Innehållsförteckning för #64 från Wireframe Magazine

It happened. They did it again. Someone described the blockchain as a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist in order to sell someone on the idea of buying into the fad, and now everyone is angry. We really should’ve seen this coming – I suppose – after the first six or seven hundred times it happened. So… what can we do now but form a collective voice to tell off the dude who said it, repeat the very clear reality of the situation back to them, baulk at the blatant ignorance of tech bros, and move on. It’s a pattern that crops up time and time again, and each time it does, I can’t help but think: why are we mad at this again? I mean, yes, obviously, NFTs…

One of the major changes Deliver Us Mars makes to traversal relates to the addition of climbing. Whereas the first game’s Moon was relatively smooth to navigate – by foot or rover – due to its flat surface, the sequel will frequently test your ability to clamber over the red planet’s rough terrain using Kathy’s two pickaxes. KeokeN brings a surprising level of challenge to these sections by tying the left and right pickaxe to the controller’s corresponding triggers. It’s wise to never let go of both at once on most occasions, but confident players can time their drops creatively when they want to scale tricky climbing routes that bit faster.…

Stray’s cat moves so realistically that you’d be forgiven for thinking that the studio implemented mocap tech to portray its specific hops and strides. In actual fact, it’s the effort of just one dedicated animator. “Miko is really talented and fluent with keyframe animations, like hand-made animation,” says Martin-Raget. “It seems like the internet was basically invented to host cat pictures and videos, so it’s really easy to find anything you want. Miko became a specialist of old cat videos at some point. That was definitely very important in the process, and the iterations between code and animation were crucial.”…

Developer Reply Game Studios may be based in Italy, but its latest game’s soul is rooted firmly in Japan. A dark fantasy hack-and-slash, Soulstice looks and plays very much like Devil May Cry and Bayonetta; it’s a game that thrives on fast combat and devastating, satisfying combos. Fabio Pagetti, Soulstice’s creative director, is unabashed about the game’s far-eastern influences: beyond video games, its characters and location are heavily inspired by anime and manga. “Here at the studio, we are all into dark fantasy – Japanese dark fantasy in particular,” Pagetti says. “Any Berserk or Claymore fan will be able to see that our game is a heartfelt tribute to those worlds and characters. I think ‘tribute’ is a key word here, because as much as we love those works, I…

KIM JUSTICE 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. June 2022 was yet another banner month for fans of the old-fashioned beat-’em-up, with two excellent releases hitting just a day apart from each other. Both the hotly anticipated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge and Bitmap Bureau’s new title, Final Vendetta, are worthy of the positive reviews they’ve been getting (you can see Wireframe’s review of the latter on page 95) – but they’re also highly different from each other in ways that demonstrate the often overlooked variety of this well-worn genre. Both are certainly…

Antony is Wireframe’s writing and narrative design columnist. He’s also a freelance video game storyteller, and you can find his work on default.games or @antony_de_fault on Twitter. Often in designers’ minds there’s a tug of war, where investing effort in storytelling means sacrificing good gameplay, and vice versa. But this is not the case. To illuminate the subject, I find it helps to consider The Beatles’ discography, wherein we find a metaphor on which to hang a framework for thinking about what to do when design meets story. I know how mad this sounds but bear with me. NARRATIVE-LED In the song Yesterday, melody and music are present to augment the story painted by the words. The primary focus is on relating a sequence of events, and in a narrative-led…

Building bridges is something I’m very into… but it means one thing to an engineer and quite another to a therapist. The fact that I’m both has flummoxed many people. They think it’s weird that I was a successful engineer and then chose to become a therapist. When they point this out to me (which they frequently do), I tell them: “I don’t really think it’s that odd. If you think about it, engineers and therapists are all systems analysts. In becoming a therapist, I’ve simply moved on to more sophisticated hardware.”…

