How Indie Games DOMINATED the Decade
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ALL FORMATS LIFTING THE LID ON VIDEO GAMES CONQUERED How indie games DOMINATED the decade Issue 30 £3 | wfmag.cc Conker Latency OMNO The making of What it is, and how A solo developer’s Rare’s Bad Fur Day to minimise it big action adventure 01_WF#30_Cover V6_RL_DH_VI_RL.indd 1 09/01/2020 12:02 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 Death Stranding is a mess of weird ideas, and that’s a good thing n the lead up to Death Stranding, there were This isn’t how big-budget games are supposed to a lot of fingers crossed for a Kojima downfall. be made. They say something clearly; they follow There were hot takes and a fair amount of trends; they can be labelled and filed. Reject the models I shade aimed at the nonsensical, star-studded and you deserve no success. It’s the way the world is. trailers. Some say Kojima’s games amount to little more It’s what people want. And yet Kojima Productions didn’t than “sixth form creative writing.” These people are WILL LUTON follow the rules. right. Kojima’s work is defined by the lack of creative As I look back over my decade as a game-maker, I see Will Luton is a veteran inhibitions and pop influence of a media studies student myself become increasingly rational and smart, yet my game designer and from a middle England university – albeit made with product manager games are less interesting. Paralysed by analysis and the budget and cast of a Hollywood production. And as who runs Department second-guessing, my work has become unsurprising, players and game-makers, this is a great thing for us. of Play, the games unadventurous, and safe. We are at risk of letting industry’s first Our increasingly scientific world has given us System 2 thinking – the slow and methodical type of management sanitation, iPhones, and Pop-Tarts. A follows B and so C. consultancy. He is thought – run game development. We need more gut We measure, we observe needs, we act to fulfil. Yet our the author of Free-to- reactions and subconscious ideas reflected in our work. inner lives remain immeasurable. Smart ideas fail while Play: Making Money We’re also at risk, however, of falling into the fallacy of dumb ideas flourish. We behave unexpectedly. We vote From Games You auteur theory. Kojima Productions is not one man – it’s Give Away, and has for Trump or Brexit when every model and expert tells worked with Sega, a team ostensibly in service of one man. Yet I suspect us it’s a bad thing. Because it makes us feel something. Rovio, and Jagex. there’s higher collaboration across the studio than For those most rational amongst us, this is frustrating. He is also an avid the games press give credit for, with Kojima being the Don’t we see this doesn’t make sense? Death Stranding’s retro games and marketing flag that provides the team freedom under pinball player. hype and the Kojima cult is just such an irrationality. the name of auteurism. The freedom to let their work Attempts to review or critique Death Stranding feel be complex and loaded with obtuse meaning, rather pointless because it’s so messy, unabashed, and than clean and full of marketable ideas. unique. Its subtext is at times too overt, while at others Kojima Productions isn’t a model we should follow, incomprehensible. Its mechanics are clunky but without and we shouldn’t herald Death Stranding as an act of compare. This isn’t how most other games are – they’re solo genius. Doing so makes us miss the real lesson in digestible, reviewable, understandable. But somehow the game: ideas and our own psychology are complex, Death Stranding, like the Metal Gear series, works. and our lack of creative bravery moves us to clean up, Its illogical game systems sit against its stream-of- #30 streamline, and Disneyfy our work. As we edit and re- consciousness world to create a whole, complete edit, we spoon-feed our audience, and an indescribable, experience. Something unexpected, yet delightful. human element is lost. Modern triple-A is the work of many aligned and As AI and computing become more and more checked rationalities: the publisher. Games pass embedded in our lives, there’s a lot of power in our through teams of VPs, SVPs, and C-suites. They bring own irrationality. Sometimes we should, just once in a people like me in to benchmark and compare. while, let a weird idea pass that feels right. These ideas The game is shaped to what is quantifiable, what can come from somewhere – and just because we can’t be measured. Death Stranding has somehow remained express where and why, it doesn’t mean they can’t drive a ramble of meaning dumped out with incredible flair. value, whether that’s artistic or financial. wfmag.cc \ 03 Contents Contents 6 Attract mode Interface 06. OMNO 16. A decade in review Jonas Manke talks us through his Looking back at ten years of ethereal adventure indie games and tech 10. KUNAI 26. Steve McNeil TurtleBlaze’s upcoming ninja The futility of making robot apocalypse ‘best games ever’ lists 12. Touch Type Tale 44. Conker’s Bad Fur Day It’s Mavis Beacon meets real- Making a cult classic, and what time strategy its devs are up to now 14. News 50. Double Fine A wry glance at another busy The Psychonauts studio’s history and 50 fortnight in gaming greatest hits 04 / wfmag.cc Contents WELCOME As the lovely Steve McNeil correctly observes on page 26, it’s almost impossible to look back over a decade of games and come up with any kind of ranked list of great titles. But what we’ve tried to do, in our epic feature on page 16, is look back at ten years of industry events, new systems, studio closures, indie 16 games, mobile games, triple-A games and oddities that defy classification, and provide a snapshot of just how diverse and vibrant the industry became between 2010 and 2019. It was a decade where a solo developer could change the entire gaming landscape with a single game (that’d be PUBG); where a mobile game like Candy Crush could rake in as much cash as a triple-A title; and where Minecraft, a lo-fi game fundamentally about making things, could win the hearts and minds of a generation of loyal players. There’s little value in arguing whether a tiny mobile game like Monument Valley is better or worse than, say, SIE 56 44 Santa Monica’s God of War, or whether a three-person indie title like Celeste is artistically comparable to something like Toolbox Rated Red Dead Redemption 2, which took the population of a small town to produce. Maybe it’s better to hold all these games 28. CityCraft 56. Death Stranding up – and countless others like How to capture a city’s essence in Digging into Hideo Kojima’s them – and champion them as a video game Deliveroo simulator the products of an ever-growing, ever-evolving, and ever- maturing industry. 32. Latency 58. Communist Planet A guide to minimising delays and Aliens arrive to save us from We can’t wait to see what the new decade brings. optimising games our capitalist overlords Ryan Lambie 38. Uncharted territory 60. Planet Zoo Editor Looking beyond games to Mucking out the ocelot enclosure: create new experiences the video game 40. Source Code 62. Moons of Madness Code your own Boulder Lovecraft at large on the angry Dash homage red planet wfmag.cc \ 05 Attract Mode Interview THE WORLD JONAS MADE Solo developer Jonas Manke talks us through the process of making his ethereal exploration game, OMNO MNO is a textbook example your abilities, which in turn will allow of doing more with less. Its you to access new areas on the map, soft-focus fantasy world from parched deserts to icy tundras. O looks huge and lived-in, It’s an absorbing, charming experience yet it’s the product of that recalls the likes of Journey and AER: just one person – German animator Memories of Old in its chilled-out, non- turned game designer, Jonas Manke. violent approach to 3D platforming – and To create his action-adventure, Manke the hours of craft that Manke’s put into has made cunning use of atmospheric OMNO are clear from the off. effects and colour to create the illusion “The first year was hard,” Manke says of of a much larger, more detailed space: OMNO’s early development, which began fog and dancing particles cling to distant in 2016. “I was still working as a character mountains, and shafts of diffuse light animator full-time, still had a lot to learn, illuminate gigantic beasts that roam the and last but not least, had three wonderful low-poly plains. kids to take care of. Working on OMNO We got a chance to play a pre-alpha mostly at night was exhausting, but well demo of OMNO earlier this year, and were worth it.” immediately taken by the soothing rhythm With a successful December 2018 of its platforming and exploration.