#however game good. might buy it to support the dev and/or show it to my family. who knows
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god i fucking love loop. esp in the playthrough im watching (its jelloapocalypse). jelo does such a good voice for them and i really enjoy the jokes like "hi stardust!! sparkle on, its wednesday!! dont forget to kill yourself!! ^^" god and the spritework?? the soundtrack?? all the vibes are off the Charts. youre telling me literally one guy and a music studio made this?????
#kaffkeekatz thanks for following me so i dont have to find and rb one post 5000 times this is way easier#im 4 hours in so far its very fun. might buy it at some point i havent decided. mostly cause the game isnt quite my Style#im not usually an adventure game/rpg player...and god id miss the Voices they do so much...#however game good. might buy it to support the dev and/or show it to my family. who knows
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DA4 Lead Producer Scylla Costa’s BIG Festival talk, “Challenges of Dragon Age production during the pandemic”, can currently be rewatched on YouTube here starting roughly at timestamp 8:57:02 after a lil presenter blurb/intro. It’s 1 hour long. When it was streamed live, there was an English translation ‘voiceover’. There isn’t in this vid, however I want to post the link for Portuguese speakers, and also it’s neat for everyone to be able to see all the slides he presented with for themselves in context.
I don’t know if an English-language version will get put up so I’m sharing the notes I took during the talk below, in case anyone’s interested and because I might as well since I wrote them. The rest of this post is under a cut due to length.
Edit: Found a place to re-watch the English version of the talk
(Quick note: I didn’t note down everything, mostly things that caught my interest, so this isn’t exhaustive, and when I was watching I was real tired, so pls bear that in mind and don’t take these notes as bullet-proof 100% accurate gospel or direct quotes. If you watched it and think I’ve written down something wrong/misunderstood, let me know and I’ll fix. Also if you’re a Portuguese speaker and I’ve gotten something incorrect or missed something important etc, again just let me know.) **
** Edit: I’ve now gone through my notes while watching the talk again. I’ve filled in some of the gaps (although they still don’t cover everything said) and so forth, and now I’m no longer worried about there being possible errors in this post.
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For some context, this slide contained the breakdown of the talk’s structure. Bear in mind there are other slides present in the talk than the ones I’ve posted here, I didn’t include caps of all of them, just ones which were of note to me.
In the talk, chief Producer Scylla goes over challenges of DA4 production during the pandemic. He discusses the adaptations - necessary skills and learning from remote work - and he ponders on the future of teamwork.
After the launch of ME3 he became a producer, all his MMO and other experience helped a lot. He was on DAI for 3 years and MEA for 9 months, then Anthem. Today, on DA4, Scylla and another Lead Producer were the heads of the whole project, and there is his boss is the Executive Producer Christian Dailey.
^ the usual AAA game development cycle (brief introduction)
AAA games are games that are launched for several platforms simultaneously.
In BioWare’s case, the pre-production phase of the game development cycle can have from 5 - 30 people, and up to almost 60 people when they’re just about to go through the gate to production.
In the pre-production phase, they go through the game’s concepts and prototypes and start developing systems. They seek the game’s concept and focus, and its key features. They do lots of market research. In the case of BioWare, all their games are strong in narrative, so they have lots of tools related to game narratives and supporting the development of a narrative (cinematic design, dialogue system etc) that get focused on in this phase. Other parts of the team such as writers and cinematic design need these systems to do their own roles.
In BioWare’s case, the pre-production phase through to launch can take 4 - 6 years, but it does depend on the size of the team during development.
With regards to Dragon Age 4, they were coming close to the time when they would shift from pre-production to the production stage when the pandemic hit.
During the production phase is when the development of content and features takes place, with the systems mostly already existing from the pre-production phase. A few new systems may be developed in this phase. In the production phase is when things start escalating, and the team really starts growing, to like 2- or 3-fold the prior pre-production phase size.
(DA4 is currently in the production phase.)
In the alpha phase, features have to be fully implemented and systems all have to be running / working. All the game features should already be in the game by now. They test from pre-production onwards, but this phase is when they run heavy technical tests with lots of players trying to play at the same time. In the beta phase, the idea is that you should now have full content and that now you’re balancing it and running more and lots of different tests with players before launch. There are final tweaks and then the final launch, when in the weeks prior to launch, all the different business units and areas e.g. marketing team, technology team, publishing team, get together once a day and all of the game’s issues are reported and brought to the table to be prioritized. Then they decide the next steps re: these issues (this is known as ‘the war room’).
After the launch there are usually patches like day zero patches and other patches, this being standard industry practise. The last stage is the new content stage where there are DLCs and a game with more content.
On March 12th 2020, the team gathered to review the DA4 story in the new office. Everyone was very excited. (They had spent over 10 years in their last building and had noticed that with the team growing they needed more space. In August 2019 they found the new studio in the city center.)
Anyway that evening, they got an email from the CEO which contained instructions and said that due to the pandemic, they should from now all start working remotely. They had known that this happening was a possibility so they had been planning on how to have all the devs working from home, but initially less than 50% of the devs were able to work from home successfully/efficiently due to various issues e.g. you need a VPN to be able to log in remotely to do your job normally, varying home office setups. The day after this, the office was basically deserted, except for Scylla, the IT infrastructure people and one or two odd devs.
Scylla was part of the team that was working on allowing the devs to work from home. They first started looking at the short-term changes they needed to make to allow this.
“First, take care of our developers”.
When the pandemic first hit, their and Scylla’s [as Lead Producer] first priority was to look after the devs. Many of them are parents (schools and day-cares were shut, children were studying from home), others have relatives living with them, others have other personal circumstances which of course need to be taken into account when it comes to assessing what needs to be taken into consideration for this new scenario. So, they looked at each dev on a case-by-case basis in order to evaluate, speaking to each one and asking them what they could do to support them.
One of the first changes/adaptations they could implement was flexible working hours and flexibility around deadlines. Generally speaking the devs got a lot of support, EA was really good and really supported the devs especially in the first months of the pandemic (and they are still supporting them). Initially not all devs had suitable office spaces at home, some were working from the living room from laptops or at the kitchen table. The whole covid situation basically just happened over night and nobody was really ready to deal with that change. So their first step was to enable their devs to work remotely. As a producer, Scylla’s main task is to communicate with the team such as via a number of daily meetings. He doesn’t depend so much on powerful hardware.
“Enable developers to work remotely”.
This slide shows some of a BioWare audio team. Different teams have varying and specific needs in order to do their jobs and therefore in order to do them remotely. For example, the audio team need good-quality speakers and amplifiers, while the lighting and art teams need other specific equipment such as tablets and large screens. So there was a lot of work they had to do to go through each dev to understand their individual needs and what needed to be done for them. ‘Could they download the builds? Did they have the right performance [tech-wise]? Could they submit their changelists, their codes to the server?’
Some devs needed a more powerful internet connection as it would take 6-8 hours to download a build (some devs live rurally). Some needed a lot of cable, as they were working far away from their routers (sometimes up to 50m). As time went by things got better and better.
The chair devs work from is also important; a kitchen able chair etc is not suitable to sit in for long-term desk work, possibly leading to health issues like back ache and blood circulation problems in the legs.
Every 3 months they had money given to help devs buy new mice, keyboards, monitors - anything they needed really in order for their office setting at home to be improved. For a while, because lots of people [generally, in society] were needing and buying them, it was quite hard to buy things like webcams and microphones.
On mid- and long-term changes:
In terms of DA, we have to look at this from 2 perspectives, the change in the personal and the professional environments.
As a consequence of working from home, people tend to be less active during the day (even in an office, you go between meeting rooms, up and down stairs etc). Physical activity supports life quality and therefore work quality. Scylla noticed that he began to feel listless and such, and found that he needed to change his routine that he had initially developed when he started working from home, for example; having a normal start time (as in, have a semblance of structure in your day as if you were still working in the office site), get dressed at the normal time, not having meetings over lunch etc. This wasn’t just him, lots of other devs encountered this and had this experience too. Devs which adapted faster had better productivity and became more productive faster.
Scylla bought a stand-up desk which he can raise up and down, and at meetings he would be delivering a talk while standing or even while walking on a treadmill. Other devs also got stand-up desks. He tracked his body’s data on a Fitbit. These sorts of things helped improve physical and mental wellbeing. Other devs did similar things, like starting going out for jogs or began practising yoga. Essentially, everyone needed to make changes to their daily routine in comparison to what they had been doing prior to the pandemic.
The pandemic has been a thing for over a year now. In their location, every couple of weeks a new restriction is put into place or a rule is changed, and every two weeks there’s a new thing that you can and can’t do. Scylla also started moving around his property. He worked on his desk, fixed it up and painted - taking up a new hobby. Other devs picked up new hobbies too. These are good ways to be active and also to be somewhere else, i.e. to break up the working day and not be spending it all in one home office-type location. Scylla found that when he made these sorts of changes to his routine to improve his lifestyle, the data output by his Fitbit as indicators of his health/wellbeing etc improved, e.g. number of steps taken in a day, heartbeats per minute while at rest. As stated many of the other devs went through a similar process.
On the professional side of things:
They had to improve remote delivery of builds. Accessing things from home as a dev requires a VPN. They need to download a build every day and then upload it to the server after making their changes to the game. They had to work with infrastructure and research other tech, such as streaming tech to allow remote console access, in order to better facilitate this process. For remote access, they also had to work on adapting communications channels.
“Adapting channels of communication.”
In this slide, the team are working on the storyboards. Before you can implement motion capture & performance capture, you have to ‘run the storyboards’ like this. These are small illustrating drawings which reflect the drafts and are meant to quickly reflect the intention of the scenes that are to be built. Before the pandemic, the team would go to meeting rooms like this, sit down, talk and interact in person. After the pandemic, the question became ‘How do you do this over Zoom?’ You can, but it’s not quite the same; it’s harder to see peoples’ expressions, some people are embarrassed speaking over Zoom etc. Therefore they had to adapt their communications systems, and unlearn the ways in which they developed before in order to relearn and learn new ways of communicating.
Slack was a tool that they adopted on this front. Communications channels can be confusing on Slack, so there was a need to develop structure. For example, how quickly should someone reply (as a recommended convention for the purposes of work)? They had to define the process/procedures for the channels so it was clear for the team as a whole how it would all flow (this is important especially if you have a team with say 30 people or as a whole hundreds of people). Before the pandemic, they had stand-up meetings where they’d go around in a circle every morning and talk about their activities - what they’re going to be working on, any roadblocks they had encountered etc. The question arose ‘How do you replace these?’ They ended up doing Slack messages at a certain time of day and updating their statuses with some details on what they’re working on and color-coding (green - fine, yellow - need help, red - busy/blocked out).
Another issue that they faced was unforeseen - the number of meetings that devs were having really shot through the roof. When there wasn’t a good structure of communications channels, any conversation would become a meeting. Everybody began scheduling meetings left and right, and at the end of the day they would have little time left in which to actually work on their to-do lists. Hence, they had to work with the team to really analyze and be very pragmatic. ‘Which meetings needed to happen? Which didn’t? Is a specific meeting really necessary? Which meetings should be recurring? What can be done over Slack?’ This guideline had to be given to the team to help, and it improved things a lot. The number of meetings decreased a lot and they got more effective. For example, by making sure to set an agenda for meetings beforehand, and by having meeting notes (then a dev who didn’t really need to be at a meeting could skip attending and just quickly review the notes output after instead). They also decreased the standard length of meeting times from the default Outlook blocks of 1 hour and 30 mins to 55 mins and 25 mins respectively. This 5 minute change gave devs time for things like bio breaks (also 4 hours in a row at a computer in a home office with one meeting after another just isn’t good for a person).
“Adapting p-cap and mocap”.
On content:
From a content point of view, the most difficult thing in terms of the pandemic was adapting p-cap and mocap (performance capture and motion capture). They hire actors and it’s a large studio. The pandemic meant big limits to what they could and couldn’t do. The actors had to be masked and 5 meters apart in distance (although it doesn’t look like it in some of these shots due to angles). Also there could be no other person around in the studio - only the actors. The directors instead would ‘patch’ in remotely on big screens (you can see this in the second photo in the top right).
Before the pandemic, they felt that they wouldn’t be able to do p-cap or mocap properly remotely, as the directors would usually stand right next to actors giving guidance on their performance. The techs would also usually be near. But they adapted! The keyword is adapting, changing process. It’s harder and it’s different, but it is possible, and people start rethinking what is possible. What was said to be impossible before now is possible.
P-cap differs to mocap in that it also captures voice and facial expressions.
On the future of work after covid:
There will probably be more working from home and more flexibility for workers e.g. being able to work say 3 out of 5 days from home. It does depend on what a dev’s specific job is however. For example, the audio engineers require lots of specialist equipment and said equipment is of higher quality and quantity in the office. So, depending on role, devs might be working more often or less often from home.
Another development is that lots of devs are moving house. In lockdown etc people started reassessing what’s most important in life. Some are moving further away from the studio to get a cheaper rent or for example couples who both needed an office space to work from home from but their current place only had one area. Others are moving closer to nature for a better quality of life, and still others have other different reasons for doing so. Over 10 devs that he knows in fact have recently moved, including Scylla himself.
The pandemic changed certain skills being used by people on a daily basis. Scylla used as an example of this one of his soft skills, being able to tell from looking/interacting in-person with someone if they are stressed out. Obviously it’s less easy to tell if someone is stressed out when you’re remote, so you adapt different ways of checking in with people in the new situation. To continue carrying out his role as Lead Producer, he began checking in with his team pro-actively on the new comms channels and asking how they were doing.
Also, now that companies are more open to working remotely, there is going to be increased competition for hiring devs. They saw both sides of this coin at BioWare. They were able to hire devs from many places that they couldn’t hire from before e.g. Montreal, Vancouver, the US, as there’s less need for devs to relocate to Edmonton or Austin. This opens up opportunities to hire really intelligent and skilled people that they would not have had access to before.
Question and answer segment:
The pre-production phase has been concluded. They’re in the production phase.
They are not giving out a lot of details yet but Scylla is really excited as a big fan of the whole series. He thinks that with DA4, they will have the opportunity/possibility to launch the best story out of all DA games. He feels that the characters they’re making are amazing. He’s dying to say more but can’t.
When you work from home you need to keep your team as productive as possible. During the pandemic, when people started working from home, they noticed that some people became more productive and some people became less productive. They were analyzing it on a case-by-case basis so as not to make assumptions. They were interested in seeing what they could do to help. At the beginning of the pandemic, they were looking at the devs as people and seeing what they needed.
Production of DA4 still needed to continue during the pandemic because they want to be able to launch the game.
This slide shows a writer. Writing is an example of a role which is more able to work from home easily.
Their productivity did go down in the first month of the pandemic. After adaptations, some people then became more productive than they were before (this was role and personal situation-dependent, examples of this being artists and coders who were able to art and code at home without being interrupted, thereby being able to produce more). Covid has affected productivity in general, but this is part of our new reality. They have adapted and adjusted some deadlines. They have enough data (Scylla LOVES data) now to understand how long it will take them/how long they’ll need to launch the game. They have always had historical data for this purpose, but they’re doing more of this sort of thing now to ensure that they are doing things at the right time.
