Throwback Thursday - Fossil Hunters, EGLX, Far Cry 5
/Another Throwback Thursday! Remember to subscribe :)
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Give-Away: $20 PSN/XboxLive/eShop/or Steam Gift Card
/Make sure to follow us on Twitter, and RT this tweet to be entered in a give-away for a $20 PSN/Steam/eShop/or Xbox Live card.
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Co-Op Mode For Debris Announced
/Moonray Studios have announced a co-op mode will be coming to their underwater game - which you can pick up on Steam right now.
"You and a friend are trapped together, yet still somehow alone. An unconventional narrative co-op game set in a surreal frozen seascape. Developed over 3 years, this first-person co-op story takes place in a surreal sunken world locked between ice and rock. Following an accident, players must scramble to find power, defeat strange creatures and decipher what mysterious forces are attempting to prevent their escape. Debris is designed based on the challenges facing those affected by psychosis and created with the help of medical professionals, Debris explores the interplay between perception and reality in an unconventional narrative-driven co-op format."
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Far Cry 5 Season Pass Announced
/Ubisoft has gone ahead and announced the Season Pass for Far Cry 5 and...it seems pretty awesome. Included in the season pass will be a port of last generations excellent Far Cry 3 - which will come out in Summer 2018 and will be our 4 weeks earlier for season pass holders.
Take your Far Cry® 5 experience beyond Hope County with the Far Cry® 5 Season Pass. Go on a ride through three uncanny adventures: face off against hordes of zombies, escape from behind Vietcong enemy lines, and save Earth from a Martian arachnid invasion.
Far Cry 5 will be out for Xbox One, PC, and PlayStation 4 on March 27th.
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Job Posting - Unity 3D VR Developer
/Lucky VR is working on immersive virtual reality experience focusing on casino gaming, and they are hiring for a full time Unity 3D Developer. The details are posted below, but you can check out everything on their site.
Responsibilities
Develop and optimize our VR Casino Game software
Prototype, design, and implement new features in Unity
Work independently with ownership over the Unity (PC) codebase
Work collaboratively with artists and other programmers on the team to create powerful & enjoyable features
Required Skills
Several years of experience with C# and Unity3D
Shipped one or more games with Unity
Experience with programming fundamentals and project management (GitHub, Trello)
Ability to work within a team.
Basic understanding of a production cycle and ability to evaluate issues' severity.
Autonomous and proactive.
Good communicator.
Bonus Skills
Experience building VR/AR apps for the Rift/Vive/Gear VR/HoloLens
Mobile development experience building and shipping iOS or Android apps made with Unity
Game design experience including designing levels/environments, user interactions, and enjoyable game mechanics
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Interview Between Jake Butineau and Cuphead Composer Kris Maddigan
/Good friend of the site Jake Butineau (who you've probably known for our News Bytes, or on our Podcast) started his own podcast - and his first guest is Kris Maddigan the composer for Cuphead (which won GOTY from our fans). Give it a listen!
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Throwback Thursday - Lost Orbit
/We're back! This time we're looking at Lost Orbit from PixelNauts - you can pick up the game on PlayStation 4, and Steam. It's a twitch, speed "floater" in space - we did a recent video (and make sure to subscribe on Youtube).
Lost Orbit did well with critics getting a 77% on Metacritic, and was reviewed by some of the bigger places out there.
“All in all, Lost Orbit is a winner.”
8/10 – Destructoid
“Lost Orbit could quite possibly be contender for indie game of the year.”
9/10 – Punk and Lizard
“If you like dodge ‘em ups then this is one of the best available"”
9/10 – The Sixth Axis
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Guest Podcast on The Third Person Podcast
/Colin Cummings who is over at The Third Person was kind enough to have me on their podcast to talk about our Game of the Year results, as well as my own personal Game of the Year. Check it out on their site!
Friend of the site Jake Butineau was also on it, including a bunch of local devs - so check it out!
Check out our own podcast!
TorontoGameDev Patrons Get Free EGLX Tickets
/Were you thinking of going to EGLX? You should because it's a great gaming convention here in Toronto! Until February 20th all Patron's at the $4 dollar level or more will get a free weekend pass to EGLX. This will also include a ticket to the invite-only Industry Mixer that happens Friday evening.
All you gotta do is head over to our Patreon, contribute at least $4 dollars a month, and you'll get your ticket before the event on March 9th-11th. If you have any questions, let me know on Twitter!
Note: We have a limit of 50 tickets, and 20 are used up by pre-existing Patrons, so we have 30 let over.
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Orbit: Satellite Defense Hits Early Access
/Bluish Green Productions, the team behind Robos World will be releasing their next game Orbit: Satellite Defense in Early Access tomorrow on Steam. The RTS game has you protecting the planet from alien invaders and is "roughly 80% complete" right now with a scheduled full release date in April 2018. You can check out the Steam page right here.
If you're interested in seeing what is avaliable in the Early Access, the below vidoe should help.
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Guest Post - How our first game project accidentally reached 3 million players
/The following guest post is copied from Medium with the author's permission. Danny Forest is the creator of Soul Reaper from Power Level Studios and wrote about his experience with his game reaching 3 million players in an unconventional way. Make sure to follow his studio on Twitter.
How our first game project accidentally reached 3 million players
During a recent interview with Gaming Reinvented (https://gamingreinvented.com/), I opened up on the “success” of our “first” title: Rogue Sharks Arcade, which has been played by over 3 millions players around the world.
