Dropping a small patch today to fix a vulnerability that was discovered in the Unity game engine we use to build our Loathing games. Nothing to get excited about, unfortunately, unless safety gets your motor running that is.
Dropping a small patch today to fix a vulnerability that was discovered in the Unity game engine we use to build our Loathing games. Nothing to get excited about, unfortunately, unless safety gets your motor running that is.
This update brings full Steam Deck compatibility to the Windows and Linux versions. The macOS version is already fully compatible, in that it correctly does not run on Steam Deck.
This update brings full Steam Deck compatibility to the Windows and Linux versions. The macOS version is already fully compatible, in that it correctly does not run on Steam Deck.
Many thanks to everyone who reported bugs and helped us track down the trickiest of these issues, we really appreciate it! Here's what's fixed: Corrected a problem where the player character would move super fast on a high-end personal computer. AKA the PCPCPC (personal computer
Many thanks to everyone who reported bugs and helped us track down the trickiest of these issues, we really appreciate it! Here's what's fixed:
Oh, also there is one known issue that we haven't dealt with yet, but will try to remedy that at some point down the line: A few scenes will look weird at the far edges on very wide monitors (2:1 aspect ratios and above).
Holy cow it's been almost three years since we first released West of Loathing! To celebrate this we've fixed some obscure bugs, improved some interactive bits, and added a splash of new content here and there. It's a regular smorgasbord of patch notes! If you leave the record pl
Holy cow it's been almost three years since we first released West of Loathing! To celebrate this we've fixed some obscure bugs, improved some interactive bits, and added a splash of new content here and there. It's a regular smorgasbord of patch notes!
Thanks so much for playing our goofy game and telling other people about it so much over the years. Your word-of-mouth support makes a huge difference, and we really appreciate it. Y'all rock!
Today's long-in-coming patch fixes a couple of rare and extremely difficult-to-track-down crash bugs on Windows 10. Many thanks to the folks who helped us out by sending in Unity logs and testing things on a beta branch! With this release we'll be closing all the current beta bra
Today's long-in-coming patch fixes a couple of rare and extremely difficult-to-track-down crash bugs on Windows 10. Many thanks to the folks who helped us out by sending in Unity logs and testing things on a beta branch!
With this release we'll be closing all the current beta branches — this build incorporates every bug fix we've made thus far, so no one should need to be on a specialty build at this point. (We'll open fresh branches to address new issues as they arise.)
There's at least one additional Windows crash bug still out in the wild — if you're experiencing it, please let us know! It's extremely elusive at the moment.
We did tweak a few minor things as well:
Surprise! Monochrome stick-figure giggle em up West Of Loathing has DLC now, called Reckonin At Gun Manor. As the skeleton in the front garden might suggest, this old house has a mystery hidden within, and it s up to you, hat-wearing puzzle-solving protagonist, to unravel it. (mo
Surprise! Monochrome stick-figure giggle em up West Of Loathing has DLC now, called Reckonin At Gun Manor. As the skeleton in the front garden might suggest, this old house has a mystery hidden within, and it s up to you, hat-wearing puzzle-solving protagonist, to unravel it.
A quick little DLC patch today to address some issues that folks have brought to our attention. Thanks for all the bug reports and also all the kind words about the DLC in general, everyone! Y'all rock. You now get the Spirit Guide achievement at a more appropriate moment -- also
A quick little DLC patch today to address some issues that folks have brought to our attention. Thanks for all the bug reports and also all the kind words about the DLC in general, everyone! Y'all rock.
Our first DLC for West of Loathing, Reckonin' at Gun Manor , is now available for purchase right here on Steam! And now, here's some exciting marketing copy for you to read: A ghostly carriage arrives in Dirtwater. Only you can see it, and it only goes one place -- the mysterious
Our first DLC for West of Loathing, Reckonin' at Gun Manor, is now available for purchase right here on Steam!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/954060/West_of_Loathing_Reckonin_at_Gun_Manor/
And now, here's some exciting marketing copy for you to read:
A ghostly carriage arrives in Dirtwater. Only you can see it, and it only goes one place -- the mysterious Gun Manor.
