ALL FORMATS LIFTING THE LID ON VIDEO GAMES Licence Ka-boom When games look to thrill like comic books Tiny studios making big licensed games On a mission The secrets of great campaign design Issue 33 £3 wfmag.cc Yacht Club’s armoured hero goes rogue 01_WF#33_Cover V3_RL_DH_VI_HK.indd 2 19/02/2020 16:45 JOIN THE PRO SQUAD! Free GB2560HSU¹ | GB2760HSU¹ | GB2760QSU² 24.5’’ 27’’ Sync Panel TN LED / 1920x1080¹, TN LED / 2560x1440² Response time 1 ms, 144Hz, FreeSync™ Features OverDrive, Black Tuner, Blue Light Reducer, Predefined and Custom Gaming Modes Inputs DVI-D², HDMI, DisplayPort, USB Audio speakers and headphone connector Height adjustment 13 cm Design edge-to-edge, height adjustable stand with PIVOT gmaster.iiyama.com Team Fortress 2: death by a thousand cuts? t may be 13 years old, but Team Fortress 2 is to stop it. Using the in-game reporting tool does still an exceptional game. A distinctive visual nothing. Reporting their Steam profiles does nothing. style with unique characters who are still Kicking them does nothing because another four will I quoted and memed about to this day, an join in their place. Even Valve’s own anti-cheat service open-ended system that lets players differentiate is useless, as it works on a delay to prevent the rapid themselves from others of the same class, well- JOE PARLOCK development of hacks that can circumvent it… at the designed maps, and a skill ceiling that feels sky-high… cost of the matches they ruin in the meantime. Joe Parlock is a even modern heavyweights like Overwatch and So for Valve to drop Team Fortress 2 when it is in freelance games Paladins struggle to stand up to Valve’s classic. writer and founder of such an unplayable state is not only a kick in the Except it has two problems: it’s jam-packed ubi-source.com. His teeth for the players, it makes no sense for Valve’s with hackers, and Valve has washed its hands of favourite games are business. One of the defining features of Team Sonic, Left 4 Dead, the whole game. In a report by the ever-reliable Fortress 2 is its item economy, with players buying and Assassin’s Creed, ValveNewsNetwork, it’s reported that Valve has but he also loves and selling weapons, hats, and other cosmetics stopped development on new Team Fortress 2 RPGs, simulators, and through the Steam Community Market. content, nominally to get all hands on deck for stealth games. When As of writing, Dota 2, one of Valve’s more recent Half-Life: Alyx. Outside of community-made stuff not writing, he loves cash cows, has 26,175 items for sale through the nature, photography, (of which there is still a healthy amount), we can’t and chilling with market, with every sale giving Valve a cut of the expect any new maps, weapons, or balance updates. his dog. money. Team Fortress 2, the game Valve’s allegedly Maybe forever, maybe not. Trying to predict Valve’s abandoned and which is seen as being on life support whims is impossible. by its community, still has 21,347. Valve is going to cut That lack of support is exacerbated by the game’s off a perfectly fine revenue source for absolutely no European servers being overrun with hacking snipers reason. The game still has a healthy player count and who can headshot you from across the map in an an item economy comparable to such heavy-hitters instant. And it’s not something that happens once as Dota 2 and CS:GO, but that won’t last if Valve keeps or twice every few matches – at its worst, I’ve had to treating Team Fortress 2 the way it is. re-search for matches 16 times before finding one #33 Team Fortress 2 is a classic. It has an established that was remotely playable. The main culprit is a fandom and numerous third-party community notorious hacker from Germany who floods games servers. With a little bit of maintenance, it will, for the with bots with racist names, and has been doing so most part, take care of itself. It doesn’t need to give for years, but he’s not the only one. Say ‘Matt [S]- us new maps and game modes every six months; Service’ to any Team Fortress 2 player, and they’ll roll it just needs the odd balance patch occasionally. their eyes and sigh. Most crucially, Valve needs to sort out the game’s These hackers have been active in the game for ridiculous hacking problem. The community will take years (with their bots clocking thousands of hours care of the rest – and that’ll only be good for Valve in-game), and Valve has seemingly done nothing in the long run. wfmag.cc \ 03 Contents Contents 6 Attract mode Interface 06. Shovel Knight Dig 18. Comix Zone Yacht Club Games and How games are given the Nitrome’s bite-sized spin-off graphic novel look 10. A Frog’s Tale 24. Spirittea The personal story behind Immerse yourself in a bath a top-down adventure house management sim 12. Iron Danger 44. Magical properties Real-time strategy with When tiny studios make games a rewinding twist out of big licences 16. Incoming 50. Peter Molyneux Aliens, barbarians, and a The UK’s most controversial 50 cybernetic Metroidvania game designer? 