Remote hiring opens up the door to more talent joining, so if someone has talent geography will hold them back less. Some companies though may choose not to hire people from other countries due to labor issues, cumbersome legal aspects, time zones. But even in such cases there are activities for example that can be carried out while the rest of the team is asleep such as testing or working on the build, or there are cases where those companies still will want to hire a specifically/highly talented person even in spite of the potential legal aspects and so on.
On mental health: People were affected. There is the mental, physical and social impacts of the pandemic situation on people. EA supported them during the pandemic in terms of their mental wellbeing, there are specific companies (services offered, speaking to a therapist) that they can contact if they need something or help. EA had always been good at supporting them with this sort of thing but this has improved further during the pandemic. Another change was that they could/can take a couple of days off if they needed/need to because of the pandemic e.g. to take care of children, who were obviously not at school at the time. As a producer he had to be very mindful of all of this. How much they were monitoring peoples’ wellbeing really went up during the pandemic.
A question that was asked - in terms of DA4′s storybeats, is there anything in there that they decided to change due to the pandemic as it wouldn’t be sensitive or appropriate to include anymore, for example a plague plotline or something? Scylla’s answer is that DA and ME are games in which they try to have narratives that are relatable, which include things which people will identify with, so that players understand what characters are going through etc. Nothing in DA4′s plotline/storybeats has been changed (in the frame of this question, relating to the pandemic), as it didn’t have anything in it that could be specifically or a directly connected to a pandemic-type situation or anything. Of course the DA story has Blights and the Taint, but these are different & fantastical things and existed long before the pandemic situation. So this wasn’t the case with DA4 and there was no need to change anything, but this has happened to other games where they decided to change a storyline due to a strong correlation with something in the real world.
There were then concluding/closing remarks. The message he wants to send is that a crisis will always spark opportunities. Look at a crisis and try to see how you can grow.
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[☕ found this post interesting or useful? my ko-fi is here if you feel inclined. thank you 🙏]
#dragon age 4#the dread wolf rises#da4#dragon age#bioware#video games#covid mention#long post#longpost#wanted to write these up properly and post them yesterday but wasn't able to#mass effect#anthem
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STARTUPS AND CADILLAC
Eventually the pimps and drug dealers notice that the doctors and lawyers have switched from Cadillac to Lexus, and do each kind of work in the way of noticing it consciously. The reason I've been writing about existing forms is that I don't know. Most of the people who've had to write PhD disserations about Dickens don't.1 That word balance is a significant one. I encourage founders to follow whichever path is most immediately exciting to them.2 What happens to publishing if you can't sell content? We're good at making movies and software, and undergrads are not especially prone to waste money.3 When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, then a lot of people. One of my most vivid memories from our startup is going to be than the worst?4 In this model, the research department functions like a mine.5
I'm sometimes accused of meandering. With each step you gain confidence to stretch further next time.6 You had to for guests. Perl. If they get something wrong, it's usually not realizing they have to be inferior people.7 Of what? And because of supply and demand, they pay especially well.8
If free copies of your content are available online, then you're competing with publishing's form of distribution, and that's why they do it so well.9 Another trick I've found to protect myself against obsolete beliefs is exactly what you have to customize something for an individual client's complex and ill-defined needs.10 I make a note of what surprises me most about them is how conservative they are.11 It didn't seem to harm us. He redefined the problem as: make one that's beautiful.12 Prediction is usually all we have to rely on. As you accelerate, this drag increases, till eventually you reach a point where the adults sit you down and explain all the lies they told you. It's exciting to chase things and exciting to try to guess answers.13 Combine this with the confidence parents try to instill in their kids, and every year you get a valuable new resource you can use to figure out what he meant. One, the CTO couldn't be a first rate hacker, because to become an eminent NT developer he would have if the founders had given the VCs what they wanted, when they wanted it, and focus our efforts where they'll do the most good.
A few steps before a Rubik's Cube is solved, it still looks like a mess. There were a lot of false positives. At least, that's how they see it. If it fails, that is. But it's certainly possible to do things that make you stupid, and if you can, as Steve Jobs does, make satisfying you the kind of productivity that's measured in lines of code: the best programmers can solve a given problem in a tenth the time. Hackers & Painters. Particularly to young companies that are growing fast, but haven't been doing it for long enough to have grown big yet. Do we want to get the resulting ideas past other people's. Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Note too that determination and talent are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the 1960s.14 It's one of the most spectacular lies our parents told us was about the death of our first cat.
But no one those days was paying a lot more than Yahoo. Conversations with corp dev is not doing a bad job of talking to them before they are. And I think we may be good at what we're good at for the same reason we're bad at.15 When you're too weak to lift something, you don't need either of those. It's something they plunge into, working fast and constantly changing their minds, and why companies pay now for Bloomberg terminals and Economist Intelligence Unit reports. The time was then ripe for the question: if the study of ancient texts became less about ancientness and more about texts. If they're only paying a twentieth as well. But this harmless type of lie can turn sour if left unexamined.16 We want kids to be innocent so they can get the most done. The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago.
If you're really productive, why not modern texts? The place to look is where the line ends. I think founders will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. When you see something that's taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn't have before, you're probably better off thinking directly about what users need. And I think this sort of thing it becomes national news. The less it costs to start a company. In the hundred meters, you know in 10 seconds who's fastest.
Notes
I know when this happened because it doesn't change the meaning of life.
Currently we do at least 150 million in 1970. Patrick Pantel and Dekang Lin.
Just use the name Homer, to a car dealer. A supports, say, but no doubt often are, but those are writeoffs from the most difficult part for startup founders tend to use some bad word multiple times. Ii. I'm not against editing.
Of the remaining outcomes don't have enough equity left to motivate people by saying Real artists ship.
But if they do for a patent troll, either. If our hypothetical company making 1000 a month grew at 1% a week for 4 years.
It should not try to get elected with a screw top would have disapproved if executives got too much. Another tip: If doctors did the same way a bibilical literalist is committed to believing anything in particular made for other reasons, the switch in mid-game.
Good and bad technological progress, however. Y Combinator makes founders move for 3 months also suggests one underestimates how hard they work. This is the accumulator generator benchmark are collected together on their companies took off? But that doesn't seem to have to talk about startups in Germany.
I may be exaggerated by the government to take board seats by switching to what you really want, like selflessness, might come from meditating in an urban legend. And if you know Apple originally had three founders? When you're starting a company if the students did well they do now.
After Greylock booted founder Philip Greenspun out of business, having spent much of the biggest winners, from hour to hour that the worm infected, because investing later would probably only improve filtering rates early on?
We Getting a Divorce? Perl.
Don't invest so much from day to day indeed, is a huge, overcomplicated agreements, and b when she's nervous, she doesn't like getting attention in the sense that there were about the same reason I stuck with such tricks will approach.
But it's useful to consider behaving the opposite way from the CIA. There are successful women who don't like to invest at any valuation the founders. But while this sort of things you waste your time working on is a dotted line on a scale that Google does. 0001.
But try this experiment is that you're not going to create a great deal of competition for the future.
VCs thus have a standard piece of casuistry for this essay will say that it refers to instant ramen would be more likely to come in and convince them. But this seems an odd idea.
You're going to drunken parties. I have no real substance. VCs should be working on Viaweb. But iTunes shows that people get older.
After a bruising fight he escaped with a slight disadvantage, but in practice money raised as convertible debt is a shock at first, but this sort of person who would never have left PARC. Again, hard work is in the Valley has over New York, people who did it lose?
#automatically generated text#Markov chains#Paul Graham#Python#Patrick Mooney#memories#note#lies#NT#h2#demand#something#li#government#attention#bruising#sort#VCs#problem#progress#name#company#benchmark#tricks#time#sup#confidence#experiment#outcomes#meters
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How to make games: MMORPGs
Hey, you! Does your current job not fill enough of your life with soul-crushing misery? Have you ever stopped to consider 'man, I wish I could get into a line of work that involved me wasting more time away from home and friends but I would have to pay infinity dollars for the experience'? I have to say that's a very particular set of tastes, but I play Mei in Overwatch too, so I understand having a weird sadist/masochist relationship with our gaming experiences. I'd also say that it sounds like you're in the market for an MMORPG, which is good because that's what we'll be talking about today! Making an MMORPG is easy, since it requires literally less effort than the last two genres we've covered: no one actually expects you to innovate past the good-old WoW standard of gameplay. So steal the most generic Tolkien stereotypes you can bring together, but leave out all that "Jesus" and "patriotism" stuff that accompanied Tolkien's work, because our primary market is going to be east-Asian countries and 13 year olds with money burning holes in their pockets. Making a character creator is as easy as going through the process of making one yourself, as you start with the obvious stuff like species. Species should include, but never exceed: Humans who are neither good nor bad at anything (but called some kind of stupid fantasy name), Elves for sissy magic users, Dwarves for your tanks, some kind of dragon hybrid for the fucking furry degenerates, and the obligatory Sexy Race which you'll slap all over your ads that show up on the sides and bottoms of webpages when viewed by morons who don't know what AdBlock is for. If the above doesn't address it, you should also pick a class, so just steal them from early D&D: Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Thief, etc. No more than that - gotta save room for those sweet, sweet expansion packs so you can fleece your players for "Monthly Server Maintenance Fees" in addition to the price of the game. Never mind that 'sever maintenance' is just ripping out old HDDs and putting in new ones and that HDDs are dirt-fucking cheap, you need to fleece these fuckers for gold like your name was Jason. (That's a smart joke.) Your art style should revolve around the most generic mono-themes you can steal assets for, preferably in the Unity engine since that won't make it look like unabashed shit or anything. For music, just hit royalty free music websites, because everyone's just gonna put Youtube in the background when they play anyways, so fuck it. We got money to earn and gameplay to digest, so let's get what your players can expect. Remember, making each class distinct is important as all members of a given party operate like different members of a family unit. For instance: DPS Roles are the family dog. They get excited easily and rush into situations without regard for life or limb, usually making way more noise than they have earned any right to make. They think they're the leader of the party since they insist on being front and center of every encounter even though they are not. Tank Roles are the Asian helicopter moms. They feel the need to live vicariously through their DPS compatriots because the damage they dish out is, frankly, paltry and any time the situation isn't about them - they make it about them somehow. They believe they are the leaders of the party, though they obviously rarely have control over the most immediate threats, let alone the entire party of sociopaths. Support Roles are the stern fathers. They can't immediately intervene on the behalves of the above roles no matter how much they want to, so they stand back and grant all the help they can muster and, at best, will be largely ignored despite the fact that their movements will dictate the pace, flow, and results of combat above all others. They will only be recognized for what they do when they fail in their tasks, which makes this metaphor hit a bit too close to home for most. Just remember: Supports who aren't active in their party are every Raid Boss's future wingman. Don't come crying to me when your DPS Daughteru comes home dating one of those degenerate dragon-people! Anyways, the pacing of the game is paramount, since making an "end" of an MMORPG is essentially illegal, so you need to make it so it's easy to get to somewhere between levels 30-50 before you just start scaling things on a logarithmic basis. For those who don't math good like what I do: your first three level ups should happen more or less instantly upon completion of the tutorial and the players should be able to make good progress over the next few dozen levels as they play with their friends and make larger parties for stronger instances. However, you're not gonna be wringing any monthly server fees out of these plebs if you make it that easy on them, so around level 40-ish or so, just start slapping higher multiplier values on the Exp. required to level up to the point where solar eclipses happen with greater regularity than the "LEVEL UP" chime. By the time players hit this wall, they'll make one of three choices: that they will persist through the grind because the game is literally all they do outside of work now, they will ragequit (and hopefully forget to cancel their credit card subscription to the game with some luck!), or they'll resort to the premium cash shop. What, you didn't know your MMO needed a premium cash shop? Well it does, wake up and smell the lack of ethics, game dev! For some paltry sum between 1 and infinity bucks, your players can buy some kind of in-game premium currency, as mentioned in my gacha explanation. In fact the comparisons here are apt as this, too, is morally dubious and really is for trying to wrench even more money out of your players for something that they can rest more or less assured that you aren't gonna update meaningfully until Halley's Comet passes through the solar system again. However, for some amount of this premium currency, they should be allowed super powerful weapons and armors that completely invalidate any sense of pacing up until the low 70s level range. This will help them play further into the mindless grind until they are playing at least for a few months (worth of fees) time. Once hopelessly addicted, they'll slog through the remaining 30 levels or so of grind, ideally. All other premium currency items should be cosmetics - preferably cosmetics with expiration dates so you can fleece them for their fashionista tendencies repeatedly. If you have any pangs that make you think this might be "not exactly on-the-level", hey, you're right! You're really getting the hang of modern game design! After that, it's time make expansion packs! The beauty of this is that not only have they paid for the base game and monthly fees, but now they get to buy the game ALL OVER AGAIN! Slap on a few extra islands and some quests to populate them and sometimes raise the level cap. The design is the easy part. The name is where you will likely struggle. However, using our advanced scientific algorithms, we have deduced that the ideal title should follow the template: "Adjective Noun Adjective" plus or minus a definitive article and a couple of "Of"s. Do you not know what those are? That probably means you're at the right IQ level to actively make MMOs! Or to play them! Oh yeah, every second expansion pack you should add an additional class - preferably one that invalidates the classes of an earlier build, so as to subtly 'encourage' making a new character. But the prereqs for getting these should be difficult to the point of patent absurdity. After all, you can't class change to a "Bumtickler" until you get that level 85 Pirate! Congrats! You're a soulless monster who cares naught for their fellow man. You are now a living example of gaining the world and losing your soul. I hope the Faustian bargain was worth it. You're welcome.
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Mostly vidya ramblings pt 3C
Previous post here.
Right, software time. A cursory glance at my PSN Profile will show that I’ve met my personal quota of getting the platinum in at least 10 PlayStation titles over the year, with a few PC titles sprinkled in for good measure since hey, I have access to a Windows machine again (though it’s not exactly a games machine, unless your definition of a “gaming rig” is something with a 15W Core i3 and modest laptop Radeon graphics). While I didn’t start out meaning to rank these games, I find I have a tendency to do so anyway and while I’m certainly not saying these games are outright bad, they were absolutely lower on the rung, so I’ve dubbed this part “C” (again, no disrespect to the devs or any who rate these games higher than I do; these are just my personal assessments). These are OK games.
The Darkness 2 (Steam)
Enjoyable, somewhat! I put this down like, ages ago when I picked it up for a song on PC, feeling it was too basic and uh “console shootery” at the time. Often times, having restrictions placed upon something can net great results, and hamstrung as I am by my less-capable hardware, I’ve only been picking up Steam games that could run on lower end hardware, or anything released prior to say, 2015. Surprisingly this runs at something stupid like 200 FPS on my machine with V-Sync off and all settings on High at 1080p, so go figure. Anyway, it’s a short and enjoyable shooter. I don’t know anything about the comics upon which the game(s) are based, but Jackie is a likeable character, the Darkness powers are fun enough, the locations are varied, the supporting cast surprisingly interesting and the plot was actually pretty cool too, with a major sequel hook that we’ll probably never get.