A brand new West of Loathing adventure, full of all the things you've come to expect from the Loathing brand:
Who can solve the mystery of Gun Manor? Is it you? It's probably you.
* Does not actually contain any cabbage Not a ton of changes in this patch: The dialog window has been made a bit wider so that text after buttons can't try to hide from you off-screen any more Harmonized Halloway’s Hideaway hardwoods (had halted hiker headway historically) Horse
* Does not actually contain any cabbage
Not a ton of changes in this patch:
The game should run in Windows XP again, probably (we really mean it this time) Best Font Mode should no longer prevent text from appearing Letters should no longer double-up when you type text in the Linux version of the game. Our apologies for the extra work now required when n
Red Dead Redemption 2 was made by five million people working nine day weeks , but does it have a duck that collects your discarded throwing knives? Actually, I don t know, as it s not on PC. But a game that does feature a magic duck, and can be played on your home computer, is t
Red Dead Redemption 2 was made by five million people working nine day weeks, but does it have a duck that collects your discarded throwing knives? Actually, I don t know, as it s not on PC. But a game that does feature a magic duck, and can be played on your home computer, is the lovely Luckslinger. It s one of eight delightful cowboy em ups that you could be playing while Rockstar pretends its latest won’t eventually come to PC. And the RPS Video Department has gathered them in one handy video.
This patch is live for Windows, Mac, and Linux (which means that Linux now has controller support) The game should run in Windows XP again, probably Macs with Retina displays should now display the game at a reasonable size instead of in a tiny baby window Changed the setting fro
Out now for Windows and Mac, and coming very soon to Linux, it's version 1.10! Major updates: We've added controller support! The game should notice if you are trying to use a controller and update your UI as appropriate. We've tested a variety of Playstation and Xbox controllers
Out now for Windows and Mac, and coming very soon to Linux, it's version 1.10!
Major updates:
Captain updates:
Lieutenant updates:
Today's Deal: Save 33% on West of Loathing !* Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are! *Offer ends Sunday at 10AM Pacific Time
Today's Deal: Save 33% on West of Loathing!*
Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!
*Offer ends Sunday at 10AM Pacific Time
EGX Rezzed was wonderful, wasn't it? Tim Schafer of Monkey Island and Grim Fandango fame came to shoot the breeze with editor Oli Welsh on stage , the teams behind Two Point Hospital and Phoenix Point delved into their upcoming creations, and Digital Foundry explained how Sony mi
EGX Rezzed was wonderful, wasn't it? Tim Schafer of Monkey Island and Grim Fandango fame came to shoot the breeze with editor Oli Welsh on stage, the teams behind Two Point Hospital and Phoenix Point delved into their upcoming creations, and Digital Foundry explained how Sony might get on the road to its next console, the PlayStation 5.
There were plenty of things to play, too, and it was arguably the strongest year yet - with studios big and small showcasing fascinating new games, and some truly innovative things to play them with in the Leftfield Collection, RPS area and elsewhere.
As with previous years, this isn't a definitive list, but a personal selection from the team at Eurogamer as we roamed the show, and will hopefully serve as something to keep an eye out for in the coming months.
Zack Johnson, designer of open world comedy RPG West of Loathing , detailed the difference between a comedy game and a game with just some comedy in it during two talks he gave at GDC 2018 on Tuesday and Wednesday. "Instead of a game with jokes in it, which happens all the time,"
Zack Johnson, designer of open world comedy RPG West of Loathing, detailed the difference between a comedy game and a game with just some comedy in it during two talks he gave at GDC 2018 on Tuesday and Wednesday.
"Instead of a game with jokes in it, which happens all the time," Johnson said of West of Loathing, "this was sort of a game made out of jokes."
