Sunday, 15 March 2020

You Spoke, We Listened! Oceanhorn Coming To PS Vita On May 17Th

In September 2016 we released Oceanhorn on PS4 and Xbox One, our very first console game. Since its release we received so much love and overwhelmingly positive feedback from console gaming community. Thank you so much!

Oceanhorn is our love letter to action adventures from past generations and combines the action and puzzle elements from Zelda games with the emotional journey of the Final Fantasy and Mana series.

Oceanhorn on PSVita in action

Wow these colours pop on the PS Vita screen!

Soon after launch we received many requests from players who'd love a portable PS Vita version of this game so we decided to do a Twitter Poll about it. What followed was an incredible Tsunami of likes and retweets – it blew us away! We are very happy to announce that Oceanhorn – Monster of Uncharted Seas will arrive on PS Vita on May 17th, 2017.

Taking full advantage of PS Vita

We've been working hard to deliver the same gameplay experience that you've loved on consoles, so we put many hours into optimizing our code. We're very happy to confirm that the whole game runs beautifully on the PS Vita delivering smooth performance all the way through the entire game.

It's just amazing to see the game coming to life on the colourful PS Vita display. Everything looks so expressive, adding an extra punch to the huge variety of islands like rainy forests or scorching desserts. Explore all of them on the go!

The game will take you from the deepest dungeons to the highest skies

Beautiful Game for a beautiful Handheld System

We didn't stop with just porting it, we also added features to take advantage of the Vita in unique ways. You decide if you want to use them or play in a traditional way. First of all we enabled Touch Screen for casting spells and to navigate the menus. This is a very comfortable and direct way of choosing targets or menu options. Furthermore we enabled PlayStation TV so you can play on the big screen.

Oh and in case you're wondering: The game features its own set of trophies, so all trophy hunters rejoice, another Platinum Trophy to hunt for. Altogether we aimed to deliver a must have for every PS Vita library and it's our way of saying thanks for your support. Cheers!

Korbinian Mossandl// Producer, FDG Entertainment

Thursday, 5 March 2020

Why Do You Play Games?

In the first post of this year, I want to share some content from the book I'm reading at the moment: Playing smart - on games, intelligence, and artificial intelligence by Julius Togelius. The author discusses many aspects on how games challenge us and what we can expect from games that use artificial intelligence in the near future.

One of the first points discussed by Togelius is about the question I already brought many times in this site: why do we play games? It's not easy to answer (and we have many different views for this subject) but I think it's essential to gather multiple points of view to create a more solid opinion.

Togelius launches the question: why do you play games? And starts his answer with a very interesting argument that most of the time we are playing games for many reasons but all the time – despite the game we are playing – we are doing an exercise of intense planning.

Below, I want to share this excellent content from his book and recommend the reading for all the followers of this site:

Why do you play games? To relax, have a good time, lose yourself a bit? Perhaps as a way of socializing with friends? Almost certainly not as some sort of brain exercise. But let's look at what you are really doing: You plan. In Chess, you are planning for your victory by imagining a sequence of several moves that you will take to reach checkmate, or at least capture one of your opponent's pieces. If you are any good, you are also taking your opponent's countermoves into account and making contingency plans if they do not fall into your elaborately laid traps. In Super Mario Bros., you are planning wheter to take the higher path, which brings more reward but is riskier, or the safer lower path. You are also planning to venture down that pipe that might bring you to a hidden treasure chamber, or to continue past it, depending on how much time you have left and how eager you are to finish the level. You may be planning to eat the power-up that lets you get through that wall so you can lick a switch that releases a bean from which you can grow a beanstalk that lets you climb up to that cloud you want to get to. In Angry Birds you are planning where to throw each bird so as to achieve maximum destruction with the fewest birds. If you crush the ice wall with the blue bird, you can then hit that cavity with the black bomb bird, collapsing the main structure, and finish off that cowardly hiding pig with your red bird. (TOGELIUS, 2019, kindle edition – position 412)

#GoGamers

Reference:

TOGELIUS, Julius. Playing smart - on games, intelligence, and artificial intelligence. London: The MIT Press, 2019.

Am I An INFP? (Monday Musings 85)

The INFP Book by Catherine Chea

I became interested in the topic of Myers-Briggs (MBTI) when I was trying to figure out what techniques fit my personality the best, the past few weeks or so, to motivate myself to not procrastinate, as I noticed I was neglecting the blog. Of course, whenever you google personality types, the notorious MBTI personality inventory came up.

