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1 Commentalt.ctrl.GDC has the most creative controllers you’ll ever see
For the fourth year running, the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco featured an exhibit on alternative controllers. Called alt.ctrl.GDC, the showcase invites developers to throw out their preconceptions of what a game controller looks like and explore some strange and wonderful alternatives.
Nick Robinson was at GDC all week, and went hands-on with some of these games. Watch him highlight his favorites in the video above.
Jason Blalock/Polygon
Nick enjoying Spacebox at alt.ctrl.play.
One of his top picks was Spacebox, which uses a cardboard box as the controller. The box is kitted out as, of course, a spaceship. By lifting the sides of the box, the player activates the ship’s shields. Hitting buttons on the box’s front flap fires weapons.
Nick also...
GDC 2017
1 CommentWatch all of the board game talks from GDC free online
This year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco featured something new this year. For the first time ever, tabletop games took center stage during Board Game Design Day. Headliners included Rob Daviau and Matt Leacock, the team behind Pandemic: Legacy, as well as Erik Lang, this year’s Diana Jones award winning designer.
Now, those talks are available for free online thanks to the GDC Vault.
Charlie Hall/Polygon
Matt Leacock and Rob Daviau, the team behind Pandemic: Legacy.
The Board Game Design Day was intended to be a “one-day deep dive into the art and science,” and it absolutely delivered on that promise.
Over the course of two different talks, Daviau lifted the curtain on the process of making a Legacy-style board game. Riot Games’ Chris...
GDC 2017
1 CommentA selfie is all it takes to get your whole head in the game
Every time I have tried and failed to scan my face into a sports video game, I've gotten 500 tweets and comments about what I was doing wrong: Not enough light. The background was too busy. I didn't fill the camera with my face. I'm so ugly I was automatically moderated by the app's objectionable-content heuristics algorithm. Blah blah blah.
OK, fine. Here's a solution, from San Jose-based ItSeez3D, that completely wipes out all of those excuses. I tried it at GDC 2017, and any video game thinking about offering this kind of customization option should use it, because all it needs to build a 3D model of the head is a standard selfie.
That's it. No "hold your head for this long," no "turn slowly as the camera scans your mug" and you come out looking like Deebo from Friday.
...
GDC 2017
6 CommentsWargaming CEO accepts blame, vows renewed focus on World of Tanks
Wargaming’s chief executive office, Victor Kislyi, was in a mood to spill his guts last week. During an interview with Polygon in San Francisco, he was candid about his recent mistakes and vowed a renewed focus on his company’s flagship title, World of Tanks.
“We were a little arrogant, let's say, three years ago,” Kislyi told Polygon. “We were thinking we know everything that our players need without talking intensively to them ourselves. It turned into — I wouldn't call it a disaster, but we hit the wall at some point.”
That wall had a name: Rubicon. The update was delivered nearly two years ago, but the ill will from players, especially from WoT’s rabid Russian fanbase, still haunts the game. It was so poorly received, Wargaming couldn’t simply roll it back.
“We were a little...
GDC 2017
13 CommentsMaking games more diverse means listening to both sides of the table
To make the gaming industry more diverse, looking at social media — and how it's used for both good and not-so-good — is essential, said Riot Games' head of diversity and inclusion during a Game Developers Conference talk on the subject.
Social media platforms have been an important tool in giving underrepresented voices greater exposure in the industry, explained Soha El-Sabaawi, who’s in charge of the League of Legends developer’s internal diversification efforts. Creators who may not otherwise get a chance to be discovered in the male-dominated world of games gather under hashtags to assert their presence and find support from fellow minority designers.
One hashtag that El-Sabaawi cited as indicative of Facebook and Twitter’s power in both connecting diverse designers and empowering...
Virtual Reality
1 CommentBounce uses virtual reality to perfect the physics puzzle genre
As much as I want to tell you, I can’t spoil the ending to Bounce, a VR physics puzzle that launched in November. It is pure creative genius, cackling at you as you stumble through its puzzles to arrive at a storyline shocker that only the sharpest and most skeptical eye could even vaguely predict. Fewer than 3 percent of those playing this virtual reality puzzle game have seen it for themselves.