With humor being the primary focus of West of Loathing, and funny text appearing in everything from item descriptions to conversations to menu options, Johnson didn't want to throw roadblocks in the path of players who were bent on discovering every last bit of humor. Combat, therefore, which some reviewers criticized as being too easy, was easy by design.
As Johnson put it during his talk: "A joke is better than a good thing that's harder to make than a joke." You may have to read that a few times before it makes sense, but Johnson cited two of the gambling minigames in West of Loathing as example. The first game, poker, was something he agonized over and kept putting off during Loathing's development.
"It was a bunch of work," he said, "it resulted in this thing that was not particularly interesting, nobody talks about it." The poker game wasn't bad, in other words, it just wasn't funny.
"If there's a puzzle that requires a needle as its solution, we don't want the player to live in a world where there is only one needle"
The other game, found in the town of Breadwood, was called Pharaoh, and it was a game in which players simply lie about how many Egyptian pharaohs they could name. "That works, right?" Johnson said. "That is actually kind of funny."
The poker game took 268 lines of scripting, and was "not funny at all," admits Johnson. "The Pharoah game was 89 lines of script." That brings us back to Johnson's statement, that a joke is better than something good that is harder to make than a joke.
Puzzles, too, were designed to not be so challenging that they'd slow a player down for long, and while there are a few pretty complex puzzles in the game, they're off the beaten path and not required to make progress.
"If there's a puzzle that requires a needle as its solution," Johnson said, "we don't want the player to live in a world where there is only one needle, and if you didn't find it you can't get past the puzzle. So we just decided to put the needle in every haystack."
Johnson also spoke about the value of the narrator of West of Loathing.
"The narrator as sort of an honest character and honest reflection as who we are as writers also lets us be a little self-deprecating about stuff," he said, "which is a fantastic way to cover up fundamental flaws with your game, act like they're on purpose. 'We meant to do that, because isn't that funny?'"
Does this room have a Couple of Pointless Gags?
Zack Johnson
Breaking the fourth wall, as the narrator does from time to time, is also more than just a gag: it's a way to simply and plainly give important information to the player. When players reached the final cutscene in West of Loathing, said Johnson, "It just tells you, this is not gonna change anything about your character or the state of the world, you can just watch this cutscene and then you can leave and do something else and then you can come back and do it again.
"I wish [more] games sort of had the confidence to let you know stuff like that," he continued, "because there's nothing more annoying to me than getting 40 hours into some RPG and then not knowing that I'm about to do something that means I should have saved, or have to revert to an hour ago."
Johnson also revealed a spreadsheet used during development of the game to track the status of dialogue, interactions, items, and monsters in each of the game's locations. One column of the spreadsheet was labeled CPG.
"CPG was my metric for whether this was a Loathing game," Johnson explained. "Does this room have a Couple of Pointless Gags?"
He referred to an area of the game where the player could explain to another character how mining equipment worked, despite not knowing how mining equipment worked, thus earning a perk called 'Minesplaining.'
"That stuff," Johnson said, "I think that is where a lot of the kind of memorable soul of the game lives."
No development tool has had quite the same impact on indie games as Unity. Its impressive knowledge database, flexibility, and tiered pricing scale all ensure that Unity is one of the most accessible engines available. According to Unity’s website , five billion copies of Unity-d
No development tool has had quite the same impact on indie games as Unity. Its impressive knowledge database, flexibility, and tiered pricing scale all ensure that Unity is one of the most accessible engines available. According to Unity’s website, five billion copies of Unity-driven games have been downloaded since late 2016. Even Telltale might be jumping on board the Unity train soon.
The 'Unity Look' many gamers lament may become a thing of the past, but who knows.
Ethan Redd
Unity is currently changing things up quite a bit with its annual version update, 2018.1, which went into beta in January. Unity 2018.1 is putting an emphasis on performance and graphics, and is expected to expand on what developers can do with the tool in some big ways.