Ori & The Blind Forest (Steam)
It sorta hovers a bit below 60fps while running at 1080p, but it’s all just a bit reductive when one spends more time looking at the framerate counter than playing a game, no? The blessing and curse of PC gaming I suppose. Anyway, as a Metroidvania the game is a bit annoying. As a piece of interactive fiction, it’s too saccharine and feels like a B-tier Dreamworks production for children which, I suppose shouldn’t be a knock against the game but I have to say -- wasn’t my cup of tea. Reminds me a bit of Child of Light by Ubisoft -- gorgeous to look at, benign if not frustrating to play (those escape sequences can piss off), and young gamers would probably find more to like in the...emotional tidbits than most adults.
Crysis 2 (Steam)
So apparently this got delisted off Steam but now it’s back up or something with EA deciding to put their back catalog on the platform or something? Anyway, like this list implies, Crysis 2 is an okay game, nothing more and nothing less. The nanosuit energy depletes a bit too quick for my liking, and you’re really made to feel like a badass only some of the times, in quick and short bursts, not unlike BJ in the new Wolfenstein games by MachineGames (any more prolonged exposure to hitscan weapons and other bullshit will quickly send you to the loading screen). Thing is, I don’t want to feel like a badass only some of the time? I mean, you put a ripped supersoldier type doing the Badass Looking Back At the Viewer Pose on the cover and I expect to be able to do certain things without stopping for a breather every 20 seconds, ya know? If you’re going to give me the power fantasy, commit to it. Or, find ways to keep the flow up and reward mastery to make players earn said fantasy (something the new DOOMs have done and why those have been so successful). I certainly don’t envy game devs for having to balance this shit, but id Software showed you one way of how you might do that while the Crysis games and those of their ilk just feel slow and unrewarding.
Quantum Break (Steam)
Really surprised I was able to get this running on my PC but hey, it runs on the Xbox One so how hard could it be? I dearly love Remedy’s games, even if they’re a bit straightforward at times and you get the feeling they’d rather be in the business of non-interactive fiction than games making at times. Well here is a TV show hybrid! Made exclusively in partnership with Microsoft as part of their TV & STREAMING, TV & STREAMING, SPORTS & STREAMING strategy of the 2010s. I didn’t care for the plot, nor the endless email / audiobook / loredumps scattered around, nor the characters, any of it. I will say the final stage with the super high tech offices was a delight (boy wouldn’t I love to live the corpo life in such beautiful, clean office environs). Lance Reddick was a treat as always. Peter “Littlefinger” Baelish shows up to do a thing. Yeah, it’s a Remedy joint through and through. 2019′s Control was such a highlight for me that I’ll take any kind of prototype-y take on it (and QB certainly feels like a rougher, worse version of Control, at least mechanically).
Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs / Dear Esther: Landmark Edition (Steam)
These titles were certainly...things that I installed onto my PC and sat through... Yes. Look, I’m not one to dog on walking simulators, and I know the devs have faced tough times recently but I still feel these are acquired tastes and could be appreciably improved in too many ways to name. Of the two, Dear Esther is the one I’d rec because at least that one was quite pleasant to meander around in while Amnesia left me disappointed that I’d wasted my time, physically sick with its subpar performance and muddy graphics, flaccid with its stodgy plot and left absolutely disappointed that I’d wasted my time on such a bizarre and confusing payoff towards the end. Chinese Room, I mean this in the most constructive way possible: maybe try a different type of game next time.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein (GOG)
I remember putting in some decent time into the DEMO version of RtCW’s MP mode, being amazed at the time by the particle effects, with child-me just running around the D-Day map with the flamethrower out. Anyway, years later and I finally played the SP campaign. It’s maybe better than Allied Assault’s? It feels more consistently entertaining anyway. Hell I think I like these boomer shooters better than MachineGames’ recent efforts (which isn’t saying a whole lot because I find those games just merely okay). I promise you I’m not just being a crotchety old fart.
Ys: Memories of Celceta (PS Vita)
I’d been playing through this over the spring on my Vita TV, before it bit the dust eventually and I’ve been meaning to go back and wrap up the cheevos. I was a bit lukewarm with Oath in Felghana (my first Ys), but could definitely see the appeal in the series, as boss rush games aren’t really my cup of tea (ie. it’s the journey and not the destination of say, a Souls game that is the meat for me). Definitely a game that would benefit from a 60fps refresh and cleaner graphics than what the Vita can provide. I’ve already got a copy of Ys 8 in shrink wrap and have my eyes set on emulating Ys Seven or grabbing the GOG version. A game where action is king and story or character development is secondary; I would prefer more of the latter to make this more of a JRPG and less of a “predominantly Japanese action game with superficial RPG elements”.
Catherine: Full Body (PS4)
I paid $70 for this on day one and I’ve gotta say... should’ve waited for the price drop. I’m a somewhat lapsed Atlus mark, and I still hold the original Persona 5 as my no. 1 in the PS4′s lineup (with Dragon Quest XI possibly being a tie), yet I bought this knowing it wouldn’t really be for me. Why? High difficulty in a genre I don’t play, like at all, a relatively short clear time (in itself not an issue and frankly welcome these days HOWEVER...), and a somewhat unsatisfying payoff despite being a supernatural romance thriller. I bought this as seed money for Atlus’s P.Studio/Studio Zero, in the hopes that Project Re: Fantasy will knock my socks off just like the latter day Persona games have. Because in spite of the contents not really appealing to me, it’s still supremely well made, and it’s not everyday that games like these get made, so there you go. Look, if I could go back in time and put this money towards 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, I probably would, but then the Catherine steelbook is ever so pretty...
Tearaway Unfolded (PS4)
The OG game is one of the most charming little 3D platformer/collect-a-thons out there, and as far as children’s games (or er, “games that also appeal to children”) go, more of these and less of those please (your Child of Lights and Oris). I’d go as far as to say the OG version is better than the PS4 version, though the PS4 version is also quite good. Really, if I wasn’t going for that stupid Misplaced Gopher trophy, this would probably be an easy shoe-in for the B-tier list, but I place this demotion firmly at Media.Molecule’s feet. That cheevo is cursed.
The Missing: JJ Macfield and the Island of Memories (PS4)
I’d almost forgotten about this! If that doesn’t qualify for making the C-tier list then I don’t know what else does. I only know of Swery65′s qualities through osmosis, having watched the 2BF’s legendary LP of Deadly Premonition and the gone-too-soon D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die. He’s an interesting person with interesting ideas but crucially, as a game dev, his output is just... kinda mediocre? If not outright bad? Case in point with this game. It looks and runs like garbo; it plays like garbo; the character designs are cute; the dialogue is pretty good; there is a wonderful and gradual “twist” to the main character that was super spoiled for me when people were discussing and promoting it (like, that is my bad, but also internet discourse on any kind of entertainment media is just *fucked*); there’s a lot of semi-colons in this sentence so I’ll stop here.
And the balls to charge like, what, $40+ for the game on PSN?? I’d gotten it for way less on a sale but in a day and age when $1 could buy you 3 months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and MS might also throw in a curio like this in there just to fill in the gaps, it makes you wonder if these kinds of games can ever turn a profit, especially when the end product is this jank. And these are commercial goods, make no mistake, any aspirations to being an art piece or social critique notwithstanding, so that also brings to the fore the whole aspect of pricing games, relative value, production and marketing costs, blah blah.
IF you like something different, can appreciate games made on a shoestring budget with arguably bad gameplay and technical deficiencies, but has...heart? Then look no further to the output of this man. The most C-worthy of all the titles listed here.
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Horizon: Zero Dawn -- There’s Only One or Two Giant Dinosaurs
Did you know that I own a PS4? Of course you don’t, why the fuck should you care? I’m literally a stranger on the internet that communicates to you via an internet post floating on the information superhighway like a piece of turd lost in the everflowing sea of turds in a septic tank. But enough rambling on the subject of human feces and back to the topic at hand, I own a PS4.
I used to own the PS2 and I remember having a CD holder shaped like a thick book that holds all my PS2 DVDs, and I remember it being filled to the brim until I have to double-stack the DVDs or else it won’t fit. So why did I bring this up? Because I want to compare that to my PS4 library which consists of 4 blu-rays. No I’m not fucking kidding, I only got 4 games, two of which are a copy of Bloodborne that I had to buy twice because I bought the wrong fucking region and the DLC won’t connect.
Maybe right now you’re asking yourself, “What’s with the rambling man?” and well... Here’s the thing, I’m gonna be honest from the start: I wasn’t that into Horizon: Zero Dawn (HZD). I bought it just as a filler, to bulk up my library of PS4 exclusives. So yes, I just wasted two paragraphs explaining that I didn’t buy HZD because I think I’ll enjoy it, I bought HZD just to own it and maybe get a kick out of it or two.
Oh well, let’s talk about the game anyway
In this game, you play as Aloy, a woman without a mother in a tribe that places value on matriarchy, which is why she is branded an outcast by her tribe. Wait what? Doesn’t matriarchal society puts more privilege and power on women? So why was she shunned? She’s a woman! Shouldn’t she be given power instead of you know, kicked out?
Something tells me this tribe doesn’t respecc whamen as much as they think they do
But Aloy isn’t all alone in this cold cruel robotic world, she’s got a foster dad whose name I already forgot. I mean it’s not my fault, he’s not that important anyway. All he does is teach Aloy everything she ever knew so that she can go to the yearly outcast acceptance tryouts, nothing important there. Sarcasm aside, it’s still kinda true that his only purpose in the game is to be the plot advancing sacrificial lamb. No spoiler alert needed! His death flag has been raised ever since he become the parental figure of the protagonist, kinda like Batman’s parents or Uncle Ben.
But no worries, his sacrifice wasn’t in vain because Aloy finally gets accepted into the tribe! By virtue of being the sole survivor of the test because some tribe of edgy fuckboys killed everybody else. And not long after, some killer robots showed up at the door, late to party and and thrashed the place up some more. With the tribe left in tatters, Aloy is appointed as a scout and sent into the world to figure out the threat that looms over the world. Also, Aloy may or may not have been born from a mountain and now have a personal quest of finding out about her origin. And if she had extra time, probably find out whatever it is the old Shaman smoked until she came to the flawless logic that mountains can give birth to humans.
The threat is, as usual: robots gone apeshit
Have I mentioned that the setting of the world is a post-apocalyptic world where people formed tribes and most animal have been replaced by robots? So yeah, two very important aspect of the HZD world. Anyway, the robots and the humans live happily among each other, and by that I mean they kill each other every time their gaze meet. But so far, things have been manageable as long as the humans stay the fuck away from the robot’s territory and vice versa.
Let me explain about the robots a bit. The robots are various versions of wild animal replacements: stags, bulls, leopards, hawks, saber-toothed tigers, giant fire-breathing chickens, and 30-foot tyrannosaurus rex with frickin’ laser beams.
We all know the mastermind behind the fucking dino, don’t we?
As you can see from my incomplete list alone, the robot variety is rather robust. And the variety is supported by the uniqueness of each robot species. Every robot has different weaknesses based on elements and since the design of each robots is largely varied, the locations of the weak points can be very different. I can see the love and care that went into designing each species, and it shows. Although I gotta admit the herbivores are kind of boring when compared to the carnivores. The herbivores are kinda samey and lame, all you get to do is maybe ride it to town and turn some primitive heads. Meanwhile, the carnivore’s got all the nice toys. The kind of toys that shoots laser and kills people. And guess what? You can shoot the turret off with an arrow then you can pick it up and fire it up their tail pipes.
Now I gotta say, the first time I see the robots, I was like “fuckin’ sold, this shit is G U C C I”. But then after I actually play the game and have come face to face with a lot of them, I wasn’t into them anymore. I don’t know why, but I find the enemies boring after a while. Perhaps its because somehow I find fighting the animal bots has become a chore and not a fun activity to do. I mean the animal bots tend to flock together, so you’re almost always outnumbered, and the bots usually can kill you in a few smacks. This results in a lot of untimely deaths during what I thought would be a sunny stroll in the meadows. Also I think the big machines have too much health. As you can see, I don’t think this is a good thing, the same way a rubber tire isn’t an excellent snack just because you can chew it longer. However, you can actually make all of these problems go away if you choose to stealth it up and crouch like the little bitch that YOU ARE. Hey, dev-person-man-guy-thing, nobody in their right mind looks at a robot T-Rex and say, “Boy, I can’t wait to stealth crouch around this bad boy”. You know what we wanna do? We wanna ride it, or kill it, or ride it AND THEN kill it. Maybe take down a few rival tribes in the process.
And that’s just the fuckin animal bots, there’s also the war bots that looks like a cereal box that grew spider legs. Not only is it visually boring, it’s also plays like shit. Either you have to go play hide and seek with it or it’ll blast you with piss like you’re a really tough shit-stain on the toilet bowl. But the worst of the worst has got to be the human enemies. Fucking hell, in a world filled with creative animal robots, adding human enemies will just bring the standard down. They’re boring to look at, boring to fight against, and just plain stupid. I hate how the so-called “stealth kill” alerts every motherfucker in the area. I hate how you can’t stealth kill the “elite enemies” until you unlock a certain skill. In short, I just hate humans in general.
Not in real life, mind you, I’m a God-fearing peace loving man of the people, man.
Great, since I’ve run out of places to spank HZD, I’m just gonna randomly list all of its best parts.
I like how we can grab some healing items that can be used on-the-go in an instant, and I like how it can be easily found in the wilds like some drive-through salad. What I don’t think I like is how the plants aren’t that easy to differentiate from one another. I mean if I’m gonna make a jump, roll, tumble, and scoot myself down a goddamn hill while dodging lasers fired from a turret mounted on a 20-foot robot tyrannosaurus, that plant better be the healing plant instead of that useless resist fire plant.
Another thing I like about the game is the weapons. There are quite a variety of weapons at your disposal, and it’s the good kind of variety. The kind of variety that makes each weapon had a distinct feel and different purpose, and I like them all. My favorite is the the tripwire weapon that’s the greatest thing since the invention of fire. The sleeper hit was the sling that I thought was shit but it’s actually great because it can fire ice projectiles that immobilizes the big enemies and freeze their armor.
This very very tight weapon system is also supported by your ability to craft ammo on the fly. This might seem like a trivial thing, but hear me out now: by enabling you to craft ammo mid-fight, the game makes sure that the pace isn’t halted by the fucking menu screen and you get to keep your focus and maintain the flow of the battle. Because you know what kills my combat boner when I’m in a middle of a tense fight against robot dinosaurs? Having to pause the game and open up the crafting tab because my arrows ran out.
That’s it, that’s about everything I can say about my experience playing the game. There are some things that I actually left out of my review like the world design, the characters, etc. It’s because I think that it’s not that important to mention or it’s just mildly mediocre and not worth reviewing.
