That’s a great point. I suppose one could tell how healthy the relationship is between developer and publisher by looking at how many dev companies on the roster have created a second great game. Of course, that’s tough even with a great publisher, so maybe that’s not realistic.
Wow. I’ve always trusted games published by Annapurna to be something exciting, new, and high quality. I’m devastated to hear that this publishing company is floundering.
I found a technique that worked well for me. I want to share with you and others, but I don’t want to come across as judging you in anyway. It’s hard to find great candidates of any sort. And I wouldn’t necessarily recommend my technique to every company, because it’s just not reasonable in all cases.
I’ve found that the best way to get a good mix of people hired onto the team is to do more than hope that it happens.
I had to get out to workshops, conferences, and meetups. Local universities had groups that I got in touch with. I had to make connections with the communities that I was looking to hire from. It was a lot of hard work.
But once you’ve developed those connections, candidates roll in with surprising regularity for a long time. After two years I had a team of 10 great devs with a 50/50 split between genders and a huge range of background and cultures. It was the most fun team to work with and we made awesome stuff.
I play a lot of board games. And I own a lot of board games. Not all of my games get played very much, so I like to track each play and over time see which games are forgotten gems or which games I’d be best to just trade away.
In the board game community, you might come across people talking about the “Friendless” metric of their collection. It’s a totally made up measurement, invented by a person with the user name Friendless. In that way, it’s like the Elo rating in chess and other games. I find it’s useful to know when I’m “done” with something that doesn’t really have an end, like playing board games. You can always play one more game.
Friendless hypothesized that if you play a game 10 times, you’ve gained 90% of its remaining utility. So after 10 plays, you consumed 90% of the game play that game provides. After another 10 plays, you’re at 99%. By the time you reach 30 plays, you’ve consumed 99.9% of the game.
You can do the same with games. Maybe the number of plays changes a bit. Maybe it’s not the number of plays, but the number of hours. I would say that games of Civ are like games of any other board game: 10 = 90% utility gained. Matches in COD, probably not the same.
Thank you for this! Lots of people online have pushed forward the idea that Google search results are not as useful as before. This was the first article that I’ve read that did a good job of quantifying what that actually means and providing context as to why it is happening.
Thanks for this! I had no idea about the history of the game.
Damn. I had forgotten what actual journalism looks like. There was actual work done here to investigate and acquire facts. I’ve been reading “articles” that are just paraphrased PR statements for so long. This was a breath of fresh air.
Wandersong is a game about happiness that made me really happy while I was playing it. Not all the way through; there are parts that are sad too. But I’m thinking of replaying it because it made me feel really happy when I played it the first time.
Yes! For most genres of games, I’ve noped out of some games but completed others. It wasn’t until you mentioned it that I realized I’ve never completed a Zachtronic game. I absolutely adore what Witness was doing, but I haven’t finished it. I should go back to it.
I read those when I was younger and re-read them recently. They are surprisingly good considering they were written by game developers.
Loved this game! Got completely consumed by it.
If I had been the one to decide what features this sequel should have, I never would have considered including a playable New Jerusalem or having NPC companions or any of the new stuff. And if you had asked me what I thought about those features before the game came out, I would have said it sounds like they don’t understand what people liked about the first game.
But this game surprised me in numerous ways and I honestly loved every hour of my playthrough.
This is fascinating and I would have never heard about it without you. Thanks!
I love seeing recommendations for Wandersong. It’s a completely different type of adventure game with a unique, and lovely, plot.
Thanks for sharing this interview and article. It was a really interesting read. I feel like I understand a lot more about how the game came to be now that I’ve read it
Thanks for that! I actually had to put the game down for several months because my child had just been born and I couldn’t handle one of the scenes in the game. It was heavily telegraphed, so I had time to stop the game before anything upsetting happened. And when I went back to it months later it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it might be. But yeah, it’s a game about the death of many family members, told through metaphor and fanatical imagery.
Oh man, I just want to give a shout out to the Splatoon ink mechanic.
The game is a competitive arena shooter. That would be pretty uninteresting, but instead of competing for kills or holding objectives, the teams are competing to cover the largest surface area with ink or paint. That’s pretty neat. But there’s more.
Every player has a special “squid mode” they can use when standing on ink of their colour. When in squid mode players travel much faster, can travel up walls, and are extremely hard to spot, but can not attack or lay new ink.
This makes the laying ink in specific areas valuable, as it makes it faster to get from the spawn point to the front faster and easier. It also rewards holding contiguous trails of ink, or conversely, cutting off your opponent’s ink trails.
Wow. I’m super impressed with all the suggestions here. I’ll add a few of my own that haven’t been mentioned yet.
Her Story - you query a police archive database for video clips, eventually revealing the plot. Kind of a mash between a murder mystery book with the pages out of order and Google. If you like it, check out Immortality
What Remains of Edith Finch - all you can do is walk around a very unusual house. The narrative reveals itself as you do so. That narrative is fantastical and heartbreaking and also very sweet.
Crawl - multiplayer game - you are all trying to escape a monster and trap filled dungeon. One of you is alive and the rest are spirits who can possess the monsters and traps. Any time a spirit kills the living player, they become the living player. Unique boss fight at the end where multiple spirits control parts of a huge boss monster.
Please consider WanderSong. It’s a small game and was made with so much love. Games can have a huge variety of plots and environments. But the vast majority of games, regardless of what they are about, are actually about victory. You’re a space dwarf mining for minerals, but the game is all about mastery and winning. You’re a dragon-kin with magic shouts, but every quest is about achieving a victory over a challenge. And so on.
I would say that WanderSong is not a game about victory. It’s a game about happiness. The character, the mechanics, the plot, the environments; they all serve first to explore the meaning of happiness. There’s nothing else quite like it. You can find it here.
Really enjoyed Heaven’s Vault.
Surprised that The Enteral Cylinder only has 300-ish reviews. I remember seeing it all over the new when it launched. How is it?
I can’t tell if you’re trolling. But if you aren’t, here’s something cool you might enjoy.
If an object has two sides, you can colour each side a different colour. Think of a dinner plate. That has two sides and an edge that goes all the way around. You could use a marker to colour the front side red, stopping anywhere you hit an edge. Then you could use another marker to colour the back side blue, because the backside wouldn’t be coloured yet.
It sounds like I’m explaining this in a dumb, very obvious way. I am. Not because I think anyone reading this is dumb. But because the shape in the photo does something that is not obvious.
Look at the shape above and imagine it without all the keys sticking out. Imagine it is smooth enough to draw on with a marker. It’s pretty easy to see where any edges are. Imagine colouring one side of the shape red, avoiding where the edge is. If you keep colouring as much as you can, without crossing an edge, once you’re done you’ll find that there’s no place left to colour with the blue marker. You’ll have coloured the whole shape. It only has one side and that one side snakes and twists around to be its own backside as well.
If you’re looking to learn more, the shape is called a Möbius strip.