The updates and tweaks arriving in the version update can get quite technical, so we opted to talk to a few indie developers about their thoughts on Unity 2018.1. Is it the panacea for the plentiful challenges facing indie developers, or is the update honing in on the wrong issues?
The developers we spoke with were most excited about Unity 2018.1’s Scriptable Render Pipeline and the new job system. The pipeline gives players a lot more control over their graphics and rendering. Ethan Redd, who is currently working on mech schmup Blazing Legion: Ignition feels it will better enable artists to explore their individual styles. "I'm a huge proponent for heavy stylization, and more explicit control over rendering is always welcome," he says. "The 'Unity Look' many gamers lament may become a thing of the past, but who knows."
The new job system is going to have a big impact on performance, especially for consoles. As it stands now, Unity relies on single-core performance, which is bad news for our console neighbors who have it pretty lousy when it comes to single-threading. The new job system instead embraces multi-threading, which will grant a huge boost in performance across all platforms.
The greatest impact will likely be seen by smaller developers, who will now be able to attempt projects that embrace a much wider scope. "Assuming the backwards compatibility is solid this time around, it'd be a huge boon for games like mine with hundreds or even thousands of active entities on screen at a time," Redd says.
However, immediately jumping over to a freshly baked version of Unity is often not worth the headache. Many of these developers are in mid-development on existing projects, and the change could prove risky. Inkle’s Joseph Humfrey, whose team is working on sci-fi narrative adventure Heaven’s Vault, notes that many developers only switch to newer versions of Unity out of absolute necessity. "Each version brings new features, but also new surprises," Humfrey says. "While the geek in me looks forward to the opportunity to try out new toys, my pragmatic side dictates that updating immediately could cause problems."
Most of the developers we spoke with cited backwards compatibility issues with different versions of Unity. New bugs and changing features can drastically set back projects already operating on a tight deadline. "When you’re working towards a deadline such as a demo for a publisher or for the public, you need a rock-solid foundation to build on," Humfrey adds.
To be blunt, making games in Unity is wonderful right now but shipping them is a bit of a nightmare because of bugs
Bennett Foddy
Redd seems to agree. "All of these new features are incredible, but as someone midway through the lifecycle of their current project, I doubt I'll be leveraging them. Unity is notorious for their lack of backwards compatibility even between minor version updates, with major version updates being more or less a roll of the dice. I just recently upgraded from 5.x to 2017.x and some techniques I was using for my core gameplay had to be re-implemented because certain under-the-hood things simply didn't work how they used to anymore."
Bennett Foddy, creator of QWOP and Getting Over It, says developers commonly advise others not to upgrade to newer versions because bugs are a such huge issue. "To be blunt, making games in Unity is wonderful right now but shipping them is a bit of a nightmare because of bugs in the systems (particularly in iOS rendering and the 2D physics systems). A ridiculous amount of the development time on Getting Over It was spent trying to fix things that turned out to be bugs in Unity, some of which were regressions," Foddy says. "Being close to bug-free should be the number one priority, and I would like to see Unity spend a whole release cycle (or two) on stability and unit testing. I know that’s boring, but it would make a huge, huge difference."
Backwards compatibility is just one item on the list these developers want Unity to work on. The team at Inkle are masters when it comes to interactive storytelling, but their games aren’t incredibly demanding in terms of performance. Still, they have suffered from stability problems, and they aren't alone. Unity has struggled with maintaining a steady stream of new bells and whistles while ensuring the engine is stable. Humfrey says simple stability is the one thing he’d like to see from Unity in the future.
Redd is on the same page, going so far as to call for Unity to put a hold on new features and simply focus on streamlining the engine. "Unity has this tendency to announce so many wonderful new and shiny features you didn't know you wanted, while certain quirks, inconsistencies, and quality of life fixes fall by the wayside," he says.
Despite the bugs we see, it's an excellent tool that genuinely democratizes game development for smaller developers.
