Innehållsförteckning för #55 från Wireframe Magazine

I’m sitting on a horse, galloping at full speed towards my destination, deftly weaving around the occasional tree and across lush green meadows. See how the grass bends around my steed’s feet? Majestical. Oh no! A small stone wall. This is no problem for my mighty steed, as we clunkily hop over it with a slightly ill-fitting animation but never mind that! Onwards! Just another eight miles or so to the mission marker. Look, we all love a good horse. Pop a carrot in their happy, enchanted faces. Watch as their swishy tail chases flies away which immediately re-land on them. Over and over, an endless cycle. It’s a good time! We all love a horse, which is lucky, because these days every single game has a rideable horse in…

Shiro Games’ previous titles Evoland (and its sequel) and Northgard were successful titles, but with success, is there an additional pressure to perform with the follow-up? “I mean, there’s always pressure,” Cannasse says. “When you make a new game, you kind of always want to go bigger and better than anything you’ve made before, so this is very much our mindset at least.” With the team growing in the past couple of years, Cannasse says Shiro has been looking to take advantage of the growth rather than seeing it as a factor in any perceived pressure: “[We wanted to] put all of those resources into realising that ‘bigger and better’ project,” he explains, “while also making something new and fresh that stands out from the rest of our catalogue. We’re…

Since its founding in 2010, Santa Ragione has put out a varied array of titles, from the one-button arcade action of Fotonica to the 1970s-set driving/adventure hybrid, Wheels of Aurelia. For Righi Riva, making these games thematically and visually distinct from each other wasn’t just an aesthetic choice – it’s also a means of standing out as a small Italian indie studio in a crowded marketplace. “Of the games we’ve made in the past as Santa Ragione, the idea is that each screenshot could be immediately recognisable as the game it belongs to,” Righi Riva explains. “It’s so hard to get your game noticed, to have people remember your game after they see it in a trailer. It’s so commercially important to make something people can remember and find and…

With so many games about gods, creators are increasingly seeking untapped mythologies. Curse of the Dead Gods draws on Mayan history and architecture, although it’s very much a fantasy reimagining. “Mayan mythology is really complex and not well-known,” says Crochet, “and we didn’t want to make a historical game.” The ancient temple setting leant itself to Egyptian and Mayan mythologies, he adds, “but not many games used Mayan mythology, so it was a bit more original”. In Gods Will Fall, Celtic mythology suited the game’s aims with its plethora of nature-inspired gods. “Wherever possible, we used a little bit of the Celtic gods as source material,” says Wherrett. “It was never supposed to be completely authentic, but the foundations of their belief system are something that underpins every single one…

With Moonglow Bay, Bunnyhug was finally able to give Canada the attention it rarely enjoys in TV, games, or movies. “Canada’s rarely represented in video games,” Soares says, “and when it’s represented in media, it’s typically as an American location.” Nascimento concurs: “So many games are actually made in Canada, but don’t use it as a setting.” The 1980s period was also an important design decision, the pair explain. “It’s a time before technology became what it is today,” Soares tells us, before Nascimento adds, “…it gives us a time before the use of computers, the internet, and social media. You don’t have a YouTube video that’s going to debunk the myths of the fish around your town.” “Yeah,” Soares agrees, “and the people speak to one another [in-person] to…

Konstantinos Dimopoulos is a game urbanist and designer combining a PhD in urban planning with video games. He is the author of the Virtual Cities atlas, designs game cities, and consults on their creation. game-cities.com Like every video game urban centre worth its salt, the Free City of Novigrad, one of the true stars of The Witcher 3, successfully presents players with its class structure and stark inequalities. The poor are desperate, mostly malnourished, and often kind-hearted, whereas the rich are cruel and corrupt – as is the case in both games and reality. What really impressed me about Novigrad, though, was how its urban poor were juxtaposed with the poor of the countryside. Inspired by real geographies of the European Middle Ages, CD Projekt made sure the city’s destitute…

Antony is Wireframe’s game writing and narrative design columnist. He’s also creative director of Far Few Giants, and you can find his work on default.games or @antony_de_fault on Twitter. When we talk about foreshadowing in modern screenwriting, what we generally mean are the little teasers, the fun-to-spot narrative Easter eggs, which on playing or watching a second time make us wonder how we missed them before. For example, five minutes into 2018’s A Star Is Born, we see Ally (Lady Gaga) sing Somewhere Over the Rainbow to herself, then Jackson (Bradley Cooper) drives past a billboard featuring nooses silhouetted against a rainbow background. This is intended to foreshadow, subconsciously on our first watch, the fact that these characters’ impending relationship will end in tragedy. But can foreshadowing do more than…

