in space as you travel at light speed. There’s no viable reason to put any other skin on it. And yet this one is Red Riding Hood themed.

I went ahead and took a look into the files of the game and once you get past the initial asset folders that most gamers just see and skip right over, things start getting weird.

There’s a bunch of other sketchy file names in the game too. Like, look at some of these names:

These names are encrypted, there’s no other answer. Now my buddy Andrew goes more in depth with trying to figure how to crack the code on his post, so I recommend checking it out here. To summarize though he brings up a theory that these files are where the program seed is hidden.

But the most interesting thing I found were some unused music files buried deep in the file titled ‘htest’ one through six.

Now it’s not confirmed but I believe that Htest = HiddenTest. When you open up the files and listen you can almost not hear anything. Almost. If you listen close you can make out a very high pitch—almost a dog whistle pitch. My hypothesis is that these were leftover test files put into the game to test which high and low frequencies would be heard by the player but also go unnoticed. These frequencies are typically used to brainwash people.

And then I started digging into the game’s models.

You see that right, above her head? Here’s a better look.

Well if we zoom in and enhance we get this.

Now I had to check to make sure that I wasn’t seeing things so I took this into Photoshop and brightened it as much as I could and this is what I got.

And you all know what that is. It’s almost like they wanted us to find this stuff, I mean, why make it so easy? I’ve done a lot more digging on this in code that’s far more encrypted. They want us to know they’re watching us. Maybe that’s the point.

Need more proof?

The creator of the game, a user by the name of InPlaneSite had the link up for free download on is website for a total of 7 days. No announcement, no nothing. Now the guy had made two games before and had an okay-ish audience because of it. I played them and they were pretty decent games, if you like that retro bullet-hell style. (EDIT: InPlaneSite’s other two games have nothing at all out of the ordinary in their files. Little Red Impact is the outlier.) Upon it’s first release, Little Red Impact got a rumored total of forty-two downloads. Why only that much? Because now when you check his site all you get is this 404 page which I highly recommend you check out.

I’ve checked all other social media platforms, trying to register a test account under this username and it was available on every site I tried. This means that InPlaneSite deleted all traces of himself off the internet exactly a week after this game’s release. So why is it still around, you may ask? Because those forty-two users shared it, and just like how people were paying insane amounts of money for phones with Flappybird on them, Little Red Impact spread like wildfire because it was ripped off the internet so suddenly and without warning. I can tell you this right now: this whole scheme was designed to infest the internet with this game without leaving a source to trace it back to.

And to wipe away one last scrap of doubt?

I posed a question before as to why the game’s theme is Red Riding Hood.

Little Red Riding Hood is a cautionary tale. The only reason that Little Red got into the whole mess with the wolf was because she didn’t stay on the path like her mother told her to. In the game we as the player are clearly placed in Little Red’s shoes. The government is poised as the big bad wolf. So long as Little Red stays on the path, she doesn’t have to face the wrath of the big bad wolf. It’s a warning.

‘my what big eyes you have – all the better for the government to watch you with my dear.’

‘my what big ears you have – all the better to listen to all your conversations with my dear.’

‘my what big hands you have – all the better to reach you with my dear.’

‘my what big teeth you have – all the better to eat you with my dear.’

[hiphop260-blog]

Reading the Writing Off the Walls:  Sneakers & Semiotics

Maurice Inoni // 5.7.17

Semiotic Analysis comes from a school of thought that believes that all the media “texts” or artifacts that we come in contact with convey meaning that we internalize through signs.  Signs are created through a system of signifiers (the actual thing carrying the meaning) and signifiers (the meaning or concept that is being invoked).  By interpreting these through semiotic analysis we can find the ways in which we are influenced and manipulated by media, and in the case I am about to present, the ways we are acted upon by companies through advertising that utilizes hip-hop motifs. 

Converse

This ad is a video installment in Converse’s new visual ad campaign and a development of their already established brand.  Featuring rapper and cynical culture pundit Vince Staples on the still for the video, the title of the ad “Youth” already speaks volumes about what we are about to see; the ad consists of several purposefully jarring shots accompanied by statements representing individuality, freedom, & uniqueness. They play Grime music which is a British underground subgenre of hip hop that hasn’t had its cutting edge sheen polished away by Drake quite yet, and many of the models featured I recognised as instagram models.

A post shared by Converse (@converse) on Mar 9, 2017 at 7:01am PST

Vince Staples is a natural fit as a main face for this Converse ad campaign.  Not only has he worn Converse as his signature sneakers naturally, but he has dark lyrics, that manage to appeal to white upper-middle class teens with the very real Pac-esque depictions of gang life/upbringing while also contrasting that with very indie production.  