I keep referring to content creation systems, but what are these? Basically, it’s creating elements in any way that allows you to easily swap sections of them to something else. This can range from making your monsters so you can swap which weapon they’re carrying or how much armour they’re wearing, all the way up to tools that allow you to select options from a menu and then output the results for you. Just remember that these systems are there to serve your game, not the other way around – it’s easy to procrastinate by overengineering tools!…

Steve Bromley is a user researcher who has worked in games for over a decade. He’s enthusiastic about making better playtesting accessible to game teams of all sizes. Get some free tools to help run your playtest at playtestkit.com Throughout development, there are plenty of occasions where we might wonder, ‘What do players understand or think about my game?’. Surveys are one part of your toolkit to explore these topics. A survey is a list of questions that you ask people after they play your game, whether it’s an early build, a demo, or at the end of development, and they can be a powerful tool to inform game design decisions. Here, we’ll look at how to use surveys, some traps to avoid, and how to write useful questions to…

Arguably, one of the most memorable media pieces featuring Buck was the TV series, produced by Universal Studios, which was greenlit after the success of the made-for-tv movie. Gil Gerard starred as the titular character, while Erin Gray would take the role of Colonel Wilma Deering. In their adventures, they are accompanied by Twiki, a sidekick robot comic character who would speak English, usually after making electronic noises which sounded similar to “biddi-biddi-biddi”. The series was also broadcast internationally in both the UK and Canada. It only ran for two seasons and 37 episodes, after which NBC cancelled the series because of ratings dropping fast after the première of the second season.…

Battlezone VR 2016 One of very few launch titles for PlayStation’s big VR push, Battlezone VR reimagined the 1980s arcade classic by placing you in the tank more authentically than ever before. Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron 2007 This handheld exclusive spin-off from Battlefront II was Rich’s first gig as lead programmer. It was praised for being a fully featured instalment on PSP despite being developed in just a year. Rogue Trooper 2006 Following his work in the GBA world, Rich was a coder on this third-person shooter based on the 2000 AD comic series. He quickly grew fond of his blue buddies.…

How much complexity does a farming sim really need? Does it need fancy graphics and sound? In-depth growing and harvesting mechanics? NPCs that rattle off reams of dialogue at you? Bit Orchard: Animal Valley answers those questions with a resounding ‘no’; it’s a Harvest Moon-a-like that harks back to the Game Boy era, with pared-back controls and systems to match. Starting off with a tiny patch of land, you grow apple trees, harvest the fruit, and acquire the cash you need to buy tools and – eventually – larger plots of land. Bit Orchard offers a wilfully simple riff on the genre, but one that still provides enough variety to keep things interesting: a task list in the corner of the screen constantly updates with new stuff to do, while…

A port’s technical challenges can be somewhat lessened by, where available, maintaining a good dialogue with the developer behind the game being ported. This is something that’s not always possible, though, since Aspyr’s work ranges from contemporary titles intended to launch concurrent with the lead platform’s version, to reviving titles from long ago, presumed to be lost. Hence Blair suggests that speaking to the original team is “important but not critical”. More essential is meeting an audience’s baked-in expectations. “Our goal is to make the port feel like it was always intended for the platform, and we lean heavily on fulfilling consumer expectations to ensure that is true,” he reveals. “That all said, we are extremely limited in what we can do towards that goal without source code, so source…

OUR SCORES 1–9 Trash. Unplayable. A broken mess. 10–19 A truly bad game, though not necessarily utterly broken. 20–29 Still awful, but at a push could be fun for two minutes. 30–39 Might have a redeeming feature, but otherwise very poor. 40–49 Adds in more redeeming features, but still not worth your time. 50–59 Average. Decent at best. ‘Just about OK’. 60–69 Held back by glitches, bugs, or a lack of originality, but can be good fun. 70–79 A very good game, but one lacking spit and polish or uniqueness. 80–89 Brilliant. Fabulous fun. Everyone should at least try it. 90–99 Cutting edge, original, unique, and/or pushes the medium forward. 100 Never say never, eh?…