I talked about audience types in Wireframe issue 39 (wfmag.cc/39), and your gameplay loops should be matched to your intended audience. For younger or more casual players, I’d recommend keeping the overall loop short, with players clearly able to see that A affects B and what they need to do next. On the other hand, short loops can make the game feel like a timewaster to a more ‘hardcore’ audience, with Ian Bogost’s parody, Cow Clicker, the ultimate example of a blatantly visible loop.…

When it comes to managing people, it’s always worth gaining some experience with basic human psychology, particularly in terms of how it impacts a team dynamic. One book I’d recommend to any potential team leader is Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. It’s one of the most useful books on team dynamics I’ve read, and demonstrates the critical importance of dealing with issues quickly. It provides a good lesson on why getting somewhat comfortable with providing difficult feedback is a critically important skill.…

Sievey told many of his friends that MI5 had once approached him with a job. Most people thought he was joking, but he showed a keen interest in steganography throughout his life. As well as The Biz’s bizarre coding methods, fans also spotted a coloured pattern on most of his album sleeves and newsletters that reputedly contained a hidden message. No one knew what this pattern meant, until 2019 when GCHQ cracked the code, revealing the message, “Why does my nose hurt after concerts?” – a reference to the peg Sievey wore on his nose to achieve Frank’s nasally tone.…

If the thought of making an entire game by yourself sounds enticing yet daunting at the same time, Jori Ryan has some useful advice. “Organisation is important, but really, the hardest part is ignoring your own anxiety,” she says. “You just have to stop thinking about the scale of what you’ve taken on. I work by writing out a list of very small, concrete steps. Then I check off each task on the list and start the process over again. Working this way means that I can spend more energy thinking about the details of the project and less energy worrying about the big picture. I also find that listening to songs on repeat helps me feel calm and focused when I’m working. It takes so much time, but the…

According to Philip Oliver, the technology that underpins RichCast simply wasn’t there even a few years ago. “When speech recognition was introduced in the noughties, half the reason it was terrible was because microphones were bad – the actual input signal was appalling. Whereas Alexa is so good – you can stick an Alexa in a room with the TV on and music playing and it still gets you every time. The mics are getting so good, and the software’s better at filtering out noise. We’re using third-party libraries, so a lot of this is down to them to keep improving. I’d say it’s pretty good now, but it’ll only get better. The same’s true of artificial voices – in two to three years, it’ll give real voice actors a…

Accuracy As they can indeed come out of the gosh darned walls, it pays to keep looking at the floors, walls, and ceilings to make sure you’re not about to become xeno-chow. Decking Cards can be used as XP multipliers, usually with debuffs alongside them. That said, they can make things more challenging and – would you believe it – more fun, to boot. Run so far The game’s one trick is for a certain type of xeno to ambush you around corners, so just let teammates run ahead so they can take the hit. Yes, it’s mean.…

Just as this edition was in its final, pre-press stages, news broke that Sir Clive Sinclair had sadly passed away at the age of 81. We’ll save a more detailed article for a future edition, but for now, I thought I’d take a moment to mention how pleasing it is that so many of the tributes that have sprung up over the past few days have – rightly – focused on Sinclair’s incredible contribution to the British games industry. For years, the UK media had a tendency to point to Sir Clive’s failures – most commonly the C5, his ill-fated electric vehicle from 1985. But with the passing of time, the impact of Sinclair’s most successful computer, the ZX Spectrum, has really begun to be more widely understood. The plucky…

Issue #54 Want to write to Wireframe? Message us at wfmag.cc/hello or tweet us @wireframemag Four Non-Bonds I greatly enjoyed your article about the ingredients of a James Bond game last month, but it also got me thinking: many of the best 007 games ever made were unofficial knock-offs. Does anyone else remember Sly Spy? It was an arcade game that came out in 1989, so at a bit of a lean period for official James Bond titles. The 007 theme was so strong that I’m surprised the people who made it didn’t get sued – your main character even looked a lot like Timothy Dalton-era Bond, and there were several bosses that looked like villains from the movies. I’m not sure how the developers got away with it, but…