Bounce comprises 50 mind-bending levels. The good news is the user gets to place the tools for solving each level by hand, kneeling, squatting or standing on tiptoes if necessary. The game is made by Steel Wool Studios, a team of designers hailing from Pixar, Lucasfilm, Intel and other big names. I visited their hotel suite at GDC 2017 ostensibly to talk about a virtual reality space...
GDC 2017
1 CommentOoblets is a Pokémon and Harvest Moon lover’s dream game
A game that looks and sounds like Ooblets — and has a name like “Ooblets” — could easily fall into the trap of being way too cutesy for its own good. That’s not the case with this creature-collecting role-playing game, which had a starring turn at Game Developers Conference 2017 as one of publisher Double Fine’s most promising indie titles on display.
Ooblets is adorable, of course; one need only watch the teaser above to see that. But playing the demo reveals that it’s got the gameplay to back that up, even in the early build we played on the GDC showfloor. The game is a mashup of monster-collecting, farming and exploring, all of which will be familiar to anyone who’s played one of the more kid-friendly examples of those genres.
On the game’s website, Ooblet’s two-person development...
GDC 2017
10 CommentsThe secret ingredient to Final Fantasy 15’s success? Selfies
Unlike other titles in the series, Final Fantasy 15 has an expansive open world with a plethora of sidequests. But to preserve the role-playing game’s traditional emphasis on storytelling, the team at Square Enix created a unique system to fill in the gaps: selfies.
Final Fantasy 15 is a “99 percent” open-world, teenage road trip, AI Prasert Prasertvithyakarn, the game’s lead designer of buddy systems, told me at Game Developers Conference 2017. That sets it apart from past Final Fantasy games, which tell far more linear narratives. The road trip element comes through explicitly as Prince Noctis and his broody bros traverse a huge world. The gang balances completing missions with chilling out in their convertible, which often leads to long stretches where the overarching plot has little...
GDC 2017
2 CommentsSteel Division: Normandy ‘44 is a tactical wargame with 10-on-10 multiplayer battles
Eugen Systems, the French developer known for R.U.S.E. and the Wargame series, has unveiled a new game called Steel Division: Normandy ‘44. It’s the first entry in a franchise being developed in partnership with Paradox Interactive. Polygon got a sneak peek at the game behind closed doors at this year’s Game Developers Conference. Our demo included new details on the single-player campaign, and a preview of its ambitious multiplayer mode featuring massive 10-versus-10 battles.
Alexis Le Dressay, co-founder of Eugen and creative director on Steel Division, explained that this new title is neither a grand strategy game nor a small-unit tactics game. Instead, it falls somewhere in between.
Steel Division asks players to give individual units — infantry teams, single pieces of armor and...
GDC 2017
6 CommentsKalypso turns its attention to railroad sims with Railway Empire
It's been a decade since the last entry in Railroad Tycoon — the series that practically made the word "tycoon" into its own games genre — and, as I was told, Simon Hellwig figured that was long enough. The Kalypso co-founder and president wanted one, if not for business purposes, then at least for himself.
Hellwig put Kalypso's in-house studio, Gaming Minds of Gütersloh, Germany, on the case, and now we have Railway Empire arriving at the station sometime before the end of the year. Somewhat like Dungeons 3 (previewed here), Railway Empire appears to be another stab by Kalypso at overtaking long-remembered but lapsed PC gaming genres and delivering their experiences not just to that platform, but to consoles as well.
Gaming Minds/Kalypso
Hellwig's interest in a...
GDC 2017
17 CommentsNintendo’s strategy for indies on Switch: More new games
Many Nintendo employees have made a point to state how much the company has learned from the Wii U’s missteps when launching the Switch, and that includes the company’s relationship with indie games. That incorporates more titles that don’t appear other places, especially games that haven’t already been on other consoles for years.
