This does sound pretty amazing!
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got a joypad for PC again so I think I’ll get back to the lynx soon but first pacman ce
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Axiom Verge 2: I’m doomed to enjoy the average Metroidvanias everyone here hates (like Wonderboy in the cursed kingdom too!)
Combat is so messy it almost feels like an early 90s PC 2D platformer. That’s OK.
Exploration’s better than usual. The world feels a lot more free than the genre standard (especially after playing all 3 Castlevania DS in a row)
I have never seen such a Tell Don’t Show story! Pages upon pages of lore I couldn’t possibly care about about alien factions I don’t even get to meet. The plight of the Gl’arblg…
The game does 1 really really cool thing. After a point, NPCs start feeling sick and eventually mutating into horrible monsters or disappearing. I was never quite sure what causes this to happen. I checked online and the main character is the one contaminating everybody! After you get a weird body altering upgrade, NPCs begin to turn if you interact with them. No one is safe
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Steam demo roundup 2:
Peeves from this demo fest:
- games that default to windowed mode. not a borderless, full screen window, but a teeny, bordered one.
- games (many, many games) without gamepad controls
- games with tiny text that can’t be resized because, as with the gamepad issue, people are assuming that you’re playing these seated two feet from a big monitor.
- games that are just rawdogging a low rez pixel look. you gotta a
The Stone of Madness: Stealth RPG from the Blasphemous guys. There are a couple kinds of text in this game and you can crank the size of some, but not all of them, with the result being some critical text that was just too microscopic to read from the couch. Left it at that, maybe they’ll patch it.
Voidwrought: I get no audio in this one. It’s a Hollow Knight clone. I appreciate that it takes a lot of work to bite the mechanics, feel, and visual style of that game, but there’s still nothing fresh here and the way it most distinguishes itself from its inspiration is in hitting you with a lot of talky lore upfront, in contrast to Hollow Knight’s characterisitic silence.
Chrono Sword: Hyper Light Bloodborne. they’ve got some basics down that feel good, but I wasn’t really engaged by the time I got to the first boss and got splattered. needs juice.
Dating of the Future: robot android sex girl game that’s about making porn but it’s the 2020s and this game’s ideas about porn feel like someone kinda clueless in the 90s riffing on their idea of the porn industry in the 70s and 80s. so people talk about “the biggest porn stars” and the first sex scene gets derailed because of problems with the script. and there is so much talk about the script they have, for their porno, and revising it and reading from it and rehearsing it. and we’re not even talking about the sex parts of the porn, just some roleplay setup where it’s an office boss talking to an employee and saying puns while porno music plays, which you can imagine if you have seen a 1990s riff on the porn industry of the 70s and 80s. it’s not great, I’m saying.
Dong Wu: Odyssey: Darkest Dungeon-ish with furries and cards. I thought it was pretty good for one of these until it gave me a “login bonus” and I realized this would eventually bloom into some kind of mobile game / f2p / gacha hell scheme.
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i’m in LA for the weekend but will verify when i get home
the original site seemed to indicate this was a direct arcade port as the MD version was slightly different; however, i need to watch them side by side.
i also don’t remember how the versions differed, so i’ll also need to look that up, again. hopefully it’s something visible in the first 3 stages lol
2 Likes
“You’re the president of jack shit”
This game really leaves an impression. I feel like I’m actually playing something totally new and the game of just walking around is really engaging so far. The game looks incredibly gorgeous too. IDK it’s just great. Spellbound already.
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You are in for a hundred treats
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And like 10 really rancid ones.
But I also love Sam Porter Bridges The Man Who Delivers.
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great game with an unfortunately obnoxious ending (i love mgs4 and i’ll always take its dry lore dumps over meandering melodrama featuring grotesque animated models of actors fake crying)
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Death Standing does the women in the story dirty like every Kojima game. I ended up stopping during the extended Fragile torture sequence that is uncomfortably sexualized. Kojima should make games only about gay men, then they’d be perfect.