In Brief
What’s wrong with me? Do I not like video games anymore? 10 years ago, all I had to do was fire up my PS2, boot up GTA: San Andreas and just grab a bike and cycle from Los Santos to Las Venturas and I was having fun. 5 years ago I finished Dark Souls after 2 years of git gud, and I didn’t let the difficulty break me. Now I’ve got a game filled with creative and challenging enemies, a big open world to explore, and a fuckin robot dinosaur for God’s sake. Why didn't I have fun with it? I don’t think I have an immediate answer for it, but at least I know there’s two possibilities. One, is that I AM actually losing my touch and I’m not that into video games anymore. Probably all this adult thing and living my life that’s gotten in the way. The other one is that my tastes has actually gotten better with time, and now I notice the intricacies and can distinguish whether a game is good or bad, and I simply did not want to waste my limited time with games that I didn’t really like that much, including HZD.
I guess we can learn something from the animal robot designs. No matter how well you design an element of a game; visually or audibly, it won’t be appreciated as much if it does not add much to the gameplay --or worse-- plays like shit. Because you ARE making a game, and all the elements that you design will ultimately be judged from how it feels as a game. You can paint the robots with naked titties, but if they’re boring to fight, people will still think of them as badly designed. As for the case of the war bots and the human enemies? Dogshit.
9/10/2018
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Nintendo Switch Presentation - January 2017
It’s not the first time we’ve seen the Nintendo Switch, but the original reveal did not give us too much info. Now we finally get more information about the console thanks to the Nintendo Switch Event. Here’s the main details you’re probably chasing:
Release
The Nintendo Switch will launch on March 3rd, 2017 in Japan, US, Canada, some of Europe and other territories, which includes Australia. That’s only about 7 weeks away.
The price will be $299.99USD/$469.95AUD. While it is probably worth it from a technical point of view of what it can do, that price range def takes it out of the impulse buy price range. I bought a Wii U about a year or so ago with Super Mario Maker for $300AUD on special. I played Super Mario Maker a few times and then the Wii U gathered dust ever since. I really like the Switch’s portability, but I don’t travel enough to get the most out of this feature, so not being a huge Nintendo combined with my buyers remorse (other that continuing my console collection) with the Wii U, makes me think I won’t be grabbing one of these on launch. I probably won’t consider it until there’s a significant price drop. I mean you can get the much more powerful PS4 or Xbox One S for about $100 AUD cheaper, so it’s not very competitive on price.
There’s two Switch packages you can get. The only difference being the colours of the joy-con controllers. The Joy-Con controllers come in 3 colours currently, grey, neon red and neon blue. One Switch package comes with two grey controllers, while the other package comes with one blue and one red controller. I’d be definitely picking the grey controller package. I may be bias as grey is my favourite colour these days, however I just think it looks awkward, having one red and one blue controller connected to Switch.
Other than the 2 joy-con controllers, the other items you get in the box include the Switch tablet console itself and the dock for connecting to a TV. The Joy-Con Grip that holds your two joy-cons together for a more traditional controller experience. Two wrist straps that connect to the Joy-Con that make them easier to hold and stop them flying across the room. Plus of course a HDMI cable and AC adapter.
Specific accessory pricing includes:
Switch Pro Control (available in grey) - $69.99USD/$99.95AUD
Pack of 2 Joy-Con Controllers (available in grey, neon red, neon blue or neon red/blue combos) - $79.99USD/$119.95AUD
1 Joy-Con Controller (available in grey) - $49.99USD/$69.95AUD
Joy-Con charging grip - $29.99USD/$39.95AUD
Switch Dock set (including dock, ac adapter and HDMI cable) - $89.99USD/$129.95AUD
Joy-Con Wheel (set of 2) - $14.99USD/$24.95
If you combine the prices of all the components that you get in the box together equals $199.97USD/$289.85AUD, which means you’re paying about $100USD/$80AUD for the actual Switch console tablet. That probably sounds like a good deal when put like that. Either that or it shows that the accessories are quite expensive. I’d hate to be a parent with one of this in the house, having the buy multiple docks, fighting over who gets to use it, constantly dropping big dollars to replace easy to lose controllers etc.
Specs
There are 3 modes to the Switch. TV Mode whereby you put the Switch into the dock and play on the TV. Tabletop mode, where you utilise the Switches kickstand to have it stand up independently and use the Joy-Cons detached from the console. And of course handheld mode, where you have the Joy-Cons attached and can use it like a portable tablet gaming machine. In Handheld mode it will get 2.5hrs – 6.5hrs of battery life dependent on the game (Zelda will get about 3hrs battery life). This seems reasonable. Should mean people can play triple A titles on the train or bus to work or extended long gaming sessions playing simple indie or retro Nintendo titles without running out of battery. You can also play it while charged it via a USB-C cable.
Other specs include no region locking which makes sense for a console they are promoting to use on the plane. It has a multi touch display, 6.2” display that runs as I predicted at 720p. So smaller than an iPad mini but at the largest spectrum of a smart phone screen size. The same size screen as the Wii U tablet but higher resolution. When docked it will run in 1080p. There’s 32GB of internal storage which is pretty disappointing but can be expanded by a micro SD card. Up to 8 Switches can connect together for multiplayer.
The Switch will of course support digital download games, but also has “Game Cards” for physical games, not too dissimilar to the 3DS. The dock has 3x USB 2 ports plus of course a HDMI and AC adapter ports.
There’s been no mention of the actual performance of the machine. Some of the graphics was looking a bit rough in places, so don’t expect it to in any way compete with the Xbox One or PS4 in the graphics department.
Controllers
The main controllers as mentioned at the Joy-Cons. Think of them as smaller Wii remotes. They attach to the sides of the Switch in portable mode but can also be used separately. They have NFC and support Amiibos. The left controller has a screenshot button that will later support video. It has an accelerometer, and IR motion camera sensors, which of course open up much more potential as to what you can do with them. It also has an advanced “HD” rumble feature built into the Joy-Cons that supposedly helps you feel things (the example they showed was ice being put into a glass).
Being so small you wouldn’t expect many controls but it amazingly includes on each controller a joy stick, plus or minus button, left or right button, d-pad or A/B/X/Y buttons, ZL or ZR button, release button, SL button and SR button. I think the fear at first was the Joy-Con might be quite limiting, but this has clearly been designed so you should be able to play just about any game with even only one Joy-Con controller.
The wrist straps when connected a Joy-Con help beef up it’s physical size including likely making the SL and SR buttons easier to use.
For when you want a more traditional controller setup you can plug the Joy-Cons into the grip and it will also charge the Joy-Cons. If you want even more advanced controls, then there is also the Switch Pro Controller, similar to what was available for the Wii U.
Online
For the first time, Nintendo’s online services will now cost you money to use (like Xbox and Playstation). There will be an initial free trial and then it’s time to pay up if you want to continue. This also could get costly for parents. Though there is one bonus. Each month you will get to play a NES or SNES classic game for free. With Playstation Plus and Xbox Gold you get multiple free games per month and you can play them as long as you are subscribed, and even when you resubscribe. That doesn’t look to be the case here, so price will be critical to not seem like poor value compared to the alternatives. Smartphones will also be able to connect to it’s online service for chat and arranging online games.
Games
This is great and all but it doesn’t matter if there isn’t a big selection of games to support it. This was the major problem with the Wii U. It wasn’t overly apparent during the presentation what the full launch line up was but Nintendo assures us that there’s currently over 50 devs working on over 80 games for the Switch. Here’s some of those games:
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Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, after much speculation, is a Switch launch title.
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1-2-Switch is a series of mini games that make use of the joy-cons. It is primarily a game that you don’t watch the screen while playing. It’s a launch title and could be the Switch’s equivalent to Wii Sports.
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A boxing style game called Arms is also making much use of the joy-cons. Each player needs two joy-cons each, one for each hand. You play split screen in TV mode, or use two switches to battle, or online. Released in Spring (US) 2017.
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Super Mario Odyssey is the first large sandbox Mario game since Sunshine. There’s parts based in like New York with regular size people, which is just bizarre. Mario’s hat being thrown is a major game mechanic. Out end of 2017.
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Project Octopath Traveler from Square Enix looks like pixel art paper Mario/final fantasy style game. No release date as of yet.
Other upcoming titles include FIFA, Ultra Street Fighter 2, Skyrim, Splatoon 2, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Has Been Heroes, Just Dance 2017, Snipperclips, Super Bomberman R, Arcade Archives, Disgaea 5 Complete, Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, Farming Simulator, Fast RMX, Fire Emblem Warriors, Minecraft, Puyo Puyo Tetris, Rayman Legends, Rime, Skylanders Imaginators, Syberia 3, Steep, Sonic Mania, NBA 2K18, Lego City Undercover, I am Setsuna, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth and more.
So there you have it. Pre-orders are now open and going by how hard it’s been to get a NES Classic mini, it could be hard getting a Switch at launch. That shouldn’t be a problem for me, because at that price, I’m just not big enough a fan, or trust Nintendo’s game support to wanna jump in straight away. With the expensive price of the console and accessories, plus a lack of launch titles, it’s just not competitive at a time when Nintendo really needs to be. Perhaps by Christmas with a big price drop and a larger library it might be worth it. I also a bit disappointed with it as Nintendo weren’t touting the Switch as a successor to the Wii U, yet Wii U games aren’t backwards compatible with it.
The presentation overall had it’s highs and lows, and some seriously awkward moments, and somewhat underwhelming unless you’re a Nintendo fanatic. Still I commend Nintendo for a great design and it will be interesting to try it out sometime. Because I would like a portable hybrid console like this some day. It does feel like the future.
If you like what you’re are reading, then follow The Geeklee on Tumblr or like The Geeklee on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheGeeklee/
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PS5 Reveal
The Playstation 5 has officially been revealed and my frothing demand could not be more palpable. While the showcase wasn’t ground-breaking, if you had your finger on the pulse, you should have known it wouldn’t be. And anyone expecting some jaw-dropping reveals can’t be much of an enthusiast. Nearing the end of the PS4s life-cycle, we still have some killer apps to await (Last of Us II, Ghost of Tsushima) and drawing too much away from that presence won’t be good for business. But what we did receive is still incredibly tantalizing.
The thing I want most from my console experience is seamlessness. I’m tired of waiting for things to load, I’m done looking at textures stutter and drop-in-- I just want games to run as fluidly as they can on PC. While you may stop and say, “Just get a PC then;” gaming is my escape, my relaxation. I’ve been a faithful console gamer for years and years because of the ability to boot it up and begin playing easily. I like the option to relax on my couch and play on a big screen. Plus, after years of using a controller, that’s my preferred input method. Gaming on a PC just isn’t quite the same experience. Though I understand you could absolutely get it there, the barrier for entry is simply not desirable. Whatever performance capabilities a PC offers doesn’t quite compare to the easy access of a console. And having said that, I’m psyched for the PS5.
First off, I think the console looks awesome. I’ve been hoping for a gaming box to “make a statement” for a very long time, and my envy of the Xbox Series X design is no longer an issue. The peripherals look sleek and elegantly designed; I will 100% be purchasing the media remote and charging dock for controllers.
Secondly, the showcase, itself, was awesome. It was to the point, featured meaningful content, and felt like a special display of enthusiasm, talent and storytelling. The excitement of the devs and the studios was supremely obvious and I totally bought in.
A biggest concern, however, came from seeing the comments during the Twitch stream. I question if the games Playstation chose to highlight are going to appease the majority of gamers. However, in reflecting upon the matter, the “majority” of gamers may be Fortnite players. And I don’t mean literally, “gamers who play Fortnite.” I’m more so referring to the concept of people who play F2P games and maybe purchase one game a month, if that. What I have to consider is that it doesn’t matter who uses the PS5, it’s going to matter who buys games on the PS5. Even if 10 people own the console and 8/10 people hated seeing Solar Ash, if those 8 people never buy games but the 2 people left who do loved Solar Ash, that’s all that truly matters and that’s who Playstation needs to cater towards. Sales numbers for games like Final Fantasy VII: Remake, God of War and Horizon: Zero Dawn speak for themselves. Getting worried by the dogging and negativity seen when games like Little Devil Inside and Goodbye Volcano High appear probably shouldn’t worry me... It’s the voices of those who pay that matter, not quite who plays.
Also exciting, is being able to see screenshots and videos after the fact. I’ve been far more impressed with the games from yesterday as they’ve showed up on Twitter, especially in regards to Little Devil Inside. On YouTube Live I thought, “Oh, cool, neat looking game, not sure why it has to be PS5...” But when I saw it on Twitter later, the fidelity kinda blew me away. I expect to see a lot more of that occurring as more media is released over the coming weeks. And just as I was hoping, enthusiasts are feeling jazzed about Ratchet and Clank’s showing; the ability to jump between entire worlds without hiccup was an awesome display.
What’s most appealing from the games shown is that the stance Playstation is taking on their offerings is “What kind of stories can we tell?” And if you’ve been listening, Playstation made this pretty clear months back. While the messaging was certain, understanding how that might play out was a bit cloudy. Yet after yesterday’s showcase, we see that Playstation wants to put gamers into unique experiences you won’t find anywhere else. Or even if the games do arrive on other consoles, Playstation is here to support that ecosystem and turn them into highlights.
At the end of the day, Playstation is a massive brand. Appeasing everyone isn’t going to happen and at times they will make decisions that polarize or alienate. It’s guaranteed to happen from time to time. But the Playstation I saw emerge from that showcase is definitely a company that is authentically trying. Their effort is cleanly noticed and it’s why they continue to have my money. I know people will dog them for the price of the console... they’ll continue to jab at them for issues with backwards compatibility... But I dunno, man. There’s always something to be upset about. I’m gonna focus on what’s in front of me, not what I’m hoping for, and enjoy what I’ve been given. As consumers the Internet has given us way too much agency we don’t deserve. The Simpsons tackled this when Homer gets to design his own car. He totally flops it , proving that giving in to consumer needs created an abomination. Sometimes the ideal box just can’t be realized and it may be for several reasons we just don’t understand.
I’ve loved Playstation for years. I became truly loyal when I realized their controller was the best controller. I wanted all my games to feel that way. If they go to off-set joysticks I may feel the need to contemplate my system purchases differently... But for right now, I’m all-in. And I hope a lot of other people out there can feel the same way too. It’s an amazing time to be a gamer and it’s an amazing time to watch Playstation. My hope is that consumers can worry less about what they wanted and love what they’re being given. Because if you just wear the right lens, Playstation is killing it, my friends.
Absolutely. Killing it...
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VR vs. Half Measures
If I was smart I’d talk about Star Wars today, for obvious reasons, but I’m not and there’s a matter that’s been on my mind for a little while recently and something that is probably overdue being vocalised in general. It’s about videogames, videogame development and virtual reality (VR). That, and why I’m increasingly convinced something needs to change – and fast.