I was first introduced to Myers-Briggs as a senior in high school, when I was an immature teenager (18 years old) - I'm the very definition of a late bloomer - I may even still be blooming yet.

I was extremely pleased and elated that I was solidly an INFP because they were "so cool". One of the major characteristics is that "we're often misunderstood" recalling images of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. James Dean is a major icon of cool. Since I was nerdy and geeky, you can only imagine how happy I was.

Another major characteristic is that INFPs are "extremely creative" and best careers are in the writing and art fields. Never mind if you give me a blank piece of paper and tell me to write a story and draw, I would look back at you with the same blank expression. I'm so impressed with people who can create, and to be called creative was a huge compliment.

I also was happy that we're supposed to be "emotional" because if anything, I'm as lethargic as my obese male cat, Fat Nyams, and often have a blank, glazed expression on my face. So it's nice that, per MBTI, I am emotional since INFPs "wear their hearts on their sleeves".

I was even more satisfied and smug because we're considered "the rarest type" (the INFJs are even rarer still) so that made me feel special - in American education, you feel the very opposite of special as you have to "fit in" with the structure and cliques.

Given my personality, I read all about INFPs and the part of having strong values rang true (of course, who doesn't have strong values), and felt that the description of INFP fit me so perfectly that it was uncanny. I was very satisfied with how I was one of the "awesome" rare fairies that are INFPs.

The MBTI came up in medical school when we all had to take personality tests as part of our "humanities" course where we learn about empathy, bedside manner and such. I came up as an INFJ and was confused, because I remembered how I was such a strong INFP back in high school, and personalities don't change. Your behaviors can change, but not your core personality.

For instance, if you're an introvert, you could never be an extrovert no matter how much effort. Eventually, forcing myself to be social exhausts me, and I have to go in hermit mode for days on end to recharge.

Being conscientious, I took the test again, and it came up as an INFJ. In medical school, we didn't have time to question and I left it at that.

Flash forward to now, when I'm stable in my career and rather fortunate to have free time, I took the online MBTI tests (not the official). The first step was to read the description between INFP and INFJ.

I was hoping I'd be an INFJ because as a mature adult, the INFP description made me cringe.

First, they're described as being so sensitive that if someone says their hair looks like they didn't comb it, they'd ball up in a corner for days. And that INFPs have extreme meltdowns on a daily basis. I don't have those wild emotional mood swings at all. In fact, I've gotten even more placid as an adult. I just don't have the energy to get into rages.

Another extremely unflattering description is that INFPs seem like they can't get anything done and have difficulties finding a career, if they ever get a job in the first place. But I'm doing quite well in my career, and the medical and residency training was grueling and not considered "flaky".

Next, I took the online tests. I already know that I'm strongly INF, that was never a doubt, so the question is the P vs. J. There were very conflicting results between INFP and INFJ and indeed a lot of mistypes exist between these two. There was a P vs J tester, and it would fall roughly 50/50.

Because of this ambiguity, I did internet search and stumbled upon Casual Cognition as that was the first video that comes up when you type in INFP vs INFJ.

I didn't seem to be either INFP (Calypso, the owner) or INFJ (in this YouTube clip, though I'm more INFP-ish if I had to force myself to compare:

I was even more confused, until two pieces of the puzzle came together. The one question was "Do you consider yourself having the wisdom of a sage (INFJ), or the heart of a child (INFP)" and the answer was heart of a child, heart of a child, heart of a child.

Then Casual Cognition's section of micro-expressions clinched it - I definitely have the body and eye movements of an Ne (INFP).

Armed with this information, I read about the cognitive functions and stacking, which made it very clear that I'm an INFP. The descriptions of the personality types are of course stereotypes as there are variants (Monster Hunter World reference), but the preferences you have in the way you interact with the world remain stable.

Armed with all the above knowledge and research, I then read two books on the INFP, the first one was helpful as it was technical and described the concepts of cognitive functions and stacking.

Before reading this book, this video was difficult to understand, but then after, it made sense once you know the jargon. The part that made me chuckle is when I see Calypso with that glazed look on her face (very much me) and her partner, Alex, being so laser-focused and determined (she was very much into the discussion) that the juxtaposition was quite amusing:

The second book I read is the one I recommend if you want to know about INFPs. It was written by an INFP author herself and was so spot-on about my personality. It made me laugh at the end when she recommended that we do something that's outside of our comfort zone such as oral presentations. I ended up doing Twitch precisely for that reason, to do something new and challenging. Shortly after, she even mentioned how she joined Toastmaster's International.

