Game On

Hey all.

Just a quick update. I’ve been pretty quiet the last few months. Not many posts about much at all, really.

I’m in the starting phases of building a business and have been putting most of my extra effort into that.

I still have a few things I want to write about especially with the Kingdom Hearts 3 Critical Mode update and planned DLC. I think I will wait to finalize my review on KH3 until I’ve finished Critical Mode.

I’ll have more info to share on the business soon, actually, so keep an eye out for that.

Can I just say... we’ve all been waiting for the death of the Battle Royale genre for a while now.

Then, out of the blue, comes Apex Legends. It has minimal bugs. It’s very polished. Pretty well balanced. Doesn’t have an egregious micro-transaction model. And it’s... FREE!?

Normally, I’m not a fan of EA. Their predatory practices in the industry have only gotten worse. This Origin Access bullcrap is an affront to the industry and is only the most recent bastardization of the pre-order/early-access schemes we’ve come to see as standard practice in our industry. They have a crappy track record of how they treat their employees and a  garbage customer service satisfaction rating.

All that aside, Apex Legends looks and plays incredibly well. It’s fun and engaging and adds just a little bit tot he Battle Royale genre to make it feel unique without being too crazy (Realm Royale NEARLY had something similar, but Hi-Rez went and ****ed that all up).

Respawn devs have gone on record stating that EA was not allowed to give any feedback on the development of the game itself. I think this is one of the reasons the game turned out so well. I think it definitely has some staying power especially with the Battle Pass coming right around the corner in March. We all know gamers love their flashy cosmetics and if Fortnite is anything to go by the Battle Pass will help keep Apex Legends relevant for quite some time.

If you haven’t tried it I definitely recommend it. I had some issues getting Origin to cooperate (thanks EA...) but once I was in the game I was definitely enjoying myself. Having been burned out on Battle Royale games I didn’t expect much but I was pleasantly surprised. I’m not going to review the game because plenty of other people out there have said anything I could but better.

Ok. So a full review of Kingdom Hearts 3 will be coming somewhere down the line. I’ve been a bit busy lately starting my own development company and working on other things and I haven’t been blogging much.

One of the things I wanted to keep track of with my blog following graduation was my ability to predict industry events, happenings, game changes in patches, and similar things.

One of my predictions regarding Kingdom Hearts 3 was that we were going to get an announcement for sequels to the IPs in the game. I called Toy Story 4  when it was announced it was going to be in the game and I never blogged about it properly. The Toy Story 4 announcement came before the release of KH3, of course.

Now, we have Frozen 2 being announced recently.

I want to put this prediction into the ether before Disney beats me to it:

Big Hero 6 will get an sequel officially announced with a trailer of some kind within the next 3 months. We have already heard rumors of this back in 2017 during the production of the TV show, but I want to put on record that I believe we will get an official announcement from Disney within the next 3 months.

Part of my suspicions revolve around Tetsuya Nomura’s interview with IGN where he said that the delay of the game “wasn’t due to gameplay reasons”. Very much a paraphrase and the translation is closer to the following:

“The timing of release that we were actually looking at, we were told by many people, including hardware manufacturers, marketing teams, sales teams that it just wasn’t a good timing in the year.” 

The implication is that it wasn’t a good release schedule for the invested parties, mainly Disney. Coinciding with the release schedule of their other properties and the polish that these Disney IPs had to have relative to their movie counterparts we can definitely assume Disney was partially responsible for the delays.

Now, anyone who has played KH3 can confirm this is the MOST DISNEY of any Kingdom Hearts game to do. Between the “Hidden Mickeys” and the “Attraction Summons” the game oozes Disney charm. Nomura also explained that in many cases his team was limited in the development of the related Disney worlds because the Disney teams had to sign off on any changes. For example, Elsa from Frozen was not allowed to fight with Sora and company. She could only be loosely depicted as conversing with him, but otherwise would have to maintain her story. This resulted in the world being nearly a shot for shot of the movie. Some of the delays were also because the cutscenes for these worlds were not finished yet, likely due to the level of polish needed to portray the IPs properly. If you look at a side by side comparison of “Let It Go” from Frozen and KH3 you can see they are nearly identical.