04 / wfmag.cc Contents WELCOME While clicking around on the internet last weekend, I learned that Super Mario Bros. 3 first launched in America almost exactly 30 years ago this month – 12 February 1990, to be precise. From here, I descended into a rabbit warren of features and interviews about Nintendo’s effervescent sequel. I didn’t know, for example, that development on Super Mario Bros. 3 went on for more than two years, or that, during its early stages, designers Takashi Tezuka and Shigeru Miyamoto tried to shift its perspective 18 from the side-scrolling 2D of the earlier games to an isometric viewpoint. “At first, we were making it with a bird’s-eye view rather than a side view,” Tezuka said in an interview published on Nintendo’s website. “I wanted to change everything, including [the game’s] general appearance,” he added. Tezuka and Miyamoto quickly learned, however, that the pseudo-3D perspective made precise jumps – and knowing where Mario would land – distractingly difficult: “With a diagonal view from slightly overhead,” Miyamoto said, “you lost your sense of distance to the ground.” 10 60 The team soon reverted back to the side-scrolling format of the previous titles, though small artefacts of that earlier build still exist in the finished game, Toolbox Rated including the chequerboard floor you can see at the beginning. Years later, Super Mario 64 successfully brought 30. CityCraft 56. Savage Planet the series into full 3D; certain Using cyclical changes to Typhoon Studios make an areas of Super Mario 3D Land, bring game worlds to life impressive first Journey meanwhile, experiment with a fixed 3D perspective, complete with chequerboard floors and 32. Primary objective 59. Xeno Crisis walls. It’s proof that just about A guide to making great A good reason to dust off your all of Nintendo’s game ideas single-player campaigns Sega Mega Drive find a home eventually. 38. Towerful of Mice 60. Kentucky Route Zero Ryan Lambie Breaking down The Witcher Cardboard Computer craft a Editor 3’s finest side quest powerful final act 40. Source Code 64. Backwards Compatible Make a Zaxxon-style The Evercade handheld, and other isometric scrolling map retro discoveries wfmag.cc \ 05 Attract Mode Interview DIG FOR VICTORY Yacht Club Games and Nitrome team up to bring us the rogue-lite spin-off, Shovel Knight Dig 06 / wfmag.cc Attract Mode Interview ou’d be forgiven for thinking to wider attention with its multi-platform that Yacht Club Games might puzzle-platformer, Bomb Chicken, released have grown a bit weary in 2018. Certainly, Bomb Chicken served Y of Shovel Knight by now. as a valuable showcase for Nitrome’s The studio has, after all, long-standing ability to make accessible 2D diligently supported its 2D platformer for games with chunky, likeable pixel graphics the best part of six years, beginning with – something that Yacht Club saw as a the original game – Shovel Knight: Shovel of natural fit for Shovel Knight. Hope – in 2014, and complemented by a “We’d been fans of Nitrome for a long series of free expansion packs released time,” says Yacht Club developer David in the years since. But while designer D’Angelo when we asked him about Alec Faulkner said in 2019 – jokingly, the studio’s decision to collaborate no doubt – that his studio’s “sick of on a Shovel Knight spin-off. “We were making Shovel Knight games,” Yacht interested in creating a more bite- Club’s dealings with its armoured, sized experience version of Shovel spade-wielding hero are Knight that you could play far from over. Not only “We were interested in small sessions, and does the studio have a in creating a they’re kings of mastering full sequel planned, but that kind of feel, so we it’s also teamed up with more bite-sized reached out to them.” British developer Nitrome experience” Shovel Knight Dig’s to make a spin-off – mechanics and visuals, Shovel Knight Dig. meanwhile, are very much Nitrome’s Recalling such vertically oriented titles creation. “Typically, Nitrome is steering the as Downwell and Wireframe favourite Mr. development, and Yacht Club is riffing off Driller, Dig is a frenetically paced rogue- what they’ve built,” D’Angelo tells us.