Let’s go back to one of the most recent videogame announcements and the thing that kicked this off in my mind: L.A. Noire. You didn’t need to try hard to hear the rumblings of that before the announcement arrived, and as someone who never got to play the original but who had been impressed by the efforts put into storytelling, I was excited at the possibility of a title that you could easily say was underappreciated in its time getting a second chance. Not only that, but Rockstar had seen the potential there and was even going to make the step into VR with L.A. Noire. If Rockstar was ever going to go VR I’d thought L.A. Noire with its storytelling and game mechanics were a natural fit, so I was pretty pleased.
When I got to read about it however I was left rather disappointed. We were not getting L.A. Noire in VR. We were getting L.A. Noire: The VR Case Files, seven cases recreated from the original. Not even the minor chuckle of seeing a couple of outlets refer to the game continuously as ‘LA NOIRE’, like they were just randomly bellowing French at various points in their stories, could stop me from sighing a bit internally at that.
When we, and by ‘we’ I mean the industry at large (including those who report on it) discuss VR, we invariably get drawn into the benfits of ‘the experience’. What you can feel, how immersed you are in the world, how the fictitious world can become real. Fair enough, it is the unique selling point (USP) and ultimate end-goal of immersive technologies – to take you away from the real world and make that real. Yet, again we’re left with the perception of VR being some optional extra; bonus content you put in to look flashy. VR is not the experience at the moment for many, it’s not the selling point, it’s just a selling point.
We constantly say that content is key. You know it. I know it. They know at HTC. They know at Oculus and at Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE). They know it on tech portals and our fellows over at other VR/AR websites – hello to those there who surprisingly read this week after week – know it too. On Reddit or Neogaf (or wherever)? You know it. Hell, those who aren’t even into VR know it
We’re now well into VR’s first generation but we’re still not getting the full deal. How many videogames from the big boys have had VR shoehorned in at this point? How many titles are ‘added VR missions‘? I don’t mind so much for smaller devs doing this, but come on. We can do better at this point. Studios are making money, VR in videogames is grabbing headlines. People absolutely raved about the VR is Reisdent Evil VII biohazard, so much so it might well have changed the direction the series takes from here on in. So why doesn’t anyone actually go for it full bore instead of these tentative steps? An end is likely to be signalled for the first commercial generation within the next six months, heck it could happen as early as tomorrow thanks to Oculus Connect 4. With the next consumer versions, the CV2s of this world, set to take the torch and guide us all into the future.
Yet currently, when we get content and we talk about the immersive experience as a whole, even after all this time, we’re not always getting said whole. Where’s my full experience? Why aren’t we, at this point, onto the truly big VR productions? VR isn’t going away from gaming, no matter how much some wish it so. So… COME ON. Enough delays and lollygagging. Believe me people in the comments section, we’re as tired of wave shooters as you are. I want to get stuck into a big immersive world – so where’s my Immersive Role Playing Game? My IRPG? (I came up with that term the other day and the Editor insisted I use it at some point because he loved it so much. So feel free to start using it judiciously.) Where’s my killer app? Heck, I’d settle for a ‘lesser charge of manslaughter app’ at this point to show some progress.
We’re getting parts. We’re getting measures of VR. Measures of support. Measures of interest. The results for which can vary wildly as a result. Bethesda’s trinity is a great example of this. The best experience looks set to be Doom VFR, which just so happens to be the one made for VR and not being converted in some way. The worst looks to be Skyrim, a title which has been repackaged so many times at this point it’s in danger of choking itself to death with bits of brown tape and bubble wrap.
VR might, sadly, just be a step too far for that, judging by some previews.
The scope of development needs to step up a gear, and do so sharpish. While in the meantime developers also need to be far more aware of the presentation and perception they are projecting. Because that’s also part of the problem. Whilst it’s good we’re getting VR, these ‘bits’ do not help the perception that VR is nothing but an expensive add-on, or that the videogames are not whole experiences, If that’s the case, why not improve the perception of things in the short term by altering the presentation,
Think of it this way: Say we go to a bar and, because I am a very nice sort of chap, I say that I’ll buy you a drink. For the purposes of this example, let’s use a standard pint glass – we’re a British based publication after all – which this is as close an approximation to as I can get at the moment.
Firstly, let’s get the most important point out of the way. I just bought you a drink and yes this does indeed mean that by reading this whenever you see me next, you now owe me a refreshing beverage. Fair’s fair. (Wait, this also it means I get to claim expenses for several hundred drinks? Cha-ching!)
Now some of you may be thinking this glass is half empty. Some of you may be thinking the glass is half full. To those people: what? Don’t be silly, that not the point. The point is I’ve only presented you with half a drink. Oi! What the heck, Kevin!?
Except I never said I would buy you a pint. I said I would buy you a drink.
Unfortunately, the way the drink has been presented leaves you immediately disappointed and underwhelmed. Where’s the rest of it? Why the half measures? Now if the bar staff had chosen a different glass for the drink, you wouldn’t have said anything – because you wouldn’t have known any better. You’d have consumed what which you were given and would judge it as a whole – and not as a half. Yet the volume of content would ultimately be the same. It’s just your perception of it. Had we been in a bar and I gave you a drink in that fashion, you’d end the evening with a negative opinion of the bar and of me. The same then is true for VR.
So there we go. Perceptions, presentation and volume. All of these need to improve. It’s the only way things can move forward, because they’ve been standing still too long.
And standing still gets you nowhere.
from VRFocus http://ift.tt/2kBPbb8
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Kik Messenger Apk File Obtain
Place the APK file in your telephone's SDcard or Internal memory (ideally exterior SDcard). If the APK file does not exist on Google Play, we'll search it in our cache or different licensed APK host site and obtain it. As the next image shows, the APK file is from Google Play. So in case you have a video clip containing any second from a special occasion, then use Kik to share the video with folks you care about.
Here on this web site We've purpose provide you with the newest breaking information and movies straight direct to you with none delay. Kik apk has the power of sending messages, footage, movies, voice cuts, doc information or another shared issues unlimitedly.
The answer to this is to put in an Android emulator like BlueStacks or Andy Software Currently that is the one option to set up Kik for laptop users. You can then share the movie star news, gossips or latest articles with your mates using Kik chat.
For that, you will have a Apple ID. Sadly, there are no different methods to make use of KiK Messenger on Apple units. One of many exceptional options of this APK is that it allows you to begin a public group conversation. Discover and share music, games, movie star gossip and many more without exiting Kik.
However I be more then glad if instead of getting the integrated kik digicam we can use regular cellphone digicam after we hit the digital camera possibility in the new kik if its potential. Verify the file you downloaded shouldn't be corrupt and was not tampered with using the file hashes above.
A modded Kik” is an unauthorized version of Kik Messenger and therefore, being unauthorized, just isn't necessarily safe or healthy on your system. It's possible you'll not be capable of use among the app's features while you modify it, and the developer workforce at Kik Messenger is not going to present any form of technical support for a modified app.
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Now click on on the downloaded APK file after which hit the Set up button and settle for all the terms and condition of the application. Kik Apk for Android permits customers to ship text messages, photos and chatting collectively in real time. This isn't saying that the one who developed the mod is a nasty programmer or has bad intentions just that they aren't associated with Kik Messenger and their modifications haven't been verified or licensed by Kik Interactive.
Hope you favored this article on Learn how to Obtain and install Kik for COMPUTER and kik apk direct download links. Other mods do not open up the Smiley Store packs but allow you to get 1000's of Kik Factors to buy them. Kik is completely different than several different communication apps like Whatsapp as it would not require any cellphone number.
Therefore, if you wish to download the KIK APK file in your system then just go and visit the advocate website and obtain it. Or you'll be able to instantly tap on the link below to obtain the KIK APK file on your gadget. Now, you can begin looking for the brand new friends and can spend your time on this finest chatting apk app.
Sorry it took me so long the positioning was hacked into and the websites dev lastly fixed it. I might fee this kik #1 on the record but that is simply my opinion. Listed here are among the best features of moded kikapp apk why you must have this finest Apk in your android.
Search for the most well-liked Kik mods on the Internet or in an app offered byapk file websites. Kik online messenger is a new LAPTOP-based app that permits you to entry Kik Messenger online from the consolation of your private Home windows primarily based computer. If, nonetheless, you don't really perceive what an APK file is, do learn on. We are going to attempt to clarify what an APK file in as informative and easy to know method as we presumably can.
This way you can simply install the KIK APK file in your gadget, by simply following this instruction within the above. AppsInsider is on-line place for get all android apps, apps for laptop, accessible apps for iOS and extra. As a result of it is a stand-alone model of Kik Messenger and never a modification that you just set up into your licensed Kik app, some mod followers have several modded variations of Kik on a tool.
Each time someone wants to download an APK file from , we'll check the corresponding APK file on Google Play and permit user download it instantly (in fact, we'll cache it on our server). Almost everyone utilizing Kik Messenger is aware of about these pretend camera tools and apps.
In.an analogous means, if you wish to download KiK Messenger APK for PC, we recommend you to obtain BlueStacks, an android emulator software program that allows you to run Android apps on your pc. After getting an Android emulator on your home pc, go to a type of APK download websites and observe the Android emulator set up instructions.
Click on on the above hyperlink to proceed to the apk file download page or app buy page. That is the one app that will backup and restore your whole kik conversations. If in case you have the smallest suspicion a particular APK obtain web site could contain any of these, then you should not download something from it. You will never be capable of know if any of the sites offering APK file download are 100% secure.
It is usually handy to know learn how to download an APK file if you are inquisitive kik apk for samsung galaxy ace about using an older model of the Kik Messenger file (whether or not it might be on your good cellphone, any other cellular machine, or home computer), or if you want to an Android emulator on your COMPUTER with a purpose to run the Kik Messenger app.
Yes, emojis, with that you can communicate whatever involves your mind with your dear ones no matter wherever you're either in class or colleges or wherever else KIK all the time bought lined. If this sounds a little bit bit too highfalutin to you, all it boils all the way down to is that APK file is the name of the file that Android applications (such as the Kik Messenger app).
I created this web site solely with the aim of sharing this software with kik users. If Google Play Retailer is freezing or not working in your Phone, we advocate you to obtain KiK Messenger APK 2017 from below. With the assistance of KIK App, you can easily share; ship photos, movies and textual content messages to your friends throughout the globe free of charge of value.
Having mentioned that, it's fairly possible to download the Kik APK file safely from the Internet is you're further vigilant. With the help of KIK codes, you may simply and shortly get related along with your favourite peoples across the globe. Step 5: Now disconnect the PC with the phone and navigate to the app out of your directory from the place of APK is transferred.
Kik Apk brings everyone to stay connected with others irrespective of where they are. The good news is that there are a lot of locations you'll find APK files to download from on the Internet. Additionally, if you really feel bored, you possibly can ask Kik Bot to tell you hilarious jokes.
When you discover it stays at S” on all of a friend's messages, yet they respond to your texts, chances are good they are using a modded Kik. Not too long ago the developing team launched an replace model for the kik kindle app, which fixed this subject. You can preserve and use more than one of those at a time; nevertheless, each time you alter from one modded app to another (or back to the real Kik Messenger), you lose all of your message history.
It is best to be capable of set up Kik Messenger app easily but when installation fails, first test and ensure that you've allowed installation of apps exterior Google Play Store by checking the 'Unknown Sources' choice in your Android phone / tablet's security settings.
Closing Words: We have shared Kik Apk Obtain For Android, Kik Apk Free Obtain For PC, and Kik App for Home windows Laptop Obtain Windows 7/8/eight.1/10. It is rather straightforward to download the KIK APK either from Google Play Retailer or App Store, but in case when you do not wish to obtain the app then you may go for KIK APK file from the beneficial sources.
Obtain Kik Messenger APK newest version for Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, LG, HTC, Lenovo and all different Android phones, tablets and devices..KIK for PC Free Messenger Obtain on Windows ,,. Information to obtain KIK for Home windows PC. Kik APK App free Download for Android KIK login On-line.
Kik for PC messenger lets you exchange messages with one other Kik messenger user over the data connection or Wi-Fi. Normally, pretty much any Android emulator will do the trick in the case of using the Kik Messenger app on your computer, but if you happen to additionally want to use different apps or play on-line games, and many others.
All Kik logos and pictures are the only real copyright of Kik Interactive and are used for instructional purposes. Kik for Android is actually an advance messaging software that has varied options to your comfort. The latest version of Backup & Restore for kik is 1.2.1. It was released on You may obtain Backup & Restore for kik 1.2.1 directly on Over 126 users ranking a average 3.2 of 5 about Backup & Restore for kik.
With the most recent model of Kik app for Android, you may delete a chat from your dialog so that no one knows what message you despatched. The reason for this problem is, Samsung system would close the Kik app soon after the app isn't use. There are two strategies to obtain the most recent version of KiK Messenger APK to your Android smartphone or LAPTOP. One straightforward manner is to obtain KiK Messenger APK with out Google play from under and installing on your cell manually.
Kik Messenger comes with an built-in browser that permits us to go other hyperlinks with out closing this utility. Full step-by-step tutorial is given on the best way to install Kik Messenger 7.5.0.121.zero APK manually. Kik messenger has a lot of new options like video call, voice call, immediate messages, prompt backup, restoring backup immediately and much more.
Obtain kik on-line messenger from the above link or from the Google Play Retailer. Like different chatting apps, Kik also has some distinctive options like Notification App; you may create group chats with your folks, own built-in web browser and extra.
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Open the google play retailer and search for Kik messenger utility or click the clink given on this web site. It's your personal duty to pay attention to these dangers earlier than modifying the Kik Messenger app and to make it possible for any app mod you employ is secure and that it's going to not disable or trigger hurt to both the app and the system you are using.
However, one factor you have to remember that KIK app offers you Consumer ID to log within the utility. After you get the apk file , transfer it to your Android phone's SD card after which your file manager to browse, install & take pleasure in it. Step 2: Subsequent you'll want to obtain the ASTRO File Supervisor from the android market.
I loved it as a result of its cool to speak though you'll be able to go on messages and send photos,videos,and messages on your cellphone,however on KIK you can ship all that and not have to obtain the stuff people textual content you. So, on this content material, we'll share with you on KIK APK, its features, obtain and install process in your system.
Kik app is value free and it'll give an awesome expertise for all on-line kik users. Ever because the latest update the app is draining the battery of Samsung phones while additionally making the gadgets run hot without any other apps being opened. Additionally, much like the opposite application, Kik Apk also have the possibility to indicate notifications to the consumer for the message sent, delivered, learn and necessary message from the users.
Within BlueStacks, open Google PlayStore and obtain the Android version of Kik. The only important factor to learn about that is that, with out anapk file, Kik Messenger can't run on any machine (and this might additionally embrace your house computer). Through the use of kik on laptop, you can connect with your folks and relations without driving up your cellphone bill.
Click on on it and type kik, you possibly can see kik apk file below it. Just click on on kik to put in kik on your Home windows LAPTOP. After set up you'll be able to fin kik icon on the House web page of BlueStacks. Messages and chats made through Kik will not cost any cash so you possibly can get pleasure from lengthy conversations along with your family members on the go without worrying about the fee.