I thought this may be an interesting story for other developers, so I’m sharing it here.
Here’s the question and the answer as a preview:
Rogue Sharks Arcade seemed to be your first game, and it was pretty damn successful. Did you imagine it’d have 3 million+ players?
Haha, this one’s a good story I think. Rogue Sharks Arcade was some kind of “accident”, both the game itself and its “success”.
I started working on Soul Reaper back in September 2013 and came to the realization that the game was way too ambitious for a first game. I would need money to hire artists and more, but didn’t have the money. So I thought making a simple mobile game, similar to the classic gravity-based helicopter web game, would be my way out. For some reason, Sharks was the first theme that came to mind. I thought Rogue Sharks would take one month to build. I had limited Unity experience back then, but that’s not why it took much longer. It took about a year to build. The game just wasn’t fun enough by my standards, so I re-did it a few times with different mechanics. I released Rogue Sharks Arcade two months in, since the game had enough content to be a full-game loop.
Classic gravity-based helicopter game.
I released it on the web on Kongregate and was hoping to get feedback so I could improve it for mobile after. Money was not the target here. About 200 people played it on Kongregate and had a score of 3/5, confirming my assumptions: it’s not a very good game.
But here’s the interesting part: how did I get from 200 players to 3M+? The short answer: it was stolen and put on MANY other websites around the world. You see, I was too dumb to protect it, and I didn’t even put my company logo or the game title in the game, so people just rebranded it and claimed it as their own. It got featured on lots of Chinese, Turkish and Russian websites. There was no English text in the whole game. Everything was icon-based, so it was accessible in any language
BUT, because of that incident, I got exactly what I wanted: feedback. With 200 players, I got close to no feedback, with 3M+, there were plenty of players to give feedback. I had to track websites down and translate feedback back to English, but still, there was lots of feedback. But that’s not all, I was tracking everything in the game using Game Analytics. I knew exactly how people were playing, so I knew how to improve the game for mobile.
But then at that point I was travelling around the world with my wife for about a year, so I didn’t have much time to make the mobile version. But I did it anyway. I stopped Chiang Mai, Thailand, to work on it for one full month and finished it. So Rogue Sharks for mobile exists, and is a much better game than Rogue Sharks Arcade on the web. I never released it though, because it’s still bad in my opinion. We were in 2016 then and there’s millions of games in the App Stores. A lot of them are great and have a much bigger budget than we had at the time. Unless I found a good partner to release the game, I figured there was no point releasing a game no one would discover and play. Plus, we’re Power Level Studios, we want to make great RPGs, not game genres we know nothing about.
So yeah, the game was “successful” for what we tried to achieve, but definitely no commercial success. And yeah 3M+ was definitely not expected!
Conclusion
Getting your game stolen is not necessarily all bad. We got the feedback we needed to make a better version of the game for mobile, which would not have been possible otherwise.
Is it a valid marketing strategy? Well maybe. If you’re a little smarter than I was and add ways to track actual players’ contact info, it may be one of the best ways to get discovered.
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For Honor Season 5 Coming February 15th
/Coming close to the anniversary of the games release, For Honor will have its 5th season - titled Age of Wolves - on February 15th on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. You can check out the trailer below:
For Honor will also implement dedicated servers - which was a big deal to some gamers when the game released a year ago:
Age of Wolves will also herald the implementation of a dedicated server infrastructure. By changing the way you connect to For Honor matches, the development team is doing away with resyncing, session migrations, and NAT requirements in order to deliver stable connectivity on all platforms.
You can check out all the details on the Ubisoft Blog.
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Throwback Thursday - The Castle Game
/Building off of last week - we have round two of Throwback Thursday, and this time the first video/Let's Play which you can check out here (and below).
The Castle Game is a RTS-lite fantasy game from Neptune Interactive. Originally planned to also release on Wii U, and Steam, it only graced the PlayStation 4 but was one of my favourite games from 2015. I really enjoyed the colours, the sounds, and the kind of laid back approach it took to the genre. It's not hardcore, and the concepts are simple - which was perfect for someone who was never much of an RTS fan.
The Castle Game posted a respectable 68 on Metacritic, and was helped by our good friends at Clapfoot Studios, the makers of Fortified, and Foxhole. You can get it on PlayStation 4 right here (and btw it's a fairly easy platinum). Until next time!
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One More Story Announces Voice Actress For Shakespeare's Landlord
/One More Story Games announced the voice of Lily Bard in their upcoming game Shakespeare's Landlord will be Julia Gibson, who does the voice for the Shakespeare series audio books.
Shakespeare's Landlord is the latest story game, based on the Charlaine Harris series of the same name, and came in third in our Most Anticipated category as voted by the fans - so make sure to keep an eye on their Twitter to see all the updates!
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Fossil Hunters PC Release Date Announced
/Reptoid Games have announced the release date for Fossil Hunters, at least for the Steam version. On February 13th you'll be able to download the adventure game that won Ubisoft's Indie Series on Windows and Mac.
We'll have to wait a bit longer for the console version of the game, so make sure to add it to your wishlist in the meantime!
Jobs!
Solo indie dev expert and longtime friend-of-the-site Devon Wiersma joins us to talk their latest release Centauri Dark, working across AAA, mid-sized and solo indie dev and how to fix this goshdarn industry.