All in all my point is that this game feels more like a marketing event for Disney than a Kingdom Hearts game and given what we know about how Disney likes to portray their IPs we can only assume every Disney related IP in Kingdom Hearts 3 is essentially a marketing ploy of some kind. I doubt we’re going to see a Hercules sequel anytime soon, but I’m willing to bet Big Hero 7 (or whatever) isn’t too far away.

The newest Fallout 76 controversy, for those who don’t know yet, is that people are now raving because the Power Armor editions of the game didn’t have and item it claimed to have it. The Power Armor Edition of Fallout 76 is a special edition that included the deluxe version of the game, named the Tricentennial Edition, along with a glow-in-the-dark map of Appalachia, a bag of plastic figures cast in the forms of famous Fallout creatures and people, and - most importantly - a wearable T-51 Power Armor helmet with voice modulator and headlamp. This Power Armor helmet came with a West Tek canvas bag to carry it in, or use for your gym socks, whichever you prefer.

The current controversy is that Bethesda did not disclose a specific aspect about this special edition: the canvas bag was replaced with a nylon bag prior to launch. No customers were informed of this change and no disclaimers were given about the contents of the special edition being subject to change.

Understandably, people are upset. They were promised something great and given something crappy. As a buyer of the Defiance Collector’s Edition, purchased solely for the nice messenger bag, I understand why someone would buy a collector boxset or special edition for an item OTHER than the main affair. (The Defiance CE touted a Hellbug statue about 4″ tall, but that wasn’t the main attraction for me.)

However, if people were ACTUALLY upset over this issue wouldn’t we have heard about this the day these special editions started to work their way into eager hands? The outrage has only come in the wake of Fallout 76′s bad reviews and bad PR. It took players 18 days to come to terms with their outrage? Either that, or they’re capitalizing on an opportunity to claim some money back at the cost of Bethesda’s well-being.

Now, Bethesda fucked up - 100%. I’m not arguing that, because it would be foolish to try. The game is riddled with bugs, the customer support teams are being unprofessional and short with some people. If I’m being honest, Bethesda should have known this was coming when players expressed concerned in the BETA, but they did nothing. They released the game anyway and from the looks of things, based on their responses on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and other outlets, they are planning on fixing it in the future a la No Man’s Sky. In response, consumers are trying to SUE Bethesda.

Now, if the game is so bad then Bethesda SHOULD issue refunds. I agree with that. But, throwing them under the bus and trying to cripple the company you claim to love is stupid. It’s a level of entitlement this generation is infamous for. The game is broken and you deserve your money back, but trying to cripple the company and all those who work for it is ridiculous. I doubt the devs working on this had much of a say in how the timeline of release proceeded. I guarantee it wasn’t their call to release right now, but some higher up “suit” who just wanted the payday. It’s always a bad call, because more time makes a better game and a better game yields a higher payday with a longer sustain. But you can’t convince old-money CEOs that quality is better than quantity when they’re used to rolling devs over and shaking the loose change from their pockets before they dump them aside to move onto the next (looking at you, Telltale execs).

Personally, I “finished” the game. I’ve beat the “big bads” and cleared the main challenges. Mopping up completion points and min-maxing my character are all I have left until new content is added. I enjoyed myself, but only just-so. This isn’t the level of gameplay quality I expected. (Technically it’s on par with the Bethesda brand and all that comes with that relative to the Fallout and Elder Scrolls games.) I give it a 6/10 if I HAD to score it without much more context. And yet, I STILL contacted Bethesda and asked for compensation. I bought the game day 1. I was there when the gates opened and in spite of all the BS I stuck around. I watched the price drop by $25 7-days after release. I didn’t want my money back, but I wanted a little something extra so I asked for $20 in Atoms (which is the average sale value for Black Friday deals). They obliged. I’m Gucci.

People are claiming I’m a fool for taking what amounts to a pittance when a settlement could be on the horizon if the lawsuits go through. I don’t want them to give me money from a suit. I don’t want the company to die off from this. I want them to LEARN from this mistake and to do better in the future. I’m not an apologist. They fucked up and there’s no mistaking that. But without Bethesda Fallout and Elder Scrolls die. I’m not saying we should excuse shady practice or crappy delivery to preserve these franchises, but we should give them an opportunity to redeem themselves.