When games feature so many horrible gods, it’s rarely surprising that H. P. Lovecraft is often cited as an inspiration. “The designs of the gods in Paradise Killer are often influenced by Lovecraft’s writing,” says Clarke Smith. “Also, there is a really good Lovecraft story that features lizardmen living under pyramids in Egypt, and I really like the idea of animal men living as a secret society.” Even so, he has no fondness for the man himself. “When I first read Lovecraft in my teens,” he says, “I didn’t have enough of a world-view to realise what a scorching racist he was. I don’t condone his views, but his descriptions of alien gods really lodged themselves in my brain.”…

Personal experiences can influence game design in all kinds of ways. Way back in the 1980s, designer Katsuya Eguchi began thinking about the sense of detachment he felt when he first moved from his home town just outside Tokyo to begin working at Nintendo’s offices in Kyoto. Eguchi wondered how a video game could capture the feeling of starting a new life far away from family and friends. It was the seed that eventually gave the world Animal Crossing. Moonglow Bay, Bunnyhug Games’ charmingly laid-back fishing RPG, has a markedly similar origin story. In 2016, studio co-founders Zach Soares and Lu Nascimento moved from Canada to the UK, and found themselves in a situation much like Eguchi’s all those years earlier. “Suddenly, we had no family, we had no friends,”…

An avid developer at The Multiplayer Guys with a strong passion for education, Ryan Shah moonlights as KITATUS – an education content creator for all things game development. Download the code from GitHub: wfmag.cc/wfmag55 Valve’s seminal action-puzzler Portal – and before it, the student project, Narbacular Drop – introduced one of the coolest concepts in gaming. It gives the player the ability to create pathways between two points in 3D space by ‘shooting’ an ‘in’ and ‘out’ portal onto a flat surface. It’s an idea that was explored further in 2011’s Portal 2, and more recently, the multiplayer indie hit, Splitgate. Portals can be broken down into two distinct areas: how they look to the player and what happens to the player when they use it. We’ll be covering each…

So, you want to write a killer ending too? In practice, this means writing a story, finding your way to a great ending, then rewriting everything that came before to perfectly set the stage. In doing so, you’ll have discovered the parts of your story that really resonate. Great! Now rewrite it again, focusing on just those elements. Anything unrelated gets cut, or adapted so as to also resonate, and you discover an even better version of the ending. Dammit. You rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, and eventually, you have something beautiful.…

Producing a loop diagram of your core gameplay can show if you have a single, key state that players always loop back to. In this case, it makes sense to zoom into that state with its own loop diagram to understand what’s going on inside it, but also to dedicate a lot of your development budget on getting that key state as polished as possible. For example, if a state revolves around players making rapid decisions, then focus on helping that with clear information, plus making it rewarding to be in that state with cool feedback.…

Tranz Am zoomed onto the ZX Spectrum in 1983. Published by Ultimate Play The Game, it saw the player drive around a future version of the United States in search of eight cups. Along the way, the player needed to visit petrol pumps to avoid running out of fuel, and just to make things more difficult, several other cars were racing around, trying to crash into our motor. There were plenty of other obstacles to avoid, too, which made driving at full speed a bad idea. On the left of the screen, a mini-map of the United States could be found, along with counters showing time elapsed and miles travelled. A speedo, plus fuel and temperature gauges, were also on display so that you could keep an eye on your…

In the early nineties, Ste Pickford of the Pickford Brothers remembers phoning up Frank Sidebottom to ask him to voice a character called Plok for his next game. Sievey agreed to voice the character, but the collaboration never happened due to a shift in platform and a change to an American publisher. Nevertheless, years later, when Plok! finally released for the SNES, there were a ton of potential references to the Frank Sidebottom character, including a boss fight with a duo known as the Bobbins Brothers.…

Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released in March 2020 – just as Covid-19 was spreading across the world. It prompted the National Videogame Museum to record whether people approached the game differently during a pandemic, enabling them to preserve their experience. “Animal Crossing in a pandemic is a very different thing,” says Iain Simons. “Yes, you can take a boxed copy and preserve it and you can use it in the future, but that doesn’t tell you anything about the fact it was important during lockdown for millions of people. That stuff matters. How we play – and when – is part of preservation too.”…