The games for… BIG ADVENTURES Elden Ring / Bandai Namco / 95% (Issue 61) Assassin’s Creed Odyssey / Ubisoft / 93% (Issue 1) Yakuza: Like a Dragon / Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio / 90% (Issue 45) Amnesia: Rebirth / Frictional Games / 87% (Issue 46) Death’s Door / Acid Nerve / 87% (Issue 55) The Last Campfire / Hello Games / 86% (Issue 47) Resident Evil 2 / Capcom / 86% (Issue 7) Journey to the Savage Planet / Typhoon Studios / 84% (Issue 33) The Outer Worlds / Obsidian Entertainment / 84% (Issue 28) Eastward / Pixpil / 84% (Issue 57) The games for… REPEATED PLAY Hades / Supergiant Games / 94% (Issue 44) They Are Billions / Numantian Games / 88% (Issue 20) Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice /…

With Deliver Us Mars shining out of the cover, there’s a distinct space theme to this month’s edition. By a cosmic coincidence, I found myself on the east coast earlier this month, and stumbled on Gray’s Amusements in Mundesley – a charming arcade that has a handful of classic, space-themed coin-ops at the back. I made an immediate beeline for Namco’s seminal Galaxian, and was reminded why playing a game on original hardware is so important to understanding its initial appeal. With those insectoid aliens whirling and shimmering down the CRT screen and the sound of lasers and explosions booming out of the cabinet, it’s an entirely different experience from, say, playing a port on a modern handheld or on a PC via MAME. Released in 1979, Galaxian was a…

Kathy’s journey to discover what happened to her lost father, Isaac, might be entirely fictional, but the version of Mars depicted in-game has been informed by real-life scientific study and research in the pursuit of creating a grounded adventure. “We spoke to a lot of experts,” reveals Koen Deetman. “Speaking to biologists and people that are big on planetary colonisation about: How does that evolve? Is it possible to grow stuff there?” The team even had the opportunity to pick the brain of retired astronauts, like The Netherlands’ own André Kuipers. “I know he’s very big on the overview effect that space had on him when he was aboard the ISS,” Paul Deetman continues. “They look back on Earth and we see the pictures. It’s great, but there’s also this…

Forming the backdrop for Soulstice’s pacey combat is a dark fantasy world that’s less heightened than Lord of the Rings, Pagetti says, and “similar to our Middle Ages”, albeit with a supernatural edge. A ‘Tear’ has opened up in the sky above the city of Ilden, allowing evil forces to engulf the streets below. It’s here that Briar and Lute, as members of a force known as the Order of the Ashen Blade, come in. “The relationship between Briar and Lute is the heart of the Soulstice experience,” Pagetti explains. “From the very beginning of this project, we envisioned them as a representation and a metaphor for the world in which they live. The conflict and the duality between the worldly and the otherworldly.”…

Here’s a chance to get your hands on a 34-inch curvy gaming monitor, courtesy of the lovely folks at Iiyama. One lucky Wireframe reader will get an Iiyama ProLite XCB3494WQSN-B1 monitor, which has a 3440×1440 resolution, sent direct to their home. Here are the juicy tech specs in full: 34" VA panel 48–120Hz refresh rate FreeSync Premium 0.4ms response time (MPRT) 3440×1440 resolution 1 × HDMI and 1 × DisplayPort inputs Stereo 2W speakers USB 3.0 hub Inspired by the curve of the human eye, the 1500R curved VA screen offers superb images along with a comfortable and immersive viewing experience. Equipped with the KVM switch, the XCB3494WQSN enables you to connect multiple computers which can be operated over one console (monitor, keyboard, mouse). The USB-C dock connector allows you…

There are still numerous young Finnish developers producing free games as a hobby. Moonstuck, for instance, is a free game by ComfieDev, a new studio formed by 16-year-old Finnish developer, Comfie. It’s a rage game – that is, a game intentionally designed to be enjoyably frustrating – that tasks players with navigating their way off the surface of a moon in a cute rocket ship while avoiding projectiles and other obstacles. “Five months ago, I participated in a game jam hosted by a streamer named Ludwig Ahgren,” says Comfie. “The objective of the jam was to make a rage game, and I was fortunate enough to get into the top five with my game Back to the Nest. That jam sparked my interest for rage games in general, and for…