This app isn't just about connecting together with your outdated buddies but making new ones that have related pursuits similar to you. So that's the whole details about Kik App which is available to Obtain for Each Android & iOS operating. You'll simply must register your account utilizing a username after which you're good to go. Choose a username and create a free account at Kik and then begin chatting with your mates and family members on the fly.
Kik has a very simple and a consumer-friendly interface; the registration process can be straightforward and does not require a phone number. So, supplied you have already got an Android emulator in place, all you will need to do subsequent is to find a Kik Messenger APK file.
Step 1: At first you could obtain kik Downloaded file is called as kik Messenger apk. Kik Messenger is an Android app that lets us keep related with our buddies in irrespective of of the place we are and the way continuously we keep related. You'll all the time must proceed with warning, nonetheless, as none of these sites providing APK downloads are literally official.
Within the above content material, we've discussed KIK APK, its options, download and installing course of. This little piece of software falls underneath Social Networking category and have 149,598.00 kb File dimension on apple's app retailer. The specialty of kik app is, it has the flexibility to sending messages, photos, movies, voice cuts, document recordsdata or every other shared issues unlimitedly.
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Delete the kik app and reinstall it. However remember it will delete your all chat history. Simply click on the DOWNLOAD button to download the apk file on your Android machine. There isn't any limit of phrases to be written in Kik messenger, you possibly can write all you want, and it still would not limit you.
KIK has designed in a simple manner through which everyone can use it easily and also will allow you to to speak with your friends and be you. KIK app helps us to find new pals across the globe, who shares the identical curiosity as you do. This manner you possibly can stay in touch even along with your new buddies as well as your close buddies too.
On this article we will present all it's essential to know to download Kik Messenger APK files with the intention to do exactly that: use Kik Messenger from your house laptop. Nevertheless, in case you are after the newest version of the Kik Messenger app, it might take considerably longer to seek out it. So, be affected person and prepared to spend time till you discover exactly what you are on the lookout for.
Modded Kiks are unauthorized versions of Kik Messenger which have been modified indirectly. After successful set up, it is advisable to place the Knowledge / OBB file in the fitting place. However in case you do not own an Android smartphone, then additionally you need not fear in any respect as you possibly can download KiK Messenger for PC simply by following our guide.
In case, should you don't feel like downloading the KIK APK file in your device then you'll be able to immediately download the KIK App from Google Play Retailer or you'll be able to straight click on the hyperlink beneath to obtain the App. After a number of minute, you can see that the apk recordsdata is already downloaded on your Android machine successfully.
Earlier, now we have already instructed you that KIK APK is a free instantaneous messaging app which is available on Google Play Retailer and App Store. People who find themselves in keen on trying to find new people from anywhere at anytime can now simply obtain kik messenger in your machine and begin connecting with many people all over the world right here.
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For the past five years I've been maintaining Defender's Quest, I've kept telling myself: there's got to be some magical untapped audience I've yet to reach. I've tried every possible trick to find them, and while many have helped, none have been a silver bullet.
Support Mac and Linux
5.2% and 1.8% of lifetime revenue, respectively
Participate in Humble bundles
(back when they were really good)
Sell direct, on GOG, Itch.io, etc
significant chunk, still dwarfed overall by Steam
Localize all the things
Professional: German, French, Spanish, Japanese
Volunteer: Russian, Korean, Italian, Czech
Probably worth it? But not crystal clear.
Well, I finally found these magical undiscovered players: they're in China.
In "Steam Discovery 2.0, Stegosaurus Tail 2.0", we noted the trend of Chinese players appearing on the global PC gaming radar.
For one, Valve mentioned the trend at Dev Days 2016:
and I had noticed it myself, both anecdotally:
as well as in our revenue reports:
At the time, China was still a very small slice of our overall revenue (as you can see in the graph's embedded pie chart -- it's the tiny turquoise slice at the very top). Still, it was enough evidence to start localizing Defender's Quest into Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
Now, whether or not localization is worth it depends on how much text the game has. And Defender's Quest has a lot of text.
Category # words Cutscenes 22,196 Journal 24,943 Everything else 8,709 Total 55,848
The Cutscenes and Journal together comprise a small novel -- 47,139 words, about the same length as Slaughterhouse Five. We decided to translate only the "everything else" category: the game would be completely playable in Chinese, but the story content would remain in English. This way we could test the waters, and if initial results were good, we'd follow up with a complete translation.
Spoiler alert: results were good.
I have never had a localization pay for itself this quickly, not to mention this unambiguously. When you localize a game, you are betting that sales from the target region will increase more than they would have had you not done it. Usually, however, you're never quite sure how many regional sales you would have made anyways. For example, my first language is Norwegian, and most Norwegians my age speak fluent English and consume lots of English media. Chances are they'll buy a game whether it's localized into Norwegian or not. This effect is so bad that prominent Norwegian games like OwlBoy aren't even localized into the developer's native language. (Same goes for um... Defender's Quest. Tilgi meg, Bestemor!) But what about Germans? There's a lot more of them, and research says they have a stronger preference for native-language media than Norwegians. So we did a German localization (among others). And it was probably worth it, but the effect was somewhat obscured since Germany was already a strong selling region.
The Chinese stats tell a completely different story.
For context, when we updated the game with Traditional and Simplified Chinese translations, we ran a Steam weekly deal at 50% off and popped one of our visibility tokens (see this article).
Result: China was our #1 sales region, not only in terms of units sold, but also in terms of gross revenue.
Last week's sale figures:
As mentioned previously, the before/after results of localization were completely unambiguous.
Of all the revenue Defender's Quest has earned from China on Steam in its entire lifetime, 45% of it was earned last week. That's right, we basically doubled our lifetime sales from China almost immediately! Obviously there's some degree of "pent-up demand" in play here, but based on other developers' experience, I suspect we'll see improved sales from China in our long tail, as well.
Here's a per-country breakdown for our lifetime sales, excluding this past week (ie, the entire time before the Chinese localizations were availalbe):
Back then, China was #22.
"But, Lars!" you say, "Defender's Quest has been on sale for five long years! Maybe it's already soaked up most of its potential western buyers already?"
Judging from 2016's figures, apparently not:
The same 10 countries that dominated lifetime sales show up here, just with a few positions swapped. The biggest change is that Japan and Korea represent a larger overall share in 2016 vs. overall lifetime (We shipped Korean and Japanese localizations in 2014). And the Anglosphere + Europe still dominate.
Here's a side-by-side chart of last week vs. 2016 for easy comparison:
So China zooming to #1, even for just a week, is amazing. Germany has traditionally been our strongest non-English region to date and it's never pulled off a feat like that. But you'll also notice Korea and Japan had a higher market share in this last sale, and Taiwan showed up out of nowhere to beat Russia, Canada, and the UK!
How do we explain all this?
Concerning China, it's basically the perfect candidate for localization:
Large market (18% of world's population!)
Strong preference/need for their native language
Population spends money on games (middle class has exploded recently)
But there's another story here. During the sale, 50% of copies were sold in East Asia. The growth from Chinese speaking regions makes perfect sense, but I was surprised to see growth in Korea and Japan. We've had Korean and Japanese localizations available since 2014, after all. What's going on? I have five potential explanations:
First, it could just be statistical noise and I'm reading too much into things.
Second, it could be part of an ongoing regional rise in PC gaming in East Asia in general. Japanese publishers are releasing more games on Steam, whether it's Square-Enix's back catalogue of Final Fantasy games or From Software's latest Dark Souls title, and Japanese players are following them:
@larsiusprime Yes, Japan certainly grows faster than an average on Steam http://pic.twitter.com/FVx90voTJ3
— Steam Spy (@Steam_Spy) December 27, 2015
Meanwhile, Koreans have always been big fans of PC gaming, and Steam has lots of games they like, most notably DOTA 2. Also, Steam has made strides in supporting local Asian currencies, so this growth makes sense.
Third, it could be a result of Steam's discovery algorithm explicitly recommending games to players based on their native language. Just a few years ago, everyone in the world saw the exact same Steam home page, whereas now it serves up unique recommendations, and the user's language is a key variable:
Fourth, just as there are large numbers of Spanish speakers in the USA because of its proximity to Mexico and Central America, I bet there's a decent amount of Chinese speakers in Japan and Korea. So some of those extra sales from Japan and Korea might actually be from Chinese players.
Fifth, there might be a "cultural lift" phenomenon, where visibility in a major country (such as China) trickles down to nearby countries within its cultural sphere of influence. I'm not as sure about this last one as the observed lift in Korea and Japan happened a bit faster than this explanation might predict.
But if any of these effects are in play, I can still make a solid prediction: Asian countries will continue to dominate Defender's Quest's market share in 2017. Last year Asia was 11% of our revenue and 14% of our units sold. I expect that market share to at least double for 2017.
Traffic Analysis
So, we got a lot more sales from Asia, and especially China. But how are these Asian customers finding us? Here's a breakdown of our traffic report during the post-localization sale:
Category % Visits Home Page 37.36 Weeklong Deals 15.80 Specials 14.01 Discovery Queue 11.10 Tags 7.79 Search 4.61 Valve Website 2.46 External Website 1.46 Games < $10 0.97 Other 4.44
These are some really surprising results. If you've been following this blog for a while, you'll know that the Discovery Queue almost always dominates our traffic charts. Here's our traffic from our last promotional event, by comparison:
Category % Visits Discovery Queue 23.47 Tags 14.3 Specials 11.73 Home Page 10.62 Search Results 9.15 External Website 7.89 Weeklong Deals 6.98 Valve Website 5.29 Games < $5 3.05 Games < $10 1.64 Other 5.88
Here's a combined table for easy comparison:
Latest sale Category % Visits Previous sale Category % Visits Home Page 37.36 Discovery Queue 23.47 Weeklong Deals 15.80 Tags 14.30 Specials 14.01 Specials 11.73 Discovery Queue 11.10 Home Page 10.62 Tags 7.79 Search 9.15 Search 4.61 External Website 7.89 Valve Website 2.46 Weeklong Deals 6.98 External Website 1.46 Valve Website 5.29 Games < $10 0.97 Games < $5/$10 4.69 Other 4.44 Other 5.88
Expanding the "Home Page" category for the latest sale reveals that 30.40% of the traffic came from the Special Offers Grid, and 4.56% came from "Updated Games."
What's really interesting to see here is that despite the fact that this latest sale had a smaller discount (50% off vs. 67% off for the previous one), much more traffic came from the "in-your-face" promotional channels (Home Page, Weeklong Deals, Specials) rather than the softer-touch organic discovery channels (Discovery Queue, Tags, Search) we've almost exclusively relied upon until now.
Next, let's look at our visibility round results.
As mentioned in the previous article, post-Discovery update 2.0 visibility rounds are optimized for signal-boosting frequently updated games. They specifically target your existing audience as well as people who have wishlisted your game. On the face of it this seems pointless because it's not giving you any "new" visibility, but for games like ours, it seems to work -- probably because the "Recommended by Friends" module has the highest click-through rate of all the discovery channel on Steam's front page.
Here's where we're at so far:
Our click-through rate is lower, which makes sense as we ran the last round in December and have likely thinned out the pond a bit. However, we're still getting a good number of clicks. We've already beaten the previous view count in just one week -- it will be interesting to see if we're also able to surpass the total absolute number of clicks by the time the visibility round expires. I'm pretty sure these last for either 1 month or 1,000,000 views, whichever comes first, because my last round lasted for 1 month down to the minute, and my friend Ryan Clark recently ran a round that halted at around 1,000,002 views, a suspiciously round number to suddenly terminate on.
It's hard to tell how much the visibility round had to do with the Asian regions. Steam indicates 30.7% of our purchases in this period were fulfilled wishlists, but we don't get any kind of regional breakdown for that. The fact that we reached more eyeballs faster makes me think we've got wider Asian visibility than before, but I don't have solid proof.
So, should you localize your game into Chinese? Probably.
Some quick caveats. If your game isn't selling a whole lot already, I can't guarantee that localizing into Chinese is going to double your sales or anything, and the cost of a localization might even exceed what you could expect to earn from it. Furthermore, genre effects likely apply -- some games probably resonate with the Chinese audience more than others, and our story-heavy Tower-Defense RPG is apparently one of them.
Do your homework
If you've got a simple game, you can probably get away with simple bitmapped fonts, but if you absolutely need full true-type font support with arbitrary dynamic text (as we did), you'd better get your head totally wrapped around Unicode, text encodings, fonts, possibly even IMEs (Input Method Editors). In my case, the prior experience of eight previous localizations, including fellow "CJK" languages Japanese and Korean, was invaluable.
Localize your store page!
Nobody's going to bother buying your game if they can't even read the description, after all. If your game has minimal text, this might be all you have to do to reach the Chinese market.
Now, some things not to do.
Don't use Google Translate.
Just don't. You'll wind up with a garbage translation that's incoherent at best and insulting at worst. Players will definitely notice and kill your review score. A partial translation is better than a "complete" garbage one.
Don't mindlessly 'Orientalize' your game
Localization is much more than simple translation, and you'll come across plenty of guides that insist you pick up on the cultural context and make sure to make proper adjustments for those, too. And this is important! For instance, literally translating jokes and cultural references from English isn't going to work -- your translator will need to adapt, change, or even drop them entirely. However, if you do this wrong, you're in dangerous territory of going too far and confusing or even insulting your audience:
The bottom line is -- trust your translation/localization partner to suggest proper adjustments, but don't go off on your own as a clueless westerner trying to "Chinese-ify" things for the locals.
The rise of China, and Asia in general, has taken me somewhat by surprise. Conventional wisdom has always been that Japanese players only play console games, Koreans only play StarCraft and MOBAs, and Chinese players are only interested in mobile F2P games. Although I'm sure those larger trends are true, the sheer size and diversity of these regions shouldn't be ignored, opening a new niche for some indies. This is definitely a great opportunity for some of us, but this works both ways -- we should expect to see a rise in Chinese-developed games, both Indie and AAA.
We've already seen this famously with ICEY.
So I guess the question is -- how long until we see a Chinese-developed Indie game win awards for Game of the Year, Independent Games Festival, Game Developer's Choice, and sell over a million copies?
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
It's a trick question :)
That's all already happened.
That game is FTL:
According to GiantBomb, Subset games is based in Shanghai*, and the two main developers were former employees of 2K China.
*Technically the founders of Subset moved to Shanghai from the USA, but since my own game Defender's Quest was made by an "American developer" -- ie Level Up Labs -- despite the fact that I am a Norwegian citizen who lives in the USA, I think it's fair to call Subset games a "Chinese developer" by the same standard.
I can recommend a great translator by the way, her name is Amy Ho. She does both Simplified and Traditional Chinese and comes with my personal stamp of approval.
Good luck out there!
0 notes
Link
The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
For the past five years I've been maintaining Defender's Quest, I've kept telling myself: there's got to be some magical untapped audience I've yet to reach. I've tried every possible trick to find them, and while many have helped, none have been a silver bullet.
Support Mac and Linux
5.2% and 1.8% of lifetime revenue, respectively
Participate in Humble bundles
(back when they were really good)
Sell direct, on GOG, Itch.io, etc
significant chunk, still dwarfed overall by Steam
Localize all the things
Professional: German, French, Spanish, Japanese
Volunteer: Russian, Korean, Italian, Czech
Probably worth it? But not crystal clear.
