Widen your vision with a GB3461WQSU Red Eagle with FreeSync Premium Unleash your full gaming potential and enjoy superb image quality with this 144Hz IPS panel offering 1ms MPRT and 3440x1440 resolution. 3440 x 1440 Find your match at gmaster.iiyama.com Burnout revenge ‘m suddenly aware that burnout is a very to have 10,000 games you want to make, neatly real problem. I’m a highly motivated person: organised in a queue in your brain, each waiting for I taught myself to code and make games, its turn. But I can’t. I can’t do any of them. They’ve all I such was my passion for the medium, and I’ve been patiently waiting their turn for decades, and I’m never struggled with my mental health before. letting them down as they rot in a queue. But this? This is different. This is new. I’ve never felt DAN MARSHALL So here I sit, paralysed by the idea that whatever like this before, and it’s weird and worrying. I start making right now is going to dominate the next Dan set up Size Here’s the problem: in the final nine months of two to three years of my life. I need to be sure it’s Five Games back in development on Lair of the Clockwork God, I worked 2006 before selling something I’m going to relish, and something that I’m hard. I didn’t crunch, per se, I worked regular hours indie games online going to enjoy making and playtesting. The idea of and had a great work/life balance. But it invaded was even really a getting back to the ever-expanding list of bugs fills me thing. Following every waking hour. I worked furiously to keep the with absolute gut-wrenching dread. hit adventures Ben list of bugs manageable, waking up every day to There, Dan That! and Quarantine during the Covid-19 pandemic doesn’t find the Known Issues document had grown, and I Time Gentlemen, help, I suspect. I’m in my house and my home office had 24 hours to shrink it back down to something Please!, he made 24/7, and the beach, the gym, shops, or the pub, the manageable. Lying awake at night trying to solve bugs, the BAFTA-winning places I’d normally go and take my mind off things, are Privates, The Swindle, stealing moments on the weekend to polish some Gun Monkeys, Behold suddenly unavailable to me. graphics or knock off a couple of easy bugs so that the Kickmen, and I don’t know how long this is going to last. I mean, I was in a good place first thing Monday morning. It most recently smash there’s a practical side to this where it’s got to end wasn’t crunch, but it was full-on. hit indie game of the soon because I need to start making a game to make year (so far), Lair of When the game launched, wouldn’t you know it, the Clockwork God. money, so at some point, I’m going to have to drag some people found new bugs. So there was a month my lifeless body over to my computer and force it to or so process of promoting the game while quickly start typing. fixing up these issues. During that time, I was super- But not yet. I’m taking some time to actually keen to get going on the next thing, excited at the play some games for once, jot down some notes. prospect of finally starting work on the magnum opus ‘Research’, I’m calling it. It’s not something I’ve I’d been dreaming of for three years. And when the really had the luxury of doing before; the cash flow time finally came to get going, I jumped at it, backed issues associated with indie development don’t by the fact that Clockwork God was selling OK, but not normally lend themselves to great long periods of amazingly, so I needed to hit the ground running with predevelopment dabbling. a new project ASAP. Within a couple of months, I had My motivation has gone, and it’s just hugely the basics of my character control down, and some #41 worrying. This isn’t something that’s limited to me, neat AI working – bare-bones stuff, but it was working sitting alone in my attic, panicking. It’s something nicely and getting somewhere. I’ve been warned about at conferences from And then I just… stopped. I couldn’t bring myself colleagues and peers who are indies and triple-A to write the next feature, no matter how small and developers alike. It’s something I’ve seen reflected mundane it was. The very idea of lifting my fingers to in tweets and Slack conversations from all over type the first line of code actually turns my stomach. the industry, time and time again. It’s something It’s a physical revulsion, something Pavlovian, maybe. I’m ashamed to say I’d dismissed and failed to take The weird thing is, my brain is bustling with ideas, seriously because I was so sure it could never happen same as always; the curse of the game developer, to me. And yet, here I am. wfmag.cc \ 03 Contents 6 Attract mode Interface 06. Endling 28. Oppressive platformers Herobeat Studio’s side-scroller is a The developers using the genre fox’s story of protection and survival to create dark, cinematic worlds 12. Welcome to Elk 34. Lottie Bevan Telling tall tales in this twee little title Why you’ll never see a Hello Kitty Contents from Triple Topping game for sale in China 14. Twin Mirror 36. Kickstarting success DONTNOD’s latest narrative It’s hard to make a hit crowdfunded adventure, previewed video game – we find out why 16. Fights in Tight Spaces 70. Seen and heard Turns, cards, striking art, and Meet the studios making games for striking limbs the visually impaired 18. News 78. Indie labels FuturLab speak about their travels What does the word ‘indie’ even through licensed gaming mean anymore? 22. Letters 84. David Darling Wireframe’s readers speak From Codemasters to Kwalee, their brains the veteran entrepreneur profiled 24. Incoming 90. Steve McNeil Return of the Hitman, tactical wizards, For the love of Monster Train, and all 78 OAP rage, and more things deck-building 04 / wfmag.cc Contents WELCOME I’ve had a few sleepless nights lately, which has given me a few extra hours to think about the PS5’s recently unveiled case design. The entire thing fascinates me: the contrasts of black and white, its stretched curves, and Sony’s apparent goal of making sure the console doesn’t match anything else in the living rooms of its customers across the globe. Mostly, though, I’ve been 36 thinking about the practicalities of the thing. It’s clearly quite tall – according to some rough estimates, it could be as much as 40cm high, which would make it the loftiest console of all time. Will it fit under my television, even with the PS5 lying on its side? Then there’s that white, curvaceous bit of plastic that wraps the height of the thing, like the cladding on a stormtrooper’s thigh. Just how delicate is that? Are the thinner bits near the top reinforced, or will they be prone to bending or breaking off entirely if, for example, a manic toddler pushes the thing over? At the very least, I kind of admire Sony’s approach to 14 92 the PS5. Where most industrial designs attempt to fade into the background, this one goes the opposite way: if anything, it’s a conversation piece. No, Aunty Toolbox Rated Jean, it isn’t Dyson’s take on an oil-filled radiator, it’s actually a fancy new games console. 48. CityCraft 92. Minecraft Dungeons As if to reassure us, though, An open world or separate areas? You’ve got Diablo on my Minecraft… Sony hasn’t broken with design There are pros and cons to both and it works tradition entirely: once again, it looks as though the on/off 50. 94. and eject buttons are perfectly Toys + Rules = Games Predator: invisible to the naked eye. Managing development using this Hunting Grounds simple yet effective equation Don’t bother getting to the chopper Enjoy the new issue. 58. Wall-running in Unity 96. Trials of Mana Ryan Lambie How to make your own gravity-defying Another day, another Square Enix Editor shooter mechanic RPG remake 64. Source Code 104. Backwards Compatible Fly through the clouds in an homage Digging through the Famicom Disk to Konami’s Time Pilot library and more retro fun wfmag.cc \ 05 Attract Mode Interview END IS FOREVER IT’S LIKE THE ANIMALS OF FARTHING WOOD, BUT LESS HARROWING: SAY HELLO TO ENDLING 06 / wfmag.cc Attract Mode Interview magine a world much like our haunting, beautiful micro-story of a small own: accelerating climate change, family doing what it has to in order to live ecological disasters as a result of another day. There might be a monolithic I humanity’s interference, and an factory spewing black smoke out into the endless array of animals displaced air in the background, growing larger with or completely wiped out just for being in time, but what does that matter to you? the way of our desire to be ever-growing, You’re just a fox. You just need food, safety ever-expanding, ever-more dominant over for your cubs, and somewhere to sleep.