Coincidentally, a month ago or so, I asked my best friend how can I improve my presentation in Twitch, and he mentioned that one of his best friends joins Toastmaster's International, and she really liked it, and that I should ask her about it and check it out.

It also made me cry near the end of the book as she wrote a letter of appreciation and affirmation to INFPs, since we're so critical of ourselves. Because our profile description makes it sound like we're pathetic and useless, INFPs tend to hate their personalities, and that's why we often mistype ourselves as other personalities. We want to be the golden retrievers, the doers, the inventors, the practical caregivers of the other personalities, but we fall in this category of being an idealist, being "true to ourselves" and "creative".

This book helped me to embrace who I am instead of trying to be someone who I'm not, and the exercises in self-compassion seem to be much smoother!

TL/DR: I admit that I'm an INFP!

The How of Happiness Review

Making Monsters Different - An Example Of Invisibility

Different invisibility/blinking mechanic that I've used, instead of just a modifier to hit roll

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons presents a great many monsters who can have some really cool effects, but at the end, a lot of those effects get folded into simple "reduce to-hit by x" and it's done. Players know that the creature will be harder to hit, but that's it...

What if we made took this idea of an invisible/shadowy monster that's hard to hit, but rewards players who use tactics to overcome it's special ability?

In simple, what I'm proposing is doing away with the straight -4 penalty for hitting invisible/shadowy figures. Creatures get two ACs - one when they're "invisible" and the second when their location has been pinpointed. Let's take a shadow as our example - they'll have AC2 when invisible, AC7 when PCs know where it's at.

At first, invisibility is just that, it can't be seen. In the case of the shadow, depending on light, I might rule, depending on what players are doing, that they catch glimpses of "something wrong" in the direction they're looking, if they're looking at the shadow. Or they catch glimpses of movement, but nothing is there.

So the PCs would be groping around and striking out. As the DM, I'm keeping track of where the creature is at. I will let the PCs roll to hit, but for those that aren't within melee range of the creature, they "miss" and will do so automatically, but I don't tell them any different. Just that they missed.

For PCs that are within melee range, they are rolling to hit against the harder AC, so in this case vs. AC2 for the shadow. They hit!

Now the PCs have an idea of where this thing is. As long as the PCs are within melee range of the creature, it can be pinpointed and it's AC drops down to 7. So life is good, right? Well, not necessarily.

Let's say all the PCs miss in combat - I'm going to rule that they've no longer pinpointed the creature and now its AC is back up to AC2! It's managed to avoid being hit and seen, so it has a chance to slip away again! At this point, since they've not pinpointed it, it could even flee without penalty, though the PCs could hit vs. AC2.

So why would I do this? To me, an approach like this makes fighting an invisible creature more interactive, more mysterious and potentially more exciting. Rather than a boring -4 to hit, this allows the PCs to use circling and trapping tactics. If the PCs did circle the creature while it was pinpointed, then I would not allow it to slip away. It might go back to the AC2, but it's surrounded - nowhere to run!

This also requires a bit more interactivity with the players. They can just attack the darkness, but I as DM know where this thing is. If they're within melee range, I describe an effect (shifting shadows, distortions in the light) that lefts them know they're close. Attacking blindly? Not seeing the effect.

Once they hit, then they see blood/wounds/effects which allows them and others to hit better. The creature is obviously trying to get back to being hidden! So... if everyone misses that round, they're not able to see it as well, and next round it may slip away!

These are the kinds of small things I like to add to make the game more interesting. The players don't need to know the mechanics in shifts in AC (unless they ask), but they do see the effects. I find doing things like this makes monsters... mysterious. Unpredictable.

I've also earned the players' trust that I'm fair and always give them a path to success while also giving them an obstacle to overcome. Tactics helps with this type of monster (one person hits, rest form a kill box. Now it's trapped....)

Also, I'm using Descending AC, but you can modify Ascending AC in similar fashion, going from hard to hit, to easy to hit, once the creature is pinpointed.

What do you think? Do you use certain effects and different takes on mechanics to achieve an effect that makes the monsters more interesting?

Wednesday, 4 March 2020

Sheffield Wednesday Vs Man City Live Stream: How To Watch The FA Cup 5Th Round From Anywhere - Ars Technica

Sheffield Wednesday vs Man City live stream: how to watch the FA Cup 5th round from anywhere

Hiring: 3D Art Lead

Title: 3D Art Lead
Focus: Pipeline development, 3D modeling
Type: Full-time, permanent
Last day to apply: 8th of September 2019
Location: Sweden, applicants residing in European countries welcome

A door swings open, a dim light beckons you to come step further, pick up the dusty items, give them a long look before venturing forward, the architecture leading you ever deeper. Frictional's games are filled with intrigue and emotion, the art subtly guiding the players. To keep up the illusion of a living world, the execution has to be consistent across the board.