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playing some things for the IGF and weirdest microtrend to me has been all the student games that run like shit on my pc bc they’re built for high gamer power rigs, UE5 ultra reflections and stuff by default… i guess it’s bc their function is sort of to be portfolio pieces which both look Impressive For A Student Game, which give people experience of the requirements for industry pipelines and which let the graphics team have a lot of highquality assets they can show in interviews. so like a bunch of reasons that make sense in context and i know i’m getting a sample biased towards the fussy but it’s still not great to me that young people curious abt the format are being pushed, or pushing themselves, to make this kinda stuff. at least they’ll get to nod sagely along the next time a youtuber makes a video about how real games are made, i guess.
i wonder if this was always the case and if like people trying to get jobs as recording engineers in the 70s had to frontload their resumes with that sgt pepper shit to seem impressive. yeah fade that panpipe. it’s important to get that right, since you’ll be doing it a lot in the pop music to come.
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i have no idea which schools the games you’re playing actually come from so i’m just making blind assumptions and forgive me if i’m off base
one of the biggest recent events at work i was struck by recently was a team in our capstone class choosing to disband due in large part to one of the members wanting to work on a project that would look good on a portfolio because she wanted to get a job right after the program and she specifically cited visa issues for that
and it was a bummer because the project they were previously working on was pretty interesting thematically and there was potential for them to make something cool…it was a difficult thing to pull off and they were hamstrung by the fact that they had a pretty small team for the game they were making but it was tough for me to see it happen because it’s exactly the opposite direction of what i’d like but for reasons that are much more viscerally pressing than i want to admit
makes me think back on my creative partner in grad school and how i basically just don’t know what he’s doing right now because he moved back to china after the program
17 Likes
In my experience like 85% of students will prefer a project that looks good in a portfolio as opposed to a cool project but I think very few of that group would even be interested in a cool project anyway. I think it changes when you look at postgraduate stuff but undergrads have so many financial pressures, perceived or otherwise, that they have made peace with being asset mills early.
It is pragmatic but also depressing.
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I wish I was rich enough to not make a portfolio piece in school
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Can’t help but be reminded of our game development module when I was studying software development in college. The lecturer insisted we use UE4 (the newest one at the time) to make our very first game project which protracted the whole experience a ton because everyone was just spending all their time trying to understand how to even use the tools… I remember managing to set up a simple 2d game in it even though the engine sorta only barely supported 2d stuff at the time. It was always a struggle to run my game on anything I played it on, despite it having pretty lightweight visuals, because it was such an unoptimized mess… In the same module the lecturer also tried to cover the entire history of videogames over a single two hour class. Twas an experience to be sure…
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you wouldn’t know it from the way the games industry talks about itself but there exist people who are neither rich nor in the biz who still have to live in the miserable culture that happens when public life is treated as a consequence-free dumping ground for the waste byproducts of failed pyramid schemes.
i live in a country where rockstar north officially “resides” but pays no taxes, because they always employ juuust enough british voice actors to be able to take advantage of cultural representation tax breaks. meanwhile students at the local industry uni take on tens of thousands in personal debt just for the chance of working there someday. i’m not sure why pointing out the art produced as a side effect of this weird feudal ecosystem tends towards ornate emptiness is treated as privileged bad form, compared to being one of the handful of stock owners who actually benefits from it.
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yeah the few programs i’ve taught classes at have all had a bunch of international students so this has always been an issue. have to be immediately employed because there aren’t as many jobs where they’re from. but i really think that’s a smokescreen for so many different things. plenty of international students i’ve had who don’t seem to be coming from that angle as much and i don’t think it correlates with their economic situation as much as it does their personality and level of experience doing other gamedev stuff. the more experience they have making art or doing a variety of different things, the more creative they are generally. obvs parental and economic factors apply but once you get someone into the mindset where they just have to make something whatever’s in there is just going to come out.
like def with the more intensive programs there’s also just this pressure to prove you’re a real game dev or whatever even when a majority of the people will either be working in indie games or a different field entirely. but ofc places like NYU don’t apply that pressure as much as other programs and students still do that because that’s “the default” i guess.