I don’t normally do this. You can look into my archive if you don’t believe me. (Never, to date.) This game is 100% worth buying for this *Halloween* sale. I know everyone is thinking Spoops and Spooks right now, but this is one of the best indie deals you will ever pick up for your Nintendo Switch. (And there ARE zombies so kinda spoopy.)

The game involves people trying to survive the zombie apocalypse by escaping to Canada (of all places). So, you build a team of two with personality traits and physical traits and then set out on the Death Road to Canada.

The game plays like an FTL roguelike where-in you navigate events based on your current loadout. Some of these events involve happening upon locations to explore, dungeon crawler style. You avoid being killed by zombies while you loot and shoot and hack your way from point A to point C (for Canada). You might pick up more people along the way, but with every different person comes a knew personality that might clash with someone you already have. They’re also another mouth to feed and food doesn’t come easy.

The game is SO replayable and rewarding when you start to figure out the best ways to navigate each event. It’s also great on Switch for two main reasons, 1) the pick up and put down nature of the game means you can just pause it and come back to the DRTC at any time, and 2) another player can take the second JoyCon and play one of your other party members for you. Having two people really is better than one because the AI isn’t perfect (some AI are smarter than others based on their personalities).

Really an excellent buy and one I can’t recommend enough, especially at that price.

Hell of an intro line there... You know what makes ME sad? When Games Journalists aren’t even invested enough in the games they review to know the mechanics. Forbes has been irking me for quite a while. Honestly, they seem like the position was open because they wanted to capitalize on the possible ad revenue but didn’t really want to bother hiring actual GAMERS because that nerd culture doesn’t really mesh with their “business-y” vibe. A common trend among these articles is a journalist who hasn’t done enough research about the product and complains about something they personally don’t understand. In this article the write claims that they don’t actually know what gear drops when you die. He speculates it might just be “junk” category items (the ones we use for crafting and repairing of items). If he had done even an hour of research prior to starting the B.E.T.A. or even writing the article he would know that only your “junk” drops and not ever your actual gear (maybe some caps if you were engaged in PvP play). He goes on to criticize the lack of saves in a Fallout game and while I can’t blame him for the initial complaint the reality is that any Persistent Online game does not have a manual save system least of all one that is built around the potential of random and sudden PvP fights. Fallout games have always required a save system to counter the YASD that the game is known for (Yet-Another-Stupid-Death). Perhaps you threw a grenade at an enemy and the physics of the explosion caused a barrel to hurdle backwards at you and explode in your face faster than you could even see it. Maybe you fell through the world and died. These are things that Fallout games are known for and the main reason that the save system has been used to heavily over the years.

That said, these are not issues we should expect with this game. You have to give Bethesda the benefit of the doubt that things like this will be worked on well enough before the actual release that they won’t affect players of 76.

Paul goes on to give ACTUAL opinions on gameplay and functionality of Fallout 76 that he dislikes. That is the point of these articles, but he takes so long to get there. Some of what he says is legitimately disturbing or saddening, but his lack of knowledge about the games as a whole makes me value his opinion less. Conversely, someone like Oxhorn making these statements would have me more worried because they are so invested in the Fallout world and its lore that if they thought there was an issue it probably IS an issue.

I’ve been skeptical about this game. I played the Alpha when a friend let me Steam share a while back and I really liked it. Then when Compulsion made their big announcement I was taken aback. Not only was the game not going to be a rogue-like anymore, which is arguably my favorite sub-genre, but it was also going to be a full cost game at $60 with its new publisher Gearbox of Borderlands fame. I was a bit worried because the game has been in development for a while and the price increase didn’t feel justified given how little information we had. I might be changing my tune albeit with a pinch of salt. The new trailer shows more of a fleshed out story, world, and characters. It’s looking far more like a story-driven game with features deserving of the price tag. Between the Announce trailer and the Story Preview trailer that they’ve shown in the last month I’m willing to concede any complaints I had about the price; a full story game with great art style and great gameplay is worth the cost. I think I’m going to let it release and see what the initial reviews have to say before jumping in, but I’m far more intrigued now that I see what they’ve really been doing for the last few years since the change from the previous format.