This is where you come in.

What will you work on?

We are looking for an experienced 3D Art Lead to join Secret Project #2. This is a senior position, meaning you will have responsibility over foundational elements of the project. You will work closely with other team leads, such as the creative lead and art lead.

Right now Secret Project #2 is in pre-production, which means that you would find yourself working on establishing pipelines and practices for a good workflow. On the creative side you will be working within the established style of the game – creating art, researching and documenting. The 3D art you would work on include architecture and complicated props, as well as putting everything together into functional and beautiful environments..

Once the project shifts into production, your role will involve more lead work. You will find yourself communicating with other employees and outsourcers, making sure tasks get assigned and done, and giving feedback. Alongside you will still be able to participate in creating art.

As a small team, everyone in the company has a wide variety of responsibilities as well as rights, but we consider that our strength – no day in development will look the same!

What are we looking for?

You have to be a European (EU/EEA) resident to apply. We cannot consider other applicants.

The person we're looking for is creative, self-motivated, and comfortable in a lead position. We need you to fulfill the essential requirements, but are flexible with how you have acquired your experience.

We welcome applicants regardless of background, situation, sexual orientation, religion, and similar, so don't let anything like that hold you back from applying!

Here are the essential requirements:

Knowledge in 3D asset creation pipelines in digital games
Being up to date with the latest trends in 3D art tools and techniques
Not being afraid to give feedback to coworkers and outsourcers
Substance Designer skills in creating procedural textures
Ability to adjust artwork based on an established art style
Major role in at least one released title (not as a student/intern/trainee)

And here are some more technical skills:

Experience with face weighted normals
Experience with trim sheets and tiling textures
Experience in Medium Poly Modeling
Knowledge in Modo, or willingness to learn it as a main 3D modeling tool
Some technical art knowledge (you will not have to create anything from scratch, but you should be able to communicate your needs to the programmers, or have suggestions such as saving performance on assets)

If you want to impress us:

Experience with character art and/or organic art
Knowledge in blendshapes
Knowledge in motion capture
Experience with scripting tools in Modo
Experience with Marvelous Designer
Experience in setting up lighting and doing basic level set dressing
Love for hard sci-fi
Penchant for bold design

What do we offer?

We at Frictional make games, because making games is what we love. But we know that's not all there is – there's also playing games, doing sports, or spending time with loved ones. We believe that a healthy balance between work and life creates positive ripples throughout, which is why we discourage crunch.

We also offer:

Variety in tasks
Opportunities to influence your workflow and workload
Flexible working hours
Participation in internal Show & Tell sessions for both projects, meaning giving feedback to and receiving feedback from all members of the projects
An inclusive and respectful work environment

We welcome remote applicants from European (EU/EEA, UK) countries. However, you are welcome to join us in our office in Malmö if you live in the area, or would be willing to relocate after the trial period.

Apply!

If all of the above piqued your interest, we would love to hear from you! Send us your application 8th of September 2019 the latest - but the sooner, the better! Please attach your:

Cover letter
Why should we hire YOU?
CV
Portfolio (link and/or PDF)
Answers to preliminary questions (see below)

Send your application to apply@frictionalgames.com!

Please note that we require all the attachments to consider you.

Preliminary questions

Please provide a document answering the following questions:

When is the earliest you could start working?
Tell us about the daily work you did on your last finished game project.
Name two games you think have high quality 3D art. Explain why.
Imagine you are in charge of the 3D art pipeline for a new sci-fi game. Name the top 3 things you think need to be included.

If you are not living in Sweden, please also answer the following:

Do you have the ability to invoice?
What kind of hardware do you have?
What kind of internet connection do you have?

Wonder how we hire? Read our blog on How we hire at Frictional Games.
What kind of application are we looking for? Read our blog on Writing the best application for a Frictional Games job.

Privacy Policy

By sending us your application, you give us permission to store your personal information and attachments.

We store all applications in a secure system. The applications are stored for two years, after which they are deleted. If you want your your information removed earlier, please contact us through our Contact form. Read more in our Privacy Policy.

Tuesday, 25 February 2020

Learn more about our updated Terms of Service

dish4.internet@blogger.com

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