yeah in reality it just hasn’t been the case to me that rich kids are the ones who are allowed to not make portfolio pieces while they others aren’t. that’s just an entirely false binary to me tbh. also i’m going to be eternally biased as someone who has been broke my entire adult life doing “art games” stuff/being around that space in general and knowing a lot of other people in that position.
and if i’m being honest a lot of the kids who seemed to be more local or there on scholarship at NYU tended to have more experience with online gamedev communities and made more interesting stuff. they were actually engaged with the space in a larger sense because they had to be. that’s different from the kids who go to schools expecting them to be factories to provide them with jobs. it’s just not the case that like richer kids were the artsier or less “industry” ones. the only way to really tell which kid came from a lot of money to me is how oblivious and in a weird fantasy world they seemed to be in. like the richer kids are just generally less accountable to reality.
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honestly my feeling is that portfolioization happens because it’s something that benefits rich kids to begin with, lol. what are the aesthetics of the “impressive” who’s raised to speak that language and has the resource to replicate it themselves etc. if it had any kind of meritocratic basis i don’t think we’d be doing it because i think the function of creative jobs, or maybe any job, is basically to act as moral laundering service where we convert “bad money” (unearned inheritance etc) into “good money” (ruggedly individualist art profits, earned by the sweat of a man’s creative brow…!) at a set exchange rate. i have sympathy for anyone stuck playing that game but i don’t believe it’s a game worth playing!
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ofc it depends on the program (i.e. state schools and community colleges have this less) but i mean a lot of academic programs are in a situation where they only have a handful of scholarships to hand out. and so they hand them out the kids who are perhaps more used to going above and beyond to prove their skill. and in any creative field, that means having some more substantial experience doing stuff already.
from my experience a lot of the lower income students know what college is, and try harder to get what they can out of it. they’re less floating in the zone of “this is expected of me due to my status so i guess i’m doing this now.” this means they’re more used to thinking about stuff in practical terms. and the ability to get something done in a way that isn’t horribly bloated or suggests at some other kind of depth that doesn’t actually exist is a result of that more practical thinking. if kids even just pumped out Vlambeer style action games on a consistent basis that would be great, but ofc most are not capable of that at all. i don’t think the ability to do that has nearly as much to do with comfort as it does experience (which yes - can come from having some freedom to explore but it’s complicated) and ability to adjust to less than ideal circumstances. and like i said, being accountable to reality. to me if i’m hiring at a company, i see kids consistently being able to get stuff done a far greater asset than demonstrating some kind of nebulous technical skill in a half-formed way. because then you have to spend a lot of time fixing whatever bullshit they’re doing so that it actual works and is functional.
obvs like i said state schools or community colleges where there’s a lower financial barrier to entry probably have a different vibe. from friends who teach in those places i know just getting people engaged and participating is a greater challenge there. but there’s also lower expectations and financial stakes than programs like USC and NYU which are much more high stress for a lot of students.
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This is painfully accurate to my experience of game dev courses. There simply isn’t enough time in the day to do effective breakdown of all the requisite skills to accommodate any and all incoming students and so courses tend towards this kind of hodgepodge of basic tools skills being taught simultaneously alongside fundamental creative/craft skills. Not only that but undergrads and postgrads have to decide whether they can specialise or not which means that courses end up having a large bulk of tools training whilst also trying to perform a carousel of animation, art, level design, programming, audio, writing, user testing, research etc. which are all basically subject disciplines unto themselves.
I have helped to set up and run a bunch of these and you are often trapped in a painful quagmire of compromise between what the staff can actually teach, accommodating the theoretically least skilled/experienced first year to maximise intake, and having to make this horrible thing called the ‘business case’. Courses must provide employability in the graduates which means making a portfolio of mostly middling stuff having spent 2 of 3 years learning how to get to grips with Unity/Unreal and never actually exploring games as a craft.
I stop here before this post makes me feel like I’m at work.
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