Button-mashing ‘quick time events’ (QTEs) are common in narrative-led games since they’re mechanics which can draw the player into a scene, but they’re themselves uninteresting and have hardly developed in decades. This isn’t necessarily a problem since they remain effective. But quick time events’ triteness misleads designers to think of all narrative-supporting mechanics as inherently boring, which creates discord between story- and gameplay-minded devs. For a great example of an innovative use of small mechanics for story purposes, see Guardians of the Galaxy’s beetle hunting ‘competition’ in its first level. It neatly creates a sense of rivalty between Star-Lord and Rocket in the player’s mind.…

An avid developer at The Multiplayer Group with a strong passion for education, Ryan Shah moonlights as KITATUS – an education content creator for all things game development. By default, characters in Unreal Engine can’t walk on spherical surfaces. But in this guide, we’re going to make cunning use of Blueprints to create a planet with its own gravitational field. We’ll be looking at supporting characters and physics objects on our floating gas balls, so strap yourself in, it’s all systems go… There are a number of ways to approach Custom Gravity in Unreal Engine, depending on what you’d like the system to achieve. Here, we’re going to look at an approach we can put together using Blueprints, but as we go along, we’ll discuss alternative (and more comprehensive) methods…

We covered the development concept of the ‘iron triangle’ back in Wireframe 52 (wfmag.cc/52), which dictates that you can control any two of your project’s time, cost, or quality. For indie developers, time and cost are much the same – how long you can afford to work on a game before you need to release it – so working with matrices can really help. Every element of your game needs to pull its weight, so if you can’t find many uses for something, it might be better to cut it and focus your efforts elsewhere.…

The original rock-blasting arcade shooter was, of course, Asteroids, released by Atari in 1979. But since then, many clones; one notable example was Super Stardust, developed by Finnish developer Bloodhouse and released by Team17 for the Amiga platform in 1994 (for more on that studio’s history, see page 28). The game featured considerably better graphics and sound than Asteroids, and got great reviews. One of the differences between the two is that Asteroids uses vector graphics to draw the screen objects whereas Stardust uses sprites. If you have a look back at Wireframe issue four (wfmag.cc/4), you’ll find a Source Code article describing how to make a spaceship move using thrust, Asteroids style. Rather than go over old ground, this example will cover how to code the asteroids that are…

Project M was a 1993 project by SSI, intended to be a new beginning for the company. It was said to be a full-on isometric RPG with a completely new engine, as Gold Box was starting to show its age. David Shelley and Rhonda Van were in charge of the project which, in the end, after many production delays, came to nothing, not even a demo. After its cancellation, almost 30 people from R&D were laid off. Several people mention Project M as the real beginning of the end for SSI, a black hole of time and resources which were spent on nothing, a blow which the company never recovered from.…

While 2Boone looked to the likes of Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing when looking for references for Bit Orchard’s visuals, he found that a bigger influence came from YouTube’s Brandon James Greer. Greer’s channel contains a wealth of tutorials and tips for drawing and animating sprites, as well as useful analyses of how designers once drew pixel art for systems like the NES and Sega Game Gear. “The way he broke down retro graphics changed the way I approached making pixel art,” says Boone. You can find Greer’s channel at wfmag.cc/BJGpixel.…

While Aspyr’s main driving philosophy is to maintain the essence of the original game, the studio has had a handful of opportunities throughout the years to restore cut content, rendering its port as the definitive version. A good example of this is 2015’s Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered, which restores intimate “adult” scenes previously cut from the North American release. The recently released Nintendo Switch version of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, meanwhile, is set to receive DLC almost 18 years after it originally launched. This again is a restoration of cut content developer Obsidian couldn’t quite squeeze in, including never-before-seen dialogue, missions, and story paths.…