Calling it now! There will be a huge change in Wild Pokemon Battles before this game is launched. Notice that in both this trailer and the Japanese trailer there was nothing showing wild Pokemon capturing or battling. Combine that with the questions regarding how players felt about the game on the survey that went out a while ago and I’m pretty sure that The Pokemon Company is taking steps to alter the game based on fan feedback from E3. Mark my words, there will be some change to Wild Pokemon Battling / Capturing before launch. These trailers make me even more confident than I was before.

A very long time coming and yet the last 5 days have been the longest in a while. I have officially graduated as a Games Developer as of the 27th of July with a 2:1 Honours Classification. Feelsgoodman. Now comes the arduous task of packing everything up and getting it home. Realistically, I’ve been a bit bored with not having much to focus on. I’m working on my own game (publish date moved back to August 7th~), and trying to finish a few things in my backlog, and of course packing.

Since I didn’t have anything pressing I decided to get as much packed away as possible. I spent the first 4 days packing like a crazy person and now nearly everything of mine is ready to go. If only it were that simple...

My wife has a few boxes of only her things that I can’t really help with. Then, there's the reality that no matter how quickly we pack we’re still at the mercy of the shipping company and the flights. I’ve just got to be realistic; I won’t really be home before the end of the month. Frustrating, if only because I’ll be without my computer for ~3 weeks so I’m certainly losing work and application time. 

The games are irrelevant. What kind of gamer would I be if my PC was my only access to games? I have a 3DS, Switch, and Vita each with 2 or 3 games I’m working on. There’s plenty to tide me over for the next two to three weeks. I just hate this sitting in LIMBO waiting for callbacks.

*sigh* Just going to have to push on and keep applications going out and games being finished. If nothing else it presents a unique opportunity to finish some of the things waiting in my backlog.

My most recent “completion” is Death Road to Canada. I say “completion” because it isn’t really a game I ever feel like I’m done with. I’ve beaten the game a dozen times now and I always want to keep playing more. It’s one of the best Switch games I’ve ever bought. Expect a more in-depth write-up on that soon enough.

Also, myself and a few friends from over here are starting up Dying Light on Monday. I was just average excited for it, but after trying the prologue I’m 110% hooked. I always loved Dead Island and I can see that Dying Light is really the game that Techland had always wanted to make. They don’t get enough credit for their world building, either. (Yeaaa yeaaa I know I’m almost 3 years late to the Dying Light party, but I’m raving now!)

Damn. This one came out of NOWHERE.

Realm Royale is the newest in the latest trend of taking IPs and assets and converting them over for use in the Battle Royale market.

I think games like Fortnite and PUBG are changing the gaming landscape. I hardly know anyone who plays standard team deathmatch style games anymore. A few people play CS:GO and others play Overwatch, which I don’t really consider to be part of the standard Shooter genre anyways. 

Realm Royale is the latest offering from Hi-Rez studios. Yes. That Hi-Rez. Paladins Hi-Rez. It’s a class shooter Battle Royale with crafting and an interesting loot system.

The Realm is the world of Paladins and you can tell by the art style, animations, and color palette. Everything in the game is Paladins inspired including the voice over callouts you can use to communicate with your teammates.

The standard formula is broken here and I gotta say it: This is my new favorite BR. There is so much innovation here to what is already an established genre and yet EVERYTHING WORKS.

The biggest changes are the Down-But-Not-Out system and the crafting.

Standard BR have you either instantly die or go into a downed state and wait revival from a teammate. Realm Royale says no. Instead, hen you die you turn into a clucking cartoon chicken with a white flag and you can run around and jump and hide. After 30 seconds you are automatically revived with half health. This does away with the idea that your teammates have to stop defending themselves to pick you up, which was always a point of contention I had with the system. It meant that every knock-down was that much more critical because you couldn’t resuscitate them without breaking your attention from pushers. It was a flawed system, but until now there hasn’t really been much better. And let’s be honest the only reason the chicken works is because of the Paladins world. That wouldn’t work in Fortnite or God-forbid, PUBG.