Well, I finally found these magical undiscovered players: they're in China.
In "Steam Discovery 2.0, Stegosaurus Tail 2.0", we noted the trend of Chinese players appearing on the global PC gaming radar.
For one, Valve mentioned the trend at Dev Days 2016:
and I had noticed it myself, both anecdotally:
as well as in our revenue reports:
At the time, China was still a very small slice of our overall revenue (as you can see in the graph's embedded pie chart -- it's the tiny turquoise slice at the very top). Still, it was enough evidence to start localizing Defender's Quest into Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
Now, whether or not localization is worth it depends on how much text the game has. And Defender's Quest has a lot of text.
Category # words Cutscenes 22,196 Journal 24,943 Everything else 8,709 Total 55,848
The Cutscenes and Journal together comprise a small novel -- 47,139 words, about the same length as Slaughterhouse Five. We decided to translate only the "everything else" category: the game would be completely playable in Chinese, but the story content would remain in English. This way we could test the waters, and if initial results were good, we'd follow up with a complete translation.
Spoiler alert: results were good.
I have never had a localization pay for itself this quickly, not to mention this unambiguously. When you localize a game, you are betting that sales from the target region will increase more than they would have had you not done it. Usually, however, you're never quite sure how many regional sales you would have made anyways. For example, my first language is Norwegian, and most Norwegians my age speak fluent English and consume lots of English media. Chances are they'll buy a game whether it's localized into Norwegian or not. This effect is so bad that prominent Norwegian games like OwlBoy aren't even localized into the developer's native language. (Same goes for um... Defender's Quest. Tilgi meg, Bestemor!) But what about Germans? There's a lot more of them, and research says they have a stronger preference for native-language media than Norwegians. So we did a German localization (among others). And it was probably worth it, but the effect was somewhat obscured since Germany was already a strong selling region.
The Chinese stats tell a completely different story.
For context, when we updated the game with Traditional and Simplified Chinese translations, we ran a Steam weekly deal at 50% off and popped one of our visibility tokens (see this article).
Result: China was our #1 sales region, not only in terms of units sold, but also in terms of gross revenue.
Last week's sale figures:
As mentioned previously, the before/after results of localization were completely unambiguous.
Of all the revenue Defender's Quest has earned from China on Steam in its entire lifetime, 45% of it was earned last week. That's right, we basically doubled our lifetime sales from China almost immediately! Obviously there's some degree of "pent-up demand" in play here, but based on other developers' experience, I suspect we'll see improved sales from China in our long tail, as well.
Here's a per-country breakdown for our lifetime sales, excluding this past week (ie, the entire time before the Chinese localizations were availalbe):
Back then, China was #22.
"But, Lars!" you say, "Defender's Quest has been on sale for five long years! Maybe it's already soaked up most of its potential western buyers already?"
Judging from 2016's figures, apparently not:
The same 10 countries that dominated lifetime sales show up here, just with a few positions swapped. The biggest change is that Japan and Korea represent a larger overall share in 2016 vs. overall lifetime (We shipped Korean and Japanese localizations in 2014). And the Anglosphere + Europe still dominate.
Here's a side-by-side chart of last week vs. 2016 for easy comparison:
So China zooming to #1, even for just a week, is amazing. Germany has traditionally been our strongest non-English region to date and it's never pulled off a feat like that. But you'll also notice Korea and Japan had a higher market share in this last sale, and Taiwan showed up out of nowhere to beat Russia, Canada, and the UK!
How do we explain all this?
Concerning China, it's basically the perfect candidate for localization:
Large market (18% of world's population!)
Strong preference/need for their native language
Population spends money on games (middle class has exploded recently)
But there's another story here. During the sale, 50% of copies were sold in East Asia. The growth from Chinese speaking regions makes perfect sense, but I was surprised to see growth in Korea and Japan. We've had Korean and Japanese localizations available since 2014, after all. What's going on? I have five potential explanations:
First, it could just be statistical noise and I'm reading too much into things.
Second, it could be part of an ongoing regional rise in PC gaming in East Asia in general. Japanese publishers are releasing more games on Steam, whether it's Square-Enix's back catalogue of Final Fantasy games or From Software's latest Dark Souls title, and Japanese players are following them:
@larsiusprime Yes, Japan certainly grows faster than an average on Steam http://pic.twitter.com/FVx90voTJ3
— Steam Spy (@Steam_Spy) December 27, 2015
Meanwhile, Koreans have always been big fans of PC gaming, and Steam has lots of games they like, most notably DOTA 2. Also, Steam has made strides in supporting local Asian currencies, so this growth makes sense.
Third, it could be a result of Steam's discovery algorithm explicitly recommending games to players based on their native language. Just a few years ago, everyone in the world saw the exact same Steam home page, whereas now it serves up unique recommendations, and the user's language is a key variable:
Fourth, just as there are large numbers of Spanish speakers in the USA because of its proximity to Mexico and Central America, I bet there's a decent amount of Chinese speakers in Japan and Korea. So some of those extra sales from Japan and Korea might actually be from Chinese players.
Fifth, there might be a "cultural lift" phenomenon, where visibility in a major country (such as China) trickles down to nearby countries within its cultural sphere of influence. I'm not as sure about this last one as the observed lift in Korea and Japan happened a bit faster than this explanation might predict.
But if any of these effects are in play, I can still make a solid prediction: Asian countries will continue to dominate Defender's Quest's market share in 2017. Last year Asia was 11% of our revenue and 14% of our units sold. I expect that market share to at least double for 2017.
Traffic Analysis
So, we got a lot more sales from Asia, and especially China. But how are these Asian customers finding us? Here's a breakdown of our traffic report during the post-localization sale:
Category % Visits Home Page 37.36 Weeklong Deals 15.80 Specials 14.01 Discovery Queue 11.10 Tags 7.79 Search 4.61 Valve Website 2.46 External Website 1.46 Games < $10 0.97 Other 4.44
These are some really surprising results. If you've been following this blog for a while, you'll know that the Discovery Queue almost always dominates our traffic charts. Here's our traffic from our last promotional event, by comparison:
Category % Visits Discovery Queue 23.47 Tags 14.3 Specials 11.73 Home Page 10.62 Search Results 9.15 External Website 7.89 Weeklong Deals 6.98 Valve Website 5.29 Games < $5 3.05 Games < $10 1.64 Other 5.88
Here's a combined table for easy comparison:
Latest sale Category % Visits Previous sale Category % Visits Home Page 37.36 Discovery Queue 23.47 Weeklong Deals 15.80 Tags 14.30 Specials 14.01 Specials 11.73 Discovery Queue 11.10 Home Page 10.62 Tags 7.79 Search 9.15 Search 4.61 External Website 7.89 Valve Website 2.46 Weeklong Deals 6.98 External Website 1.46 Valve Website 5.29 Games < $10 0.97 Games < $5/$10 4.69 Other 4.44 Other 5.88
Expanding the "Home Page" category for the latest sale reveals that 30.40% of the traffic came from the Special Offers Grid, and 4.56% came from "Updated Games."
What's really interesting to see here is that despite the fact that this latest sale had a smaller discount (50% off vs. 67% off for the previous one), much more traffic came from the "in-your-face" promotional channels (Home Page, Weeklong Deals, Specials) rather than the softer-touch organic discovery channels (Discovery Queue, Tags, Search) we've almost exclusively relied upon until now.
Next, let's look at our visibility round results.
As mentioned in the previous article, post-Discovery update 2.0 visibility rounds are optimized for signal-boosting frequently updated games. They specifically target your existing audience as well as people who have wishlisted your game. On the face of it this seems pointless because it's not giving you any "new" visibility, but for games like ours, it seems to work -- probably because the "Recommended by Friends" module has the highest click-through rate of all the discovery channel on Steam's front page.
Here's where we're at so far:
Our click-through rate is lower, which makes sense as we ran the last round in December and have likely thinned out the pond a bit. However, we're still getting a good number of clicks. We've already beaten the previous view count in just one week -- it will be interesting to see if we're also able to surpass the total absolute number of clicks by the time the visibility round expires. I'm pretty sure these last for either 1 month or 1,000,000 views, whichever comes first, because my last round lasted for 1 month down to the minute, and my friend Ryan Clark recently ran a round that halted at around 1,000,002 views, a suspiciously round number to suddenly terminate on.
It's hard to tell how much the visibility round had to do with the Asian regions. Steam indicates 30.7% of our purchases in this period were fulfilled wishlists, but we don't get any kind of regional breakdown for that. The fact that we reached more eyeballs faster makes me think we've got wider Asian visibility than before, but I don't have solid proof.
So, should you localize your game into Chinese? Probably.
Some quick caveats. If your game isn't selling a whole lot already, I can't guarantee that localizing into Chinese is going to double your sales or anything, and the cost of a localization might even exceed what you could expect to earn from it. Furthermore, genre effects likely apply -- some games probably resonate with the Chinese audience more than others, and our story-heavy Tower-Defense RPG is apparently one of them.
Do your homework
If you've got a simple game, you can probably get away with simple bitmapped fonts, but if you absolutely need full true-type font support with arbitrary dynamic text (as we did), you'd better get your head totally wrapped around Unicode, text encodings, fonts, possibly even IMEs (Input Method Editors). In my case, the prior experience of eight previous localizations, including fellow "CJK" languages Japanese and Korean, was invaluable.
Localize your store page!
Nobody's going to bother buying your game if they can't even read the description, after all. If your game has minimal text, this might be all you have to do to reach the Chinese market.
Now, some things not to do.
Don't use Google Translate.
Just don't. You'll wind up with a garbage translation that's incoherent at best and insulting at worst. Players will definitely notice and kill your review score. A partial translation is better than a "complete" garbage one.
Don't mindlessly 'Orientalize' your game
Localization is much more than simple translation, and you'll come across plenty of guides that insist you pick up on the cultural context and make sure to make proper adjustments for those, too. And this is important! For instance, literally translating jokes and cultural references from English isn't going to work -- your translator will need to adapt, change, or even drop them entirely. However, if you do this wrong, you're in dangerous territory of going too far and confusing or even insulting your audience:
The bottom line is -- trust your translation/localization partner to suggest proper adjustments, but don't go off on your own as a clueless westerner trying to "Chinese-ify" things for the locals.
The rise of China, and Asia in general, has taken me somewhat by surprise. Conventional wisdom has always been that Japanese players only play console games, Koreans only play StarCraft and MOBAs, and Chinese players are only interested in mobile F2P games. Although I'm sure those larger trends are true, the sheer size and diversity of these regions shouldn't be ignored, opening a new niche for some indies. This is definitely a great opportunity for some of us, but this works both ways -- we should expect to see a rise in Chinese-developed games, both Indie and AAA.
We've already seen this famously with ICEY.
So I guess the question is -- how long until we see a Chinese-developed Indie game win awards for Game of the Year, Independent Games Festival, Game Developer's Choice, and sell over a million copies?
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
It's a trick question :)
That's all already happened.
That game is FTL:
According to GiantBomb, Subset games is based in Shanghai*, and the two main developers were former employees of 2K China.
*Technically the founders of Subset moved to Shanghai from the USA, but since my own game Defender's Quest was made by an "American developer" -- ie Level Up Labs -- despite the fact that I am a Norwegian citizen who lives in the USA, I think it's fair to call Subset games a "Chinese developer" by the same standard.
I can recommend a great translator by the way, her name is Amy Ho. She does both Simplified and Traditional Chinese and comes with my personal stamp of approval.
Good luck out there!
0 notes
Link
The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
I recently had the opportunity to share some tips and tricks with game development students at both Stockholm University and the Swedish Game Awards Conference - and since I don't seem to have made too big a fool of myself, I thought I should share the Toolbox I offered with the rest of the world as well. This is a list of things that will hopefully stop budding game developers from reinventing the wheel and tumble into pitfalls that others have already been in. The insights below have been collected while I was working at a publisher, a mid-size developer and my own indie company, as well as from other people.
Just like with a physical toolbox, you don’t have to use all of these tools. You might find that some of them are like those weird ones in the corner you don’t really know how to use. Some, however, might turn out to be your hammer and screwdriver.
So, let’s get started!
(By the way, you might need some popcorn. This is a long one.
1. Make games It pains me to see how necessary this point seems to be, when it should be fairly obvious. If you are a game student and plan to work with games for a long time, you should at the very least put in 8 hours a day, and do so with joy! I’m not saying you have to start crunching even before you get your first job - but you can't be bothered to at least spend the equivalent of a normal work day on studies and game development every day, how can you assume that you will enjoy actually working in the games industry?
You can either go the whole mile and spend your spare time making games with friends or on your own, or you can focus on the part of game development that you have a personal interest in - be it making 3D models, writing, modding, or what have you. This will show a future employer that you have passion and ambition, which will give you a brightly colored life vest out in the sea of students who want to break into the industry. More than that, you will have things to put in your portfolio, which is critical when looking for a game job.
2. Make mistakes - and admit it Your time as a student is the ideal, safe environment to try new things, and to fail. So do it! It is okay to make mistakes - as long as you admit them, learn all you can from the experience, and then move on. To many people, trial and error is the best way to get familiar with new things, so embrace that and create an environment among your fellow students where it is okay to fail. If you don't have that, people will not make less mistakes - they will just lie more about it. What sounds like a more sustainable way to make a game, do you think? You will also learn more this way, as you will be less likely to take the safe path you already know.
This might seem horrible but personally, I get inspired by other people's mistakes. Hearing about failed projects, or even better the mistakes a developer did on a successful project, makes you look at yourself and your own projects in a new light. Surely if they could do that, you should be fine? It makes people you admire look human and their accomplishments more reachable, which, if nothing else, helps relieving imposter syndrome.
3. Ask for help, pay it forward For some, asking for help when needed is probably the most natural thing in the world - but for others, me included, it really isn't. You want to be the lone hero, who can tackle any challenge on your own. That, however, can be directly harmful. Few will acknowledge your ability to isolate yourself and create something alone - it's far more likely that people will appreciate your ability to show that you are human and not too proud to ask for help.
Time for a personal anecdote! When I did not land a publisher for my game Midvinter, I was really bummed out. I cancelled the dev stream I had planned for that evening, and more or less wanted to shut myself in and not meet anyone for a few days. But then I remembered this great TED Talk by Amanda Palmer. In it, she basically encourages people to show vulnerability and ask for help - because that is when other people will step up and shower you with love. So I wrote a message for my friends and followers on Facebook, explaining the situation with the publishers and asking them to please share and like posts, so that I could get more visibility through them. The response was overwhelming (for a company that size), which of course proved that I have awesome friends - but also that people are more than willing to show that they have your back when you ask them to. Keep that in mind!
Just don’t forget to offer support back to the people who help you, and be there when they actually need you. Also, pay any help you get forward to others. We all benefit from an open industry where people help each other, so it’s win-win-win all around.