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Come with Steve now on a journey through time and space… “I’ve all but ceased buying console games and spent the lion’s share of my time on Xbox” Like many other people who managed to secure a PlayStation 5 on day one, I’ve had very little call to use it since I bashed through Astro’s Playroom and Bugsnax with my kid, as an alternative to home-schooling in lockdown when we’d run out of Lego Mario sets. The recent PlayStation showcase didn’t give me much hope I’d be dusting it off any time soon, given titles like God of War: Ragnarok and Horizon Forbidden West won’t be with us until next year. To be clear, I can’t wait to play both of those, but it’s almost impossible to ignore what a…

Fallout: New Vegas PC, PS3, XB 360 I recommended it last time, so it’s only fair to recommend it again. Play New Vegas on PC with a recommended set of mods and you’ve got yourself a stable, deep, engaging take on the wildest wasteland. A superb game. Wasteland 3 PC, PS4, XBO Another slow burn for me, I’m glad Wasteland 3 did eventually get its claws in. Because otherwise I wouldn’t have seen laser-toting robot Reagan. It’s that kind of game. Mass Effect Legendary Edition PC, PS4, XBO And if you want your sci-fi RPGs a mite less silly, it’s hard to go wrong with BioWare’s epic trilogy, remastered and tweaked so it doesn’t focus so much on a female character’s backside. Great games, too.…

Saturnalia’s late-eighties time period wasn’t chosen for Stranger Things-style nostalgia; rather, it’s both practical – the lack of internet and mobile phones adds to the sense of mystery and isolation – and also political. Although Saturnalia isn’t as overtly about, say, second-wave feminism as Wheels of Aurelia was, there’s still a context waiting to be found if you want to find it, Righi Riva says. “I think, from a political point of view, [the 1980s] is a time that’s recent enough, especially in Italian history, that its problems are also relatable to today’s problems. So we can still talk about characters and their struggles, and their problems with discrimination, with workers’ rights, and it’s still very true today. People can still make the connection when they play the game, and…

Donnelly and O’Flaherty-Chan were originally colleagues at Shopify, but their mutual affection for sci-fi movies and literature eventually saw them strike out on their own as indie developers. Several sci-fi movies come up during our conversation – among them the 2019 Brad Pitt space epic, Ad Astra, which partly inspired Chaotic Era’s bleak tone. “Spoilers for the entire movie,” Donnelly warns. “But it turns out humans are actually alone in the entire universe. There aren’t any aliens out there, which somehow is even worse than there being aliens who want to destroy us. We’re completely alone. Me and Gabe both loved that nihilistic outlook on space travel. What if there’s no sanctuary out there for humanity? I felt that wasn’t represented elsewhere in sci-fi – there’s a lot of habitable…

Back then, the PS2 was the big winner, but today I think a lot more fondly of the purple cube. It had a great library of games, a cool controller that dared to be different, and some of the best graphics of that generation. @Rebusmind The first and last console I bought. The experience of Eternal Darkness’ sanity effects messing with your TV blew my mind! @Steve_Bromley It might have been outsold by its rivals but the quality-per-game meant it punched well above its weight. Countless childhood hours poured into Paper Mario 2, Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader, Metroid Prime, and Zelda: Wind Waker. @TheWildeRobin Well, for a start, it’s easily the best-designed console of all time. A cube… in different colours… nothing says ‘fun’ more than that.…

God-killing had virtually become a tradition in Japanese games well before Dark Souls, of course, especially in RPGs. From series such as Final Fantasy and Xenoblade Chronicles to Breath of Fire and Persona, it’s almost a surprise if the ultimate antagonist isn’t a behind-the-scenes god pulling the strings, or a human villain who somehow manages to rise to a higher state. They’ve provided us plenty of opportunities to prove the power of human unity against the hubris and madness of supposed omnipotence. And many a spectacular boss battle.…

Kim Justice is a YouTuber, streamer, and writer who specialises in the world of retrogaming. If she isn’t making lengthy documentary videos about old games and companies, she’s probably chatting and mouthing off about them live to a dedicated handful of people. The gaming world was recently treated to a remake that nobody really asked for – out of nowhere, Secret Mode and the Sumo Digital Academy announced the imminent arrival of Zool Redimensioned for PC, and before anyone could say “Whatever happened to Ninjabread Man?”, the game was released on Steam in August. The elder folk amongst you may remember Ninja from the Nth Dimension as one of many mascot platformers arriving in the wake of a certain blue hedgehog, given birth to on the Amiga. He was fast,…

