Politician rallying against SWATting falls victim herself

Writing about SWATting victims is as depressing as writing about data breaches, but this is the future we live in. In regards to the former, the politician who’s come out strongest against the potentially deadly prank found herself on the receiving end of it recently. As her Boston local CBS station reports, Congresswoman Katherine Clark had a smattering of police officers with “long guns” on her front lawn Sunday night. What’d she do, broadcast some Counter-Strike? No, She’s rallying behind the Interstate Swatting Hoax Act, a bill that’d make prank calling the SWAT team on someone a federal offense. Currently, the law states that faking a bomb threat or terrorist attack via telecommunications and across state lines is illegal; SWATting is not.

The Boston Globe writes that at 9:57 PM a computer generated voice left a tip left saying that there shots had been fired and there was an “active shooter” in Clark’s home. Police were dispatched, but an actual SWAT team wasn’t. Clark and her family luckily made it through unscathed, but from the sounds of it, this incident had the exact opposite result of what its perpetrators likely hoped — for her to give up. She told the Globe that this will only strengthen her resolve.

I’m thankful no one was hurt & grateful for the timeliness and professionalism of the #Melrose Police Dept. https://t.co/Zq2LYfdGTE

— Katherine Clark (@RepKClark) February 1, 2016

Source: Katherine Clark (Twitter), CBS Local, The Boston Globe

Virtual reality support for ‘The Witness’ sounds shaky

Your brain might be sore from The Witness‘ puzzles but you won’t have to worry about motion sickness from playing it in another format on your PlayStation 4. We’ve confirmed with developer Jonathan Blow that the gorgeous brain-bender won’t be making its way to PlayStation VR; there are no plans for it “at this time.” The game was simply in development for far too long (possibly even before Sony had a working Project Morpheus prototype) and Blow has said that to support Sony’s VR headset, the game would had to have been designed for it from the outset.

But Blow’s gone on the record about The Witness running in VR on the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, right? Yep, but when we asked to see if supporting either of those was still the case, the response wasn’t promising. A spokesperson has told us that aside from not appearing Sony’s headset there wasn’t any other VR news to share. In January 2014, Blow wrote:

“In theory the whole game is playable on the device [HTC Vive], but when you are rendering for VR the performance demands become much higher, because you are rendering two scenes at higher resolution than you might previously have been rendering one scene. So the full game world with all content currently does not run fast enough for this device, but that is the kind of problem that gets solved over time.”

Perhaps after spending so long working on the game, now that it’s been released Blow needs a break from the project. That’s entirely understandable and perhaps what he needs is some more time before saying anything about VR. Maybe now you should scour our interview our interview with Blow for any possible coded hints. Considering he explicitly told us that he doesn’t “feel accountable to the world to make things for them,” however, perhaps getting your hopes up isn’t exactly wise.

Via: VRFocus

Source: iDigitalTimes

‘Star Citizen’ solo game will cost you extra after February 14th

Right now, pre-ordering Star Citizen gets you both the open, massively multiplayer namesake game and Squadron 42, its recently established single-player counterpart. However, it won’t be that good a deal before long. Weeks after announcing the separation of the two games, Cloud Imperium has revealed that Star Citizen and Squadron 42 will officially require separate purchases on February 14th — yes, they’re splitting up on Valentine’s Day. From then on, you’ll have to buy Squadron 42 either by itself or as an add-on to the title that started it all.

The studio hasn’t said exactly how much Squadron 42 will cost at that point, but you currently have to pay $45 for the existing game combo. You may not have to shell out a full $90 to get both titles if you’re too late, but don’t be surprised if you’re paying significantly more.

The move was expected, but it could still rub a lot of players the wrong way. While Star Citizen has always been ambitious, it’s clear that this ambition is becoming expensive — Squadron 42‘s lavish production values (such as actors Gary Oldman, Mark Hamill and Gillian Anderson) aren’t completely covered, it seems. The split could be worthwhile if it leads to richer gameplay, but the higher price will sting if you’re a new player.

Via: Otaku’s Study, VG24/7

Source: Roberts Space Industries, Star Citizen (YouTube)

Yes, ‘Beyond Good and Evil 2’ is still happening

Beyond Good and Evil 2 isn’t dead yet, according to its mastermind Michel Ancel. If you aren’t familiar, the sequel is something of an enigma in the gaming world. Merely mentioning its name elicits complex emotions and dreams of publisher Ubisoft showing the game at its next year’s E3 media briefing. The first game was a critical hit but didn’t sell well. Consumers in the Aughts weren’t down with a game about a plucky photojournalist and her anthropomorphic porcine companion; who’d have thought?