Joesph Humfrey
Viktor Thompson of Asymmetric Games, whose stick figure RPG West of Loathing was our pick for Best Comedy Game of 2017, hopes that Unity will continue to expand in the future. In fact, he feels that many developers may not even need to move beyond Unity to other technology if the engine continues on its current trajectory. "As the engine becomes more customizable, the desire to move to other technology—to 'graduate' from Unity—may be pushed farther down the road or eliminated," he posits. "At the same time, the Unity system can become a more appealing choice for experienced developers who want control, but don't have the time or the money to spend developing their engine from scratch."
Unity is still the great equalizer when it comes to indie game development. It remains accessible to newer developers working on a budget, but provides the tools more experienced studios need. Humfrey thinks we’re heading in the right direction. "Despite the bugs we see, it's an excellent tool that genuinely democratizes game development for smaller developers."
Foddy certainly sees accessibility as the engine's great strength, but is worried that Unity 2018's emphasis on performance features could leave beginner developers behind. "From Unity's point of view, gamers associate [Unity] with ugly or low-performance games, so I guess that's why they’re focusing so heavily on performance right now," Foddy observes. "Having said that, I'm worried that some of the changes they’re making in pursuit of performance will make the engine less beginner-friendly, and less prototype-friendly, just by adding a lot of complexity. If that happens, the engine will ultimately become less relevant to beginners and indies and it’ll be battling for the same market niche as Unreal and CryEngine."
Unity has been pivotal in the indie games boom. Now we're starting to see the path it might be headed toward in the future. Will Unity continue to be welcoming to new developers while still appealing to creators looking for more performance-heavy tools? Ethan Redd is hopeful for the future of indie development on Unity. "Much like Twine and GameMaker, Unity has done well to embrace the DIY culture flourishing in the modern indie games sphere," he reflects. "As long as they remember their roots, I believe they will prosper as a pillar in the community."
The 2018 Independent Games Festival —the 20th one, as it happens—will be held on March 21 ahead of the 2018 Game Developers Conference. Nearly 600 indie games were evaluated this year, but as the festival's organizers announced today, only 35 made the cut for the annual awards ce
The 2018 Independent Games Festival—the 20th one, as it happens—will be held on March 21 ahead of the 2018 Game Developers Conference. Nearly 600 indie games were evaluated this year, but as the festival's organizers announced today, only 35 made the cut for the annual awards ceremony. Here's a full rundown of the nominees and categories:
Excellence in visual art
Excellence in audio
Excellence in design
Excellence in narrative
Best student game
Nuovo award
Seumas McNally grand prize
While most categories are self-explanatory, it's worth noting that the Nuovo award is for "thinking differently about games as a medium," in case the nominees didn't give that away. You can find more details and the honorable mentions in the official IGF listing.
It’s that time again already – 2018’s Independent Games Festival hands out its best-in-indie gongs on March 21 (as part of the Game Developers Conference), and these are the games in line for a prize. And, more importantly, a big shot at success thanks to the profile, although it
It’s that time again already – 2018’s Independent Games Festival hands out its best-in-indie gongs on March 21 (as part of the Game Developers Conference), and these are the games in line for a prize. And, more importantly, a big shot at success thanks to the profile, although it should be noted that a fair few of these have done rather well for themselves already.
Scooping the most nods at 4 is veritable brain-frying, rule-rewriting puzzler Baba Is You, while the singular, surreal climbing game Getting Over It… With Bennett Foddy and charming, cups-on-ears narrative adventure Night In The Woods both boast a respectable three, followed by FTL follow-up Into The Breach with 2. There are many more lovely, lovely things on the full list of finalists below.
This year it has felt like there’s been a string of quality games releases. Games that I m proud to support, whether it be for their tackling of serious subject matter or excellent writing or unique concepts that push the industry forward. Games that are already redefining precon
This year it has felt like there’s been a string of quality games releases. Games that I m proud to support, whether it be for their tackling of serious subject matter or excellent writing or unique concepts that push the industry forward. Games that are already redefining preconceived standards of play.
In short: next year has a tough act to follow. (more…)