The second innovation is crafting. Everything that drops can be instantly disenchanted with one key to turn into a general crafting currency called Shards. You take your shards to one of the numerous forges on the map and use it to craft Random Legendary tier gear or class skills. If you have managed to kill an enemy player in Chicken form you’ll also get a Chicken Leg which is a material used to craft your class specific Legendary Weapon. It means that your highest power spike can’t occur unless you can kill other players. Some people seem to do fine without their weapons, but it’s always a strong option and in some cases is the best thing you can use as that class bar-none. All the gear comes in White -> Green -> Purple -> Orange tiers with Orange, or Legendary, being the highest. If you come across upgrades spamming the assigned “pick-up” button (E by default) will swap it out. It makes the whole “which loot is better comparison” trivial. Better color = better tier and everything else? Shard it.

Now the real kicker. Every time you craft at a Forge the smoke stack lights up and the building becomes one big beacon that says “Someone is here and they’re crafting something really powerful! Come kill them and take it!” It’s an excellent addition to the BR formula. Players aren’t encouraged to hide and unlike Fortnite you can’t build cover and camp in it. The zone moves fairly quickly and with Forges at nearly every single Point-of-Interest there are always showdowns over loot.

Now, for healing yourself there is the standard health and armor potions (Realm Royale’s equivalent to Shields from Fortnite). The difference is that you can only use potions to repair what you’ve lost which means you’ll need to find armor to wear first. That armor also comes in tiers and each slot bestows buffs like movement speed, reload speed, cooldowns, etc. 

To help cover ground int he map every player also has access to a mount by default by pressing Z. It takes 1s to mount and drastically improves your movement speed, but if you’re hit once or fall from to far a height you’ll be dismounted with a 2s cooldown. It seems like this would break the BR tradition about vehicles, but really all it means is that you can spend more time looting and shooting and less time running on foot to get away from the storm.

I won’t really go into detail about the classes because this isn’t meant to be a full review, but it IS a class shooter in the vein of TF2 and Overwatch and coming from Paladins the assets and expertise are there. All 5 classes feel very different and encourage different play styles. There are enough skills for each class that you can play each game as the same class and find different ways to utilize their strengths. Given that you can only equip two skills at a time and each class gets a unique movement skill you quickly realize there are so many ways to play each class. I definitely encourage you to try them all out.

OK. Let’s be honest. We all saw these shenanigans coming. It had GO in the name so it had to have something to do with Pokemon GO.

I’m all for this game. It looks fun. It looks like it’ll actively encourage people playing more Pokemon GO which is a good thing as far as exercise and active healthy lifestyles go.

My only gripe... That PokeBall doesn’t come with the game...

This is going to be Pokemon GO Plus all over again. Scalpers will ruin this for the people who actually want to play. And I’m not about to spend $200 on a controller.

I said at the start of the showing that if they include the PokeBall with the game I would buy it Day 1. Well, that’s not the case is it? Hopefully they can work on that.

As far as gameplay goes I think it looks fun. It combines a mix of Pokemon GO’s hunting and capturing with old-school trainer style battles.

Being able to take my captured ‘Mon with me wherever I go is pretty damn adorable.

The two player mode will hardly ever get used in my friend circles but it’s a great addition, especially for multi-person households that only own one Switch.

I think the biggest reveal is that it allows you to send your Pokemon GO captures into the GO Park. Similar to the Pal Park on the GBA/DS versions that seems to be a way of transferring Pokemon across games without outright giving it to you. A nice way to integrating GO gameplay while still giving the player something to accomplish with it in the new game.

I’ll need to wait for more info before I can really break things down because as good as the art looks and the audio sounds I’ll have to get a bigger taste to really give my opinions. Right now, though, it looks fun.

For those upset about this being Pokemon Switch, chill. It isn’t. They’ve already announced they’re also working on a mainline entry for 2019. I don’t like using this word, but think of Let’s GO as filler to tide you over. It might even integrate with Pokemon 2019 so that’s certainly something to think about.

Been a bit of a weird “Vacation” which is realistically now just Unemployment.

Graduating at the end of the month makes this a bit more official I suppose, but it’s more or less right now. Additionally, I need to transfer all my work to another non-Student repository profile because once I’m no longer a student I lose the login email and Private Repo access of GitHub.