Nailing down the right clothes for Moonglow Bay’s cast of late-eighties characters was important to Nascimento and Soares. “Instead of looking for generic eighties fashion, I looked at a Sears catalogue for Canada in the winter of 1981,” Nascimento explains. “But even then,” Soares quickly adds, “that was a problem, because the 1981 Sears catalogue, it’s really the upper-middle class that would be buying that. So we had to go back to the 1960s, because you tended to get hand-me-downs [of older clothes]. So a lot of the fashion [in Moonglow Bay] is actually sixties fashion that kind of just got brought into the eighties.”…

Howard is a video game pioneer who authored several of Atari’s most famous and infamous titles. His new book, Once Upon Atari: How I Made History by Killing an Industry, is out now. onceuponatari.com The term Instant Classic is an oxymoron. Classics only become classics by lasting. But how long must something last before it becomes a classic? I think that depends on the medium. Classic drama goes back millennia. Classic literature goes back centuries. For classic radio, film, and TV, it’s decades. Classic video games are no different, except they tend to be measured in years. The rapid progression of technology ages video games faster than any other media. Of course, when I say ‘Classic Video Games’, I’m talking about the verb. Noun-wise, Classic Video Games refers to old…

Using what you’ve learnt here, take a look at the firing code in the First Person template. From what you have been taught, you should be able to extend this system by spawning portals with shooting. The next logical step after that would also be to look into moving the camera based on where the player is looking, to create a looking-glass effect. We’ve just covered the basics here, but you can now use your new understanding of portals to create interesting new mechanics in your next project.…

Stuart Maine has been a designer for 23 years, across PC, console, and mobile. He helped set up Well Played Games, and is currently working on an unannounced title. If you’re working in a team, you’re going to need to document your game’s design in some form. Even if you’re working solo, you may need notes to remind yourself why you chose a certain direction over another. As weird as it may sound, how you document your design can have an effect on the game you end up with. Games are built from a series of ‘systems’ and ‘states’. Each system handles one aspect of your game – such as the camera or combat or progression – using the rules you create, and the interactions between those systems is your…

James is the managing director and founder of Sharkmob London, a new triple-A studio in the heart of the UK capital. It’s currently working on a brand-new IP. The role of a producer in the games industry is still poorly defined, and different companies have their own definition of what a producer does. In most cases, a producer is akin to a project manager, and ultimately responsible for the planning and execution of a project. In some companies, however, a producer is also product-orientated, responsible for tying together the various disciplines of game development – art, engineering, design, project management, and so on – into a single thread. They’ll ultimately make sure the right decisions are made, given the funds available and constraints in place. In other companies still, a…

RichCast isn’t only for making games. As its name implies, it could also be used to make interactive podcasts – with voice-enabled commands for selecting chapters, for example, as Philip Oliver explains. “Hopefully we’ll eventually get something like that: someone does a podcast, they break it into pieces, drop it into RichCast, and then index through it. We haven’t got an example of one yet, but it’s something we might commission just to prove it can be done easily.”…

What’s your favourite game? My favourite game would be Bloodborne. I was slightly bullied/encouraged to give the FromSoftware games a try from friends and followers, and I quickly understood why everyone enjoyed playing them. But Bloodborne stuck out the most for me. And why is that? What is it about that particular game that resonates so much with you? I think it’s because the game offers a mix of satisfying combat, an interesting and engaging atmosphere, and challenging bosses that make you feel like you accomplished something when you beat them – like when I spent two days on stream trying to beat the Orphan of Kos. The second phase of that boss is the hardest thing I’ve had to overcome in gaming. It’s a relentless onslaught and I get…

Alien: Isolation PS3, PS4, XB 360, XBO For my money, one of the best survival horror games ever made, at least of the space variety. Its attention to detail is frequently astonishing, its depiction of the titular beast truly menacing. Isolation is also incredibly stressful, so go easy on the coffee before playing. Stories Untold PC, PS4, XBO, SWITCH No Code’s dry-run for Observation, in essence, Stories Untold offers up four discrete episodes that contain a similarly unique mix of puzzle-solving and engrossing storytelling as their later effort. The first episode, The House Abandon, is brilliantly unsettling. Deliver Us The Moon PC, PS4, XBO, SWITCH Although not quite as successful in its execution as Observation was, this adventure-puzzler, about an astronaut exploring a seemingly abandoned lunar base, has some solid…