The text on screen focuses on various statements of purpose that unify under the ads theme: Youth.  Picking up quotables such as “more questions”, “do it for myself”, “change the world”, and (maybe my favorite for the sake of the irony in it) “feel uncomfortable”.  These quotes evoke pictures of the kind of against-the-grain rebellious thinking that the Fader-ready millennial actors on-screen embody with their dress style and attitude.  The instagram models and musicians that are featured in the ads embody the ethos of the above quotes with their individual online presences and focuses of the expressions in their work.  With this, Converse is able to smartly tap into all that these various figures have built up without having to go into introducing them to viewers.

Much like Doc Martens, Converse is not forgetting its roots as a utilitarian and iconic shoe design, however note that they were made famous in street basketball and so their ads target that vibe in youth counterculture-- one that is smore into the newest, hip-hop/digital mixtape side of indie (independent music in general as opposed to the genre) rather than the completely nostalgia drenched 80’s indie (rock) that the Docs emote.

However unlike the Doc ads Converse is far more reliant on appealing to lifestyle.  Quite literally, according to Arthur Asa Berger “how people fashion their lives… People’s lifestyles are the sum of various taste decisions… all of these [decisions] tend to be class specific… the institution that tutors us about these matters is advertising”(107-8) and indeed the Converse ads tutor us on the lifestyle that their shoes are belonging to-- one with more nebulous class distinction than any other competitor brand-- these are shoes for young creatives and if you wear them (presumably) no one will be able to tell of them alone if you belong to the background of rich or poor.  Converse is seemingly not focused on appealing to a broad crowd anymore (likely because they are now a sub-division of the largest sneaker company), but want more appeal as a niche ‘indie’ commodity to up their cool factor which was stretched thin before their acquisition by Nike.  By making themselves, or rather, image, more “exclusive” or specifically edgy, people will want to associate with the brand to take on those qualities and distance themselves from being totally middle of the road in their tastes, etc.

Puma

Coming in hot off the success of their partnership with Rihanna as an ambassador and design collaborator (releasing her own line of shoes with them), the company realized that their niche would be accessed not by trying to directly compete with Adidas, who makes much more innovative athletic shoes & designs, but by playing off their legacy as a favorite of  early hip hop and a sign of success in that era. By aligning themselves as the new indie hip-hop choice, they could be seen as a cool fashion brand for sneakers.  Big Sean is the star of Puma’s latest campaign and is going to be taking a role similar to Rihanna’s but presumably bring more masculine energy to the brand to make it seem less like a “women’s fashion” brand- which in the world of streetwear (one of Puma’s target audiences) is somewhat antithetical to the culture’s ethos of trendy and swaggering male high fashion.  

The ads feature a stoic Sean posing in a black designer tracksuit with matching black shoes and minimal jewelry in front of a warehouse loft kind of background.  The outfit is very clearly masculine distinction from Rihanna’s very feminine style-- it is all black, a very serious color to match Sean’s serious facial expressions, and its sportiness puts a futuristic spin on its classic profile which is a clear throwback to 70’s hip hop attire made famous by the likes of Grandmaster Flash.  This is offset by the background which looks like any loft studio a modern streetwear photographer in LA, etc. would use with its whitewashed brick walls and large amounts of open space.  This is to assure the viewer that the fashion is modern and very relevant to the gaze of other esteemed streetwear enthusiasts.

The jewelry he is wearing with the outfit signals that these shoes are distinct from just plain casual attire they can be dressed up or down, but they have a high fashion appeal that makes them versatile in this way, similar to his gold watch/rings.

Everything Puma wants to say about the cool factor of their brand lies in the inherent coolness of its ambassadors two modern hip-hop adjacent Black cultural icons.  Puma is a German brand but it gets all its cool from being associated with being a very Black product, in a very similar manner to the inherent cool other products have picked up from their black product ambassadors: Air Jordans, Sprite, Calvin Klein, (the list goes on ad infinitum) …

The effect is genius, as unlike their competitors, Puma gets far more ‘bang for their buck’ out of the celebrity cosigns they choose, the Black cool factor seems to have more lasting appeal on the mainstream taste (perhaps because the Black audience has more vested interest in their celebrities) than I suppose the Converse or Doc Marten white-suburban “indie cool” that quite literally goes in and out of fashion every few years (from ironic, to cool, to played-out and back, similar to the mainly white music artists that these brands get their social capital from).

Adidas

Houston Rocket James Harden has an ad campaign called “Basketball Needs Creators” for his new signature line of Adidas shoes .  The ad features the quote “Never Follow” in the signature bold Adidas font, and shows a defiant, determined looking Harden on the court.