Still working on my prototype game. Making more official design documentation to add to my portfolio. Researching the techniques I’m using to create the features I want the game to have. Adding polish to features that already exist and don’t plan on being changed.

It’s tough because everything needs to be considered and flexible from the get go so I won’t have to go back and refactor functionality. Movement is the most important because everything relies so heavily on it and polishing the controls and combat to be tight is important to the core gameplay.

I’m actually adapting a lot of the features and functionality I designed for my previous game that went on hold because I couldn’t create 3D models and animations very well. That isn’t as much of an issue here and I love the ideas. When I go back and re-read the design documentation I always have a HUGE smile on my face because of how good the ideas are.

More on that prototype will come closer to the release. I’ll publish the design documentation as well so people can use it for reference when making their own.

Last, I’ve been applying for Games Development jobs and I have to say... It’s WAY harder than I thought. So many specifics in skill set and experience requirements without any detail to what you’ll ACTUALLY be doing. That’s not the worst from a rational perspective, because I understand companies want to keep their work close to their chest and detailing  projects under hiring might reveal what they’re doing before they’re ready. I mean, sure, I’d be happy with any professional Game Development job that allows me to learn more in the industry, but I also have specific skills and paths I’d like to follow and learn better for my career. I’m good at User Interface Design and User Experience analysis and testing, I’d like to keep on that path, but there aren’t a lot of opportunities for User Interface designers who aren’t artists. User Experience seems to be covered by another member of the team as well in a lot of cases.

/shrug

Quite, these last few months. Not many posts, but then again there hasn’t been much time for “fun” things. I spent a little time here and there on my Switch/Vita when I had a few minutes on the bus, but now it’s all done and there’s time to enjoy the bigger games.

The important bits: I have finished all my exams and all my submissions. Now we play the waiting game for the grades to come out. Then, I’ll know my degree classification. Of course, that doesn’t mean ALL the free time. Now to start the job hunt. After I’m done updating my CV I’ll start looking for Games Development jobs relative to what I’m good at and what I love. (Mostly, UI/UX but also deeper systems like procedural map/loot generation, battle systems and interfaces, and a little bit of retro sound composing. I’m not great at the last one, but I do love to do it. And I notice every time I do each of these I get better at it so there's that. 

The other big project on my roadmap before July is finishing my prototype for Transmatter. It was my GGJ2018 submission with my friend and the game really stuck with me. I wrote a small script for the tutorial area and first two story cutscenes, but as with all Game Jams we never had time to implement every idea we had. For now I’m working on procedural loot generation and then I’m going on to hammer out a smoother combat system. 

This is only planned to be a “showing of potential” for myself and the idea. A pseudo-demo. There will be a tutorial/intro level. Then, one single story level to flesh out the exposition of the protagonist and antagonist. Afterwards, an adventure style mode where you can continue playing the game procedurally for the fun of combat and loot with (hopefully) infinite scaling. Not that anyone would want to play a demo forever, but if I can get the infinite scaling part down it adds a huge amount of content to a simple concept. 

Recently, a newscast was seen on TV in Australia about how Fortnite Battle Royale is damaging for children and people are pushing to have it banned. A similar occurrence happened in the UK when a mom found her son was getting irritable and didn’t want to get off the game at the end of his play sessions. 

Of course parents are eating this crap up, because video games has always been an easy scapegoat. Plop your kid in front of it so they will b e quiet and give you some reprieve. But God forbid they enjoy it enough to want to make it a part of their lives. Even worse if you forget that every good thing should come in moderation and that kids still need a variety of activities to develop their minds AND bodies. 

So now we have parents blaming Fortnite because their kids play it too much and they think it should be banned because it’s too violent... It isn’t the violence that making your child irritable. I’ll break it down from my viewpoint.

Kids have had a lot of games with open world style “do anything you want” gameplay. Minecraft and Terraria are pretty common among any kid group. 

These games foster creativity and let kids explore an artistic side of games while still offering rich gameplay that keeps them coming back. They’re very laid back games for most people who play them. They’ve also spawned off quite a few copycats all looking to cash in on the pleasance of creativity and ease of development (at least from a base engine standpoint [voxel based low graphics games]). Kids are used to getting their way in these games.