Members of Nintendo’s third-party publishing team spoke about this at length during demos at the Game Developers Conference, which focused heavily on the 64 independent games confirmed for the Nintendo Switch. Those games — including favorites likes Stardew Valley and Overcooked, and new titles like Wargroove and Runner3 — are part of a concerted effort to fill up the Switch’s content library with more than first-party games.
“We’re not launching with 32...
Roster File
2 CommentsPlaying for the love of the sport — all of them — in Super Slam Dunk Touchdown
In grade school, we played a game called "bat ball" — hit a soccer ball with a bat. At home, golf clubs and a tennis ball were a natural precursor to street hockey. There was also home run derby with a tennis racket. Who hasn’t tried that?
Sports mashups are as old as sports themselves, in other words. Still, here comes Super Slam Dunk Touchdown at GDC 2017, as refreshingly out-of-place with its genre as our attempts to make a free throw with everything in the garage.
“That’s probably the seed of all this, when you’re a kid kicking a basketball,” said the game’s creator, Rick Felice. “And the football would always get stuck in the hoop in real life.
“Any time we got in a gymnasium it’d be like, ‘Alright, let’s do silly stuff!’’ he added.
An acclaimed indie game when it...
GDC 2017
6 CommentsPokémon Go was over capacity less than two hours after it launched
Remember how much of a pain it was to play Pokémon Go at launch? We finally know why: The game was over capacity less than two hours after it launched.
In a presentation at the Game Developers Conference, Ed Wu, director of software engineering at Niantic and the man who leads the engineering team for Pokémon Go, revealed some of the internal numbers behind the game’s meteoric rise. Before launch, he and his team sat down to look at the player base and the growth curve for other, popular mobile games. Then they came up with an estimate of the kind of network traffic they expected, along with a “ludicrous” estimate of five times that number.
Wu personally handed those figures over to Google, their hosting provider, in order to prepare them for the launch. Then, the team pushed the...
GDC 2017
6 CommentsNintendo's indie program treads fun — but very safe — ground
With more than 60 games due in 2017, Nintendo is positioning the Switch as a must-have for indie devotees. But taking a closer look at the console’s indie catalogue shows that, while it’s a typically fun array of retro-styled shooters and platformers, Nintendo isn’t willing to really switch up its image.
Nintendo showcased several of its most promising indies during Game Developers Conference this week, with a handful of the 60-plus games playable on the show floor. These include the familiar — Shovel Knight and The Binding of Isaac — and games that are new but … well, still familiar. Retro-style revivalist games make up the bulk of the initial lineup, as has become par for the course with Nintendo consoles.
Games like the adorable roguelike Tumbleseed and Snake Pass, a take on the...
GDC 2017
0 CommentsVirtual reality’s success could ride on a new initiative discussed at GDC
The key to virtual reality succeeding commercially on a global scale may lie in the hands of a team of volunteers working to create a royalty-free standard.
But the clock is ticking.
“We’re trying to do this as fast as we can,” said Nick Whiting, who is the chair on the working group trying to come up with a solution. VR headsets “are already out there and have been out there for a year. We want to do something as soon as possible, this isn’t a long-term project.”
The Khronos VR initiative is the latest effort by the Khronos Group, an American nonprofit that focuses on creating open standards for technology. The group, which was founded in 2000 by a collection of powerful tech companies, previously helped to create or oversee a variety of royalty-free, open-standard application...
GDC 2017
17 CommentsDeus Ex director Warren Spector has harsh words for virtual reality and more
Today at the Game Developers Conference, industry heavyweight Warren Spector hosted a post mortem on the making of Deus Ex, arguably his most beloved game. While Spector’s talk featured a lot of insights into the lengthy development process for Deus Ex and what he did right and wrong, he also offered some thoughts on current game development trends, often in response to audience questions.
Speaking about the impetus behind Deus Ex’s development, Spector kept returning to the idea that too many games of the time were too simple — that they didn’t force players to think. His best anecdote related to this came from when Ion Storm, the studio where he developed Deus Ex, opened the game up for testing.
Deus Ex is a game that mixes stealth, first-person shooter and dialogue-heavy adventure...