James Harden is a professional NBA player but more specifically, he is one that is notable for his unique personal style.  The ads’ central premise plays off this suggesting that following his creative style cues (beard, haircut- the visible obvious)-- and getting his sneakers-- will allow you to signal the same unique and capable individualism as him.  

Nike has such a grasp of market shares in the sports shoe sector that the brand hardly needs to advertise themselves, or to-be-exact, make product specific ads for each new line of shoes. Adidas’s only shot at staying viable in the market is to appeal to people in the market for Nike products that want something a bit more distinctive. James Harden is a good basketball player, but he isn't Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, or Lebron James-- as in he’s not exactly the face of the league; not in the front of Bus ads and not quite recognisable to people with no clue about basketball.  The fact that he plays in a team that hasn't won a championship recently, makes him a sort of off beat fave- more hip to choose as a favorite player than any of the players I mentioned above.  Adidas uses this to their advantage and to reinforce their brand image, in this ad it comes by making Harden their very own jumpman- the tagline never follow overlayed on his image drives this as clearly being their motive.

(Shabazz #8)

[stack-of-shame]

Shamesplosion II: Regexance

Game #26: Legend of Kay, Neon Studios, 2005

Legend of Kay is part of a peculiar group of games from the waning years of “Character Action Games” (now known as 3D platformers). In some ways these games, including Kay, are some of the best in the genre. The industry had learned how to make controls feel good. Even more esoteric things, like combo moves, had been standardized to a degree. The camera, once nausea inducing, now seamlessly balanced between the gentle hand of the game and the user’s input. 

For all that is expert about Legend of Kay, it flies a bit too high. The cutscenes and conversations over-rely on generic, canned animations. I believe that all the voice talent in Legend of Kay were fine actors, but, searching the game’s credits, there was not a dedicated voice over director. As such the voice performances as a whole leave something to be desired. 

Why am I picking these nits? Because cutscenes demand a certain quality to justify their presence in a game. Unless they are very good, they drag the experience down. I think I’d have enjoyed Kay more if the conversations had been presented only as text. I don’t say that to be cruel, I honestly believe that the atmosphere would have been easier to establish. 

Game #27: Quadrilateral Cowboy, Blendo Games, 2016

Quadrilateral Cowboy vs. Jazzpunk is an amazing case study in game audio

Largely because, given access only to the visual elements of both games, you could easily be forgiven for confusing the two.

Both have an aesthetic that blends minimalist geometry and a honey-mustard color-sheme with 80s cyberpunk, both feature a main character who is sent on various "jobs" which involve traveling to an ambiguously virtual dimension to perform espionage, and both treat pre-digital and recently digital technology as a plaything in their world-building.

If, however, you were given only the audio of each game, you would never confuse the two.

On the blog for Necrophone games, they outline the absolutely bonkers lengths they went to to achieve the sound. Many of the noisemakers used for Jazzpunk's soundscape actually built from scratch, soldering and all, by the game's creators. Bringing that level of depth to a game's sound would be admirable for a sound designer, let alone someone who is also devoted full time to simply making the game.

The soundscape of Jazzpunk is like nothing else I've heard before or since, except perhaps in a Martin Denny record. It's a jangly, agitated mix of synths and old jazz records, a kind of James-Bond-cyber-mambo. The implementation is straightforward for the most part, though outright bizarre at times, with attention-grabbing samples coming it at inappropriate times, but because the rest of the game is so damn weird you forgive it somehow.

For everything that is bizarre about Jazzpunk, it relies on more traditional adventure puzzle mechanics, as well as callbacks (there's a quake clone hidden in a wedding cake). The puzzles are hilariously gratifying to solve, but Jazzpunk does not have many new skills to teach the player.

Quadrilateral Cowboy is, in some ways, more sophisticated than Jazzpunk, and I'm not just talking about their approach to humor. Cowboy's gameplay has something quite new to offer players, and something which feels like somewhat of a holy grail in game design; it makes it feel cool to write code. For a while it seemed like there were so many attempts to make games about coding that reviewers were declaring the effort itself to be futile. But Cowboy has done it.

When you look at the credits in Quadrilateral Cowboy, under audio, it simply says "Soundsnap.com" As such very little in Cowboy's soundscape really feels like it belongs to the game. Many of the sounds are appropriate enough. But they do not have that intangible sense of having somehow come from the game itself.

The implementation of sounds is just as puzzling as in Jazzpunk, but unfortunately it is to negative effect. Point-located sounds are at maximum volume when standing near them, and nearly silent when a few steps away. When the player character throws something, they often emit a cough, not the expected effort sound.

The music is completely diagetic, which can be a powerful decision. It is all licensed, and is used to build the settings and tell you things about the characters. All in all a strong point in the soundscape.

I adore both games, but y'all can guess which has been my enduring favorite.