Now we move onto Fortnite, which started as a Players vs Monsters experience where you could team up and build big bases to defend the world from bad monsters. Parents didn’t bat an eye. Partially because this version of the game was not complete but also part because it wasn’t really competitive in nature. The violence was aimed at alien looking “zombie”-like creatures called Husks. 

When Epic transitioned the engine into a Battle Royale style game to follow up on the success of games like H1Z1 and PUBG they knew they were onto something. Add the Battle Royale, but keep the building. Make it free to play and everyone will play it! (EVERYONE. HNG!) They were right. Kids from all ages and backgrounds are playing Fortnite right now. (When I say Fortnite from here on out I’m strictly referring to Battle Royale mode.)

Parents are pretty hands off with their kids nowadays anyways and if it keeps them quite and keeps them out of trouble most won’t care. The game isn’t really all that violent anyways; at least when compared to other games of its style like Call of Duty or Counter-Strike. The cartoony graphics and lack of any human related sound effects related to the action are one of the reasons it has managed to avoid the M/15+ ratings. That didn’t stop the Australian news from adding sound effects of women shrieking in pain when a player swung their pickaxe, but I digress. I’m exposing a bit of backstory there, but now we get to the real point:

Fortnite is a game that not everyone can win.

Kids can’t login and win whenever they want. The 1 vs 99 nature of the game means that you are statistically unlikely to EVER win a game unless you continue to play and practice and improve your skills. It’s also a game that can’t be paused and when kids are told to get off they can’t “save”. They have to either give up or finish the match. Now most matches only last between 10-30 minutes, but for most kids bedtime is NOW. 

You spent about 5-10 years telling kids they can be anything with games like Minecraft and anytime another builder comes along they think they can win because “they’re supposed to”. It’s essentially telling a bratty kid “No.” when they ask for something. As if showing up is enough to get a medal. I mean, most ADULTS don’t ever win a game of Fortnite let alone kids who don’t have the capacity to play as fast as others who have had years of experience and reflex training across a variety of games.

It’s a psychological trigger and it makes kids angry and frustrated being told they can’t win. Losing over and over and over. Maybe some of their friends win a game and they’re made even more angry over why they themselves cannot. Add to parents lack of proper limitations and rules and you can easily see how kids will get frustrated with the situation that they really aren’t capable of understanding. It’s the first stop on the road to adulthood: realizing that disappointment and acceptance in things you cannot change is going to be a fact of their lives from then on.

Custom Switch Joy Con mod I’ve wanted to do this for quite a while but I didn’t want to mod my Joy Con while it was still heavily under warranty.  Took about 2 hours in total. I had to take my time and do things right.  Really satisfied with how it came out. The green and black combo really goes well with the brown of the Zelda case.  My buddy even let me use his laptop (with a bluetooth adapter) to connect the JoyCons to the PC and change the color in-system to match. Purchased these from Amazon US [BASSTOP] Brand. The UK version was removed the day I went to purchase it so I had to wait for shipping to scotland. The tools, anti-static tweezers, and shells came out to be about £50 total including US -> UK shipping and customs. Worth every penny (and the near-aneurysm from those dang ribbon cables)! Last note, not for the light of heart. If you DO decide to do this realize a few things:

this WILL void your JoyCon warranty

the insides are very fragile and you need to take your time and do things properly

watch JerryRigEverything’s video on his Clear JoyCon DIY where he goes through step by step and does everything - pay close attention to the trigger button removal and ribbon cables

be patient - it WILL take time, but the results are excellent and well worth it

Our 2018 GGJ submission. Didn’t really have time to continue posting the resources as we developed them. We really only had 44 hours by the time we started it. I’ll upload more resources as time goes on. The premise is a basic Action-RPG where you scavenge a mining planet for resources while fighting your way past enemies.

The main protagonist, Sarah, executing a dodge roll. This will be accompanied by the cloud posted earlier. During a dodge roll she will be invulnerable; roughly 1s of airtime. Useful for dodging projectiles, hazards, or groups of enemies.