4. Game Jams Just like your time as a student is a great time to try new things, so are game jams. You go through almost all phases of game development in just a few days - and even if you do not have a finished game in the end, you will most likely have learned a lot and made some new friends. If you are not able to make it to the ones that take place in a particular physical location, there are many that run online over for example one month. On the final day, you simply submit your game to the jam’s website. Check out itch.io for jams like that!
5. Open Development
As a small developer - either while you still study, or if you chose to take the indie path after graduation - you can’t afford to have secrets. AAA companies do, but they also have marketing budgets the size of small countries’ yearly expenses. In order to sell your game in the end, you want to build a fanbase already during development - and what better what to do in than to include people in what you are doing? Make them feel involved, and they will be so much more loyal to you! A nice side effect is also that you learn a lot from watching other people playing your game and discussing ideas with them. They will most likely find things to do with the game that you did not even know about yourself, and tell you that the best part of your game is something you would never have anticipated.
Remmeber, ideas are cheap - execution is everything. Let me write that again, in bold.
Ideas are cheap - execution is everything.
No one is going to steal your idea. If there is one thing the games industry has in abundance, it’s ideas for games. Even great ideas - mindblowing ideas - are as common as bugs in the production phase. What matters is what you do with your idea. Therefore, you are better off allowing people to give input on your game, adjusting your development based on their opinions. It’s the difference between protecting an idea that in the end is not interesting to anyone, and making a game in the open that aligns with what people actually want.
6. Unique Selling Point In my experience, students are good at making pretty cool games, but not necessarily unique ones. To some extent, that’s okay - you need to learn the craft before you can master it, and looking at what other people have done is a great way of doing that. If you want to sell your game at some point, however, you will have to give a good reason as to why someone would buy your game instead of the one next to it.
The Unique Selling Point (USP) is what makes your game stand out from the crowd. What’s the edge? What’s the deal? This, you will have to be able to communicate to your consumers - and also investors and other potential partners (more about that below).
You see, back in the age of physical games on a shelf, you competed only with the games released at roughly the same time as yours. After a while, they were replaced with other games, and so it went on. Today, as we continue to move more and more towards digital platforms, you compete not only with the games released at the same time, but also all the games ever released on that platform. If you make a game inspired by DotA 2 and put it on Steam, you are competing with DotA 2. The player needs to have a clear reason as to why they should choose your game instead of all the other games in the same genre.
7. Elevator Pitch Imagine that you step into an elevator, and - lo and behold - standing there is a representative for a publisher, or your CEO, or maybe a journalist. You have one minute to pitch your game idea, before they get out of the elevator. Go!
The elevator pitch is a quick description of your game, with a good reason as to why someone would be interested in it. The USP needs to be front and center, most likely along with a mention of theme and setting.
If you are heavily inspired by the Diablo game series, you might feel compelled to say something like: “It’s kind of like Diablo”. Expand on that! “It has much of the gameplay of Diablo 3, only your primary weapon is a badass rocket launcher. Also, it takes place in the New York subway system.” While that might not be the best idea ever (but how about that game with excellent execution?), it gives a fairly good view of roughly what you would experience while playing the game. The listener will be much more interested in learning more, than if you would have stopped at the first sentence.
This is hard, no doubt about it - but it is worth it. If you have trouble finding your Elevator Pitch, I would recommend going to conferences and game developer meetups, if you are able to. In an environment when people are more than happy to hear what others are working on, you will most likely have plenty of opportunities to tweak your pitch and fine-tune it based on the reactions you get.
8. Synchronize within the team While you and your team are working on your game, you may suddenly find that you have some trouble knowing what kind of game you are actually making together. The artist’s colorful, Blizzard-esque art might not work with the writer’s dark and gritty noir story, and suddenly you realize that the programmer has implemented a complex crafting system for a game focused on sneaking. It could work - but without great execution and clear leadership, you are more likely to end up with a game that feels like it doesn’t know what it wants to be.
A former colleague taught me a good way to avoid this. Everyone on the team should write down the game’s elevator pitch - in their own words - on a piece of paper. If these all turn out to be more or less the same, you seem to be fairly synchronized when it comes to what the game is all about. If not, you will have to take a step back and agree on what your vision is, before you continue.
9. Minimum Viable Product When making, say, a set amount of characters to your game, don’t work on one until it is 100% done before you move on to the next one. Instead, make the right amount of okay characters first, and then iterate, itarate, iterate. The product of each iteration should be a model that’s a bit better than the last one, and good enough to show other people while still not necessarily all the way there. This way, you minimize the risk of running out of time and/or money all of a sudden, leaving you with one perfect character and a bunch of white capsules.
You also decrease the risk of wasting time on unnecessary things. One example: I recently heard about a student who had made an enemy for their game that was probably good enough for Pixar. Every hair of its fur was there, and it was beautifully animated. The only problem was that it had to be very small once in the game, so none of the details would actually be visible to the player. If they had just thrown an early, rough draft into the game right away, they would have realized that much earlier. In the end, the student could probably have spent a couple of weeks or even days on the character, instead of two months.
It’s also easier to get feedback on your game and the part of it you are making this way. Instead of going “oh and all those gray boxes will be buildings”, you can then say “those buildings are WIP (Work in Progress), but I think you get the idea”. If the viewer is at least somewhat experienced, they will see in which direction you’re heading. It’s easier to test the game this way as well, for the same reason. It’s hard to make sure for example the combat system works properly when it’s just boxes jumping around - even the most crude models will help visualizing what you have in mind.
10. Plan When you get that great game idea you will most likely be tempted to just jump straight into it and start coding right away - trust me, I know. But try not to do that. Start by planning the project, both when it comes to time estimates and schematics for the systems themselves. How will the features interact with each other? What exactly can the player do when in the Marketplace? All things like that should go into your Game Design Document (GDD), before you write even the first line of code.
When you know which systems you want to use, start estimating how long time it will take to implement them. This, of course, goes for art, writing, sound etc as well. It always takes longer to create something than you think, so be generous here. If you have a financial budget to stick to, this is where you go through that as well. Make sure you know how much leeway you have if the project takes longer than anticipated, and remember to put some money aside for things like software licenses and marketing. This is an artform in itself, so I recommend reading other, more in-depth articles on the subject.
Once you are ready to start developing the game, make sure the whole team is up to speed with what everyone else is doing, whether or not you are on time, and what is next in the pipeline. This is achievable by using a Kanban board and/or Scrum. You can keep your tasks in either a physical or digital place - as long as you do keep track, and everyone in the team has access to the same information.
11. Production, Alpha, Beta, GM
Let us quickly look at the stages a game normally goes through when in development. People will tell you different things here so don’t take for granted that your future employers use exactly these definitions - but I will use terms I have been taught and am personally comfortable with.
Going from left to right in the bar representing development above, you will find that the majority of the time consists of production and pre-production. Their relative sizes may of course vary a lot, but this simply means that a well-planned projects spends a lot of time preparing for production and then even more just creating the basic systems.
When the game is starting to shape up, you enter Alpha. A good definition of Alpha is “feature complete”, which means that if you want an approved Alpha build, all systems will have to be implemented and working (albeit with a few bugs). This means that for example the dialog system needs to be in the game, but all dialogs do not have to be finished. It is important to remember that after this phase, you can no longer implement new features. It is far too dangerous, since you risk breaking other features late in development if you do.
To get an approved Beta build however, all those dialogs mentioned above need to be in the game. They are allowed to have flaws, but there can no longer be any major placeholders. Beta can therefore be described as “content complete”. Character portraits, animations, sound effects, game modes - they should all be done and implemented at this point.
After the Beta phase, you are getting close to release. There are many different words people use here - but for the sake of this post, I will only use Gold Master (GM). The term comes from the music industry, and refers to the actually golden disc which all other records were copied from. For games, that is the build that is as close to perfect as it can be. After completing a GM build, you should freeze the code and not touch it between then and the actual release. If you still have fixes to make before release, you should work on a separate build meanwhile, and release a stable version as a day-one patch. This decreases the risk of introducing new bugs when fixing others just before launch, making it a safer method than not freezing the code.
12. Test, test, test
There really is no way of stressing this enough. You need to test your game, and others need to do it too. As for you, don’t just test the little snippet of code you just implemented or check how that artwork looks in-game - play the game. Run through a few levels every day, put together an office Multiplayer session, or whatever works for you.
It is important go get others’ opinions on your game as well. You will inevitably be affected by your knowledge of how the game “is supposed to” work and look, which will skew your perception of it. You will also be very good at the game after having worked on it for a while, even if you do not recognize it yourself. The input of a few friends, family members or (preferably) total strangers can many times prove totally invaluable. If nothing else, they have more time to actually think outside the box and tear your game apart than you, since all you want to do is making the game - right?
Test the game before you even feel completely comfortable showing it to others. The earlier you find issues, the cheaper they are to fix. A good idea is to get input already on the Game Design Document. As mentioned earlier - the benefit gained from that input is much greater than the risk of someone potentially stealing your ideas.
Finally, make sure that you get input on all of these three areas:
Playability - is the game fun/engaging/entertaining/scary (whichever feeling you’re going for)?
Usability - do the players know what to do, and how to interact with the game?
Stability - is the game free from bugs?
13. Find inspiration everywhere
When you are designing your game or a part of it, don’t just look at other games for inspiration - go explore other forms of media and culture as well. Digital games are still the new kids on the block, and we haven’t figured everything out yet. Some of the others kids have, and they can teach us a great deal.
Some examples of things I recommend delving into:
Theatre, opera and ballet
Movies and tv-series
Music
Literature, graphic novels and comics
History, mythology and folklore
I want to especially recommend you to read up on history, if you are looking for inspiration for something you’re writing - and not just that of your own country. So many things have happened through the years that are literally stranger - and more badass - than fiction. I have personally tried to base fictional characters on historical ones, but ended up with a much more modest version of them because some parts just did not seem plausible.
As for the other things mentioned above, they are often dealing with themes you could use as well. There are also more technical things you can look at. How do comics use lighting and colors? How did that tv-series use music to achieve that dramatic effect? What did that opera do to give you goose bumps? If games are to be considered worthy of standing alongside for example works of classical art and literature, we have to put ourselves on their level - and the only way of knowing where that level is is to explore what it is they actually do.
14. Marketing
When I gave my lectures about this, I would here ask the students to put their hands up if they agreed with the following:
“A good game sells itself”
I would then go on to make fun of those who did, using these patronizing gifs:
I thought, rather me than the world - and this way they will hopefully remember it. Luckily only one person raised their hand anyway, so no great harm done.
No, a good game does not sell itself.
As mentioned earlier, we are today figuratively drowning in good games on our digital platforms, and getting seen in that sea is not an easy task. That is why you need to do marketing, whether you like it or not.
There are many ways to do this, all of which people more experienced than me have written long articles about. But in short, one point you could and should focus on as a small developer is social media. Make a presence, update often (even if you don’t think you have anything to share), and connect with other people. Create content that people want to share, like Armin Ibrisagic would say. You can also have an in-game share function, to encourage your players to show what they have created to their friends.
Streamers and YouTubers can also provide great exposure for your game. If you have fun gameplay that translates easily into an easy-to-follow video, people will run to buy your game after seeing someone have fun with it. This might be less effective for a linear story game, since you get most of the experience from just watching - but it’s still worth looking into.
You could argue that traditional journalism has lost ground in the last few years, but they are still relevant. As a rookie developer, try reaching out to smaller sites - maybe some that focus on indies - first. The big ones will be more hesitant to pick up your story if no one has covered you before. There are tons of articles on the subject here as well. But in short - remember to be brief and to-the-point in your email (remember your elevator pitch!), but also friendly. Show that you understand that the person you contact is a human being, not just another entry in a large spreadsheet.
15. Don’t say “I can’t do X”
Anecdote time again! Eight months ago I could hardly code. I had passed three university courses in programming, but I told myself I was rubbish at it. Then I looked at some code again in another context, and realized I could read and eventually apply it without any problems. That is when I started to change my way of thinking. I could code just fine - I just hadn’t done it on my own terms, on a project I had designed myself based on my own abilities. Now, six months later, I am about to finish my first game, for my one-person indie studio.
That is why now, whenever I hear someone say “oh but I can’t do X”, I add “...yet!” Ever so often, it’s just that your teacher’s way of teaching doesn’t match your way of learning. So try it! Find alternative routes to get around the things you “can’t”. For example: can’t do art? Make it wiggle!
16. Be prepared
If you want to become a successful game developer, you should prepare yourself for what will come. Know that there most likely will be rough patches. You may have a hard time finding a job, or a publisher, or getting press coverage. When your game finally launches, you might be greeted by a wave of hate from even your most dedicated players.
And you know what?
That’s okay.
Everyone started out somewhere, and most of the really successful creators you can think of have stories of how people doubted them and told them they would never succeed at what they did - but they kept at it anyway. So don’t give up, don’t take critique personally, and you’ll be fine in the end!
17. Take care of yourselves!
This might be the most obvious item on this list - but also the most important one, and the one I sadly think we compromise far too often.
Don’t think about the sprint, think about the marathon. Hopefully, you have a long and wonderful career in the games industry in front of you, so make sure you are well enough both physically and mentally to enjoy it!
Eat well! Kick that sugar addiction, cut down on at least the red meat, don’t skip breakfast. You know this already. It might be tough in the beginning to change your habits, but it’s worth it in the end!
Drink water. Coffee and beer can only get you so far - all sorts of good stuff comes out of being properly hydrated. Always keep a bottle of water on your desk.
Sleep. A good night’s sleep is better than all the energy drinks in the world. Staying up a few extra hours to work might be okay short-term, but it’s not a sustainable solution in the long run. Your brain needs the sleep to process what has happened during the day, and come up with new ideas.
Work out. If you don’t do this already, you might be one of those people who simply don’t like working out. The biggest problem here is probably that you haven’t found the right type of training for you - the kind that makes you forget that’s what you’re doing. Exercising makes you feel better short-term as well as long-term. It releases those nice little endorphins and gives your brain the oxygen in needs for long hours working on the game. Also, if you have access to adjustable tables, stand up for at least one hour every day. All the cool kids do it.
Take care of the people around you. The human is a social creature. Our bodies reward us for being nice to each other, so use that to your benefit! Take the time to show people that you like them, and note how much you get back. The greatest people of the industry, in my opinion, are not the ones who have made successful things, but the ones who truly care about the wellbeing of others. It’s the ones who humbly share all their knowledge, listen to input with open ears, and offer praise and confidence boosts when needed. Someone told me recently that a production company once wanted to make a reality show about game developers, but quickly cancelled it when they realized that the devs gladly helped each other out and refused to talk smack about each other. That’s the industry I want to work in. So continue being awesome, and tell others that they are too!
And there you go! A toolbox of tips and tricks to get you going. I hope that many of them were obvious to you - that means that you are already well on your way.
Please share any additional tips you may have in the comments!
Written by Anna Jenelius Independent Game Developer, Talecore Studios @TheAnaka
Thanks to Johan Dorell and Laura Bularca for giving input on this article, and the students who shared their thoughts after the talks!
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