Game #28: Snuggle Truck, Owlchemy Labs, 2012

This game has been in my library for five years, and I sorely regret not playing it immediately after buying it. Snuggle Truck smacks of the Indie Revolution. These kinds of games, centered around a straightforward-but-wiley physics-based mechanic, will always have a special place in my heart. I found myself wondering if this game would be able to stand out if it were released today. Perhaps it would, given Owlchemy’s outreach. 

But how Snuggle Truck would do in today’s market has nothing to do with it’s validity as a work of art, nor does it have anything to do with how deserving it is of commercial success. 

I think about the discussion going on in the indie game community, about the “indiepocalypse” and the “indie bubble.” I think it’s easy to forget that there was never a time when making a game was risk free. It was never a case of, “make game, get paid, onto day three of my indie adventure.” It has always been hell. Maybe the marketing wasn’t hell for a short while. Everything else has always been hell. 

Game #29: Day of the Tentacle Remastered, Double Fine, 2016

I don’t like admitting that I always kind of thought Broken Age invented the whole switching between characters thing. I’ve been touting myself as a fan of point and click adventure games for a while now, and it’s just embarrassing to think I had gotten the whole picture after having played only a tiny selection from what the golden age of this genre has to offer. Man there are a lot of these things. They are a huge time sink though, often designed to take 40 hours to play. I’m not gonna lie, as much as a I adore these games I have myself a good ol’ fashioned think before I choose to start in on one. 

Day of the Tentacle is great, by the way. 

Game #30: Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death, Rebellion, 2003

According to steam, I have played this for 13 minutes. I couldn’t tell you a thing about it because I have no memory of doing so.

Game #31: Elite Dangerous, Frontier Developments, 2014

Oh the deep, dark, horrible shame. My boyfriend bought this game for me at considerable expense in the hopes of giving us another thing to do together. As we booted up the game, he explained to me how we would do one simple thing to boost my cash reserves, and that we’d then be able to do some fun stuff together. He would give me some items, I would sell them. Easy. Would you care to guess how long this took? Trade and sell. How long? How long do you think? 

Three hours. It wasn’t because of our internet connection, it wasn’t because we were very far apart, it wasn’t because we had to do multiple runs, that is how long it takes to do all of the preparatory work in the 20 odd menus and locales you need to visit, then rendez-vous in space, then use a slightly smaller set of menus to open a thing, arm something else, send out another thing, there’s something called a limpet, (I’m assuming it’s named after a British cookie) and then I got the thing and then I could fly back to the station blah blah blah blah. 

I cried. I cried, people. I felt so much like a dumb failure, like a complete waste of my boyfriend’s generosity, that it honestly upsets me to write about it. He did his best to comfort me and assured me he wasn’t mad (yeah, he saw the cry happen) but we have never played it again. I still technically own it but I have hidden it from my steam library because the mere sight of it is disturbing to me, even now. 

Game #32: Mass Effect 2, Bioware, 2010

I have started using Mass Effect 2 to bone up on my German. It’s got full German language support. I only get about a 3rd of what they’re saying. It makes me chuckle how the made-up sci-fi words get pronounced with an American accent. 

Game #33: TRI: Of Friendship and Madness, Rat King, 2014

Exposition of any kind is a tough sell, especially in the fantasy genre. Unless you have Ian McKellen in your roster, almost any fantasy writing is going to sound silly when read aloud. Put another way, dramatic voice over in a game is one of those things that cannot be anything less than great.  I’m tempted to compare this to Journey. Both do a good job of building a fantastical world with magical architecture and a story that existed long before you arrived, but Journey does it better. They probably could have gotten a budget for voice over, but they chose not to use it, and I think it was the right decision. Even with the best voice cast and writers in the world, human voices would have made the world more familiar, to it’s detriment. 

And here’s the thing: in all likelihood, the team behind Journey wrote down just as much detail about the backstory of their game as Tri presents aloud, and a million times more. It may seem that choosing to tell your game’s story without voice over would save effort in terms of storytelling, but nothing could be further from the truth. To expose a world to a player without dialogue, you have to know how your world affects the walls, clothes, materials, gestures, decor, artifacts, absolutely everything the player encounters, because that is the sum total of what you have at your disposal to tell your story.  I’m told that there’s a real mind bender of a game waiting for you if you stick with it, so I may revisit. 

Game #34: Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball, Erik Asmussen, 2015

I am a chronic late adopter of multiplayer games, partially because I’ve never been able to afford them when they’re new. I’ve never joined one in time to get good at it at the same pace as all the early adopters. For my entire life playing games, I’ve found myself getting stomped by people who have hung on long after a game’s heyday, people who know every trick, and who’s patience for newbs ran out years ago. Which is a shame because this game is colorful and awesome.