Red Dead Redemption 2 PC, PS4, XBO Rockstar’s second story about a criminal-turned-honest outlaw is a beautiful expedition amidst the American frontier’s final years. The luscious landscapes you ride through always feel alive. Forza Horizon 5 PC, XBO, XB S/X Watching the world whizz by your window has never been more thrilling than in Playground’s open-world rendition of Mexico. It’s certainly one of the most impressive locations you can visit by car in games. Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes PC, PS3, PS4, XB 360, XBO While Venom Snake’s main mission certainly has its moments, Ground Zeroes is something of a masterclass in bite-sized stealth action. Sneaking through Camp Omega lets you get intimate with just one location.…

Lost in Play is brimming with so many ideas that reflect the characters’ own imaginations, it was a challenge for Happy Juice Games to whittle them all down. “We would do a quick sketch of an idea and know pretty fast whether or not the scenario works for us,” says Markovich. “Puzzles we were sure would work didn’t, and others we thought wouldn’t be that good turned out to be the best. You can never really know before you’ve tested them on actual players.” Making the puzzle relevant to the story also helps players make visual sense of what the solution could be. “For example, when the siblings try to catch a frog, we created a board game where each sibling is a pawn trying to corner the frog the…

MR BIFFO Mr Biffo, better known as Paul Rose, was the creator of the legendary Digitiser. Check him out on wfmag.cc/digitiser “Long before Star Wars, or Alien, game developers were already flaunting their love of sci-fi” What is it with video games and space? Pretty much from the start, science fiction – specifically science fiction featuring aliens and spaceships – had a massive influence on the games people created. Spacewar! – their exclamation, not mine (although I am similarly excited) – was the first bona fide digital video game, and right out of the gate it wrapped its thighs around a sci-fi theme. It was created in 1961 on a PDP-1 minicomputer by massive nerd Steve Russell and his equally nerdy friends Martin Gaetz and Wayne Wiitanen (who would later lend part…

Away from the world of commercial game development, Arvi Teikari remembers while at school in Finland in the early 2000s, there was a large number of kids making their own games, usually with personalised domains. “There was kind of a pretty active community who were slightly older than me, who had these websites […] with a domain ending cjb.net,” he recalls. “And there were dozens of studios of Finnish kids having their own websites with cool names like Blue Storm and Blue Skull, Blablabla Software, and making small games. It was usually with GameMaker or The Games Factory; most commonly with The Games Factory, as that didn’t require any scripting at all, and was powerful enough for making these Pokémon clones, small linear adventure games, or simple platformers.”…

Howard is a video game pioneer who authored several of Atari’s most famous and infamous titles. His book, Once Upon Atari: How I Made History by Killing an Industry, is out now. onceuponatari.com As The Silicon Valley Therapist, I'm very familiar with people joining tech startups and what that entails. One aspect is the unspoken (though often explicit) contract that people accept as part of the deal: founders and employees are expected to sacrifice their lives entirely for the job. And in return, they get a pot of gold at the end of the death march. The promise of extraordinary riches. The rough bit is that this promise is not always kept, but the hours and effort are always demanded. You must accept a near-total lack of balance in your…

Stuart Maine has been a designer for 25 years across PC, console, and mobile. He helped set up Well Played Games, and is currently working on an unannounced title. Rather than a sunglasses-wearing Neo battling Agent Smith, matrix design revolves around the much more exciting world of using ‘square growth’ to produce the content needed for your game. When discussing ‘content’ here, I mean the elements that players encounter during the game, either as threats and challenges (monsters, hazards, NPCs) or the tools they use to overcome them (weapons, pick-ups, special moves). There are several ways you can use matrices when creating content, but each revolves around efficiency. That may not sound exciting, but it boils down to letting you add more stuff to your game in the time you…