But, much like Double Fine’s Psychonauts, it developed a cult following after its quiet 2003 release and even got the HD-remaster treatment in 2011. Project lead Ancel has since made other games (like the excellent reboot of the Rayman series and the upcoming PlayStation 4 exclusive, Wild) but BG&E 2 is the one everyone asks him about. Even Double Fine creative director Tim Schafer. The two got together for the season finale episode of Double Fine’s “Devs Play” series to talk shop and play through the cult classic.

The episode starts out innocently enough, but at the 48 minute mark conversation turns to Ancel talking about the sequel’s years-old teaser trailer. That’s when Schafer says the only logical thing to Ancel: “Tell us everything about Beyond Good and Evil 2.”

“Maybe we should continue with Beyond Good and Evil 1,” Ancel said, laughing coyly.

“It’s going to be great though; it’s going to be amazing. Good enough for Miyamoto.” Schafer prodded.

“That’s the problem — it has to be great. When we started that game [BG&E] there wasn’t much pressure… No other games I’ve made have the same aura.”

The stinger after the credits roll is where the magic lies, though:

“You’re still in this headpsace because you’re making the sequel though, right?” Schafer asked.

“Yeah, but it’s difficult because it’s hard for me to do the same kind of game two times. I don’t know how you manage that with Psychonauts 2,” Ancel said.

As are the rest of the Devs Play videos, the whole episode is worth watching. Especially if you want to hear Ancel’s answer when Schafer asked if he’d thought about putting big breasts on Pey’j the pig. This has been your update on BG&E2 for the day.

Via: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Source: YouTube

The only video game developer in Mississippi

Mathew Weymouth lives one hour away from the birthplace of the blues, that humid, fertile swampland known as the Mississippi Delta. He grew up along the state’s southern coastline, and over the years he absorbed tales of legendary local artists including “The Mad Potter,” George E. Ohr, and the painter Walter Inglis Anderson. The Delta fertilizes creativity like it spawns towering cypress trees, and Weymouth is a product of his environment. He’s an artist, but with a technical twist.

Weymouth is a self-taught video game developer with big plans for his local community. He wants to build a “gaming incubator” in southern Mississippi, a creative haven for the area’s youth, artists, musicians, filmmakers and programmers. It’s basically a high-tech neighborhood center where people can work together to create video games and other works of art. But there’s one major problem with this idea: He might be the only serious video game developer in the state.

“Here, it’s literally just this dead zone in the middle of the United States for technology,” Weymouth says.

Birds fly over Mississippi’s Lake Ferguson. (Via Flickr/Jimmy Smith)

He holds out hope that there are other developers quietly working away in Mississippi, but he’s been on the programmer prowl for about a year and hasn’t found much. He founded a Facebook group, Mississippi Video Game Developers, in August, and so far it has two members: Weymouth and one other guy who plays around with GameMaker software. Weymouth’s company, War Room Studios, is registered with Mississippi, and he’s working on a Super Smash Bros.–style brawler called Vellum Wars, though both his artist and musician are out of state. He calls Mississippi a wasteland for technical prowess.

“That’s what it feels like to be a game developer or even just a creative person in this area,” he says. “You live in your own little bubble, and that’s not how creativity flourishes … This is a real industry, and it’s not going anywhere, and the fact that our state is not capitalizing on it is just a travesty. There’s people in Florida doing it, there’s people in Louisiana and Alabama. Why are we this dead zone in the middle of all that?”

The dream

Despite Mississippi’s digital deficit, Weymouth has hope for the state’s technological future, because he believes in the people of Mississippi. He knows artists and sees opportunities for education, training, entertainment and creative expression everywhere — even in run-down, closed-up buildings.

Parts of Mississippi are still recovering from the carnage that Hurricane Katrina dumped on the region in 2005. Weymouth says rental fees are high in his town because of inflated insurance rates since the storm, resulting in rows of vacant storefronts. He passes these empty buildings every time he drives down Gulfport’s main highway, and they fuel his drive to do something, anything, to help his community recover and create something beautiful.

Google Maps captured one abandoned building along a Gulfport highway.

“It just drives me nuts,” he says. “I’d love to be able to remove the wall for anybody who wants to be creative, even if it’s just a local band that just needs to use sound equipment. A video game studio has that.”

Weymouth thinks big. He imagines an incubator outfitted with computers (complete with major game-engine licenses), sound equipment, a physical-art space, experts-in-residence from a range of fields, and, grandest of all, a motion-capture studio. He wants to host game jams and tournaments at the studio, and he’d encourage schools to bring students on field trips. He dreams of a community hub for creativity and collaboration.

The incubator wouldn’t just be a place to learn and create — it would be a lifeline for Gulfport’s vulnerable youth. It certainly would have helped Weymouth when he was a kid. He comes from a large