A final use for a matrix that’s a little different is creating one whose two axes are gameplay styles that your game can be rated on. For example, you might have ‘coordination versus tactics’ on the X axis and ‘luck versus skill’ on the Y axis. You can consider where games aimed at a similar audience to yours sit on X and Y, then get playtesters to rate where they think your game sits in that space. If this doesn’t line up with what you were expecting, you can either adjust your gameplay or pivot towards a different audience.…

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Strategic Simulations, Inc. was originally founded in 1979 by Joel Billings as a way to develop and publish his in-house-developed war games, as he could not find a publisher that would allow him to do so. While originally dedicated to strategic war games, titles like 1985’s Phantasie would see the company expanding to fantasy RPGs as well. It would be the Dungeons & Dragons licence, acquired from TSR in 1987, that would change the future of the company, leading to bestsellers like Pool of Radiance and Champions of Krynn. After losing the exclusive rights to the licence to Interplay in 1994, the company ended up basically folding in on itself, being acquired by Mindscape first, later by the Learning Company, and then finally by Ubisoft.…

“Making games can be a stressful occupation, and people don’t always see eye to eye” Can you remember the game that first made you want to get into games? It was in the early 1990s when I first got a glimpse via the various magazines I was reading at the time. Screen captures of sprite pages from games like Alien Breed 2, Cannon Fodder, and Lemmings were fascinating, and I’d spend hours trying to replicate them in Deluxe Paint on my trusty Amiga 1200. How did you break into this industry? I’d finished a computer science degree and was wondering what to do with myself. My friends were applying to big IT consultancy firms, which I didn’t particularly fancy. After trawling the websites of various games companies, I discovered Codemasters…

Morbid Metal might be significantly faster-paced than what Schade initially had in mind, but its roguelike nature encourages players to act with precision as well as speed. Giving the player the appropriate tools in which to balance these aspects, therefore, was important. Due to the fact that the player has to start over upon death, dying and taking damage has a greater weight compared to games with a traditional checkpoint system, he says. “This inevitably also influences how players approach combat encounters and their actions during the fights. Of course, Morbid Metal still encourages offensive manoeuvres. All according to the motto: offense is the best defence.”…

STEVE MCNEIL Steve is just trying to save the world, honestly. “For around £100, you could relive childhood memories on entirely original hardware” Regular readers of this column may remember that last month I was pondering the proliferation of game subscription services and the rising cost of it all. With the PlayStation and Nintendo offerings, in particular, retro gaming plays a significant part, with NES, SNES, N64, Sega Mega Drive, and Sony PSone & PS2* all represented. However, emulation issues and ill-considered errors with aspect ratios, refresh rates, and the like are frequent, making for an often less-than-satisfying experience. Someone near me recently announced on Facebook they wanted to get rid of their 20-something-inch Sony CRT TV and, on a whim, I leapt on it. A few years ago, I…

What would you say is your favourite game of all time and why? This is always a tricky one as I’ve been playing games for well over 20 years! I actually have two that I think really stand out – the first one is Final Fantasy IX, which I know is controversial as everyone loves VII, but I loved its aesthetic and its story. The second one has to be The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. I cannot express how much I enjoyed every aspect of that game; it was such a brilliant experience when I did my first run and I recommend it to everyone all the time. The way you could go off the beaten track and find new and interesting things to do wherever you went is something…

Observation PC, PS4, XBO No Code’s 2019 sci-fi thriller is an enthralling amalgam of 2D puzzles and claustrophobic, Kubrickian storytelling. It’s a confident, logical expansion of ideas first floated in Stories Untold. What Remains of Edith Finch PC, PS4, XBO, SWITCH, IOS A first-person adventure whose episodic tales gradually build to create a poignant, unforgettable whole. A dark and truly emotional experience. Your Future Self PC, MAC, LINUX Another shaky CRT monitor, another adventure about getting to grips with an arcane, eighties-looking interface. It’s not perfect, but Your Future Self is still an absorbing two-hour time loop mystery – and at the time of writing, it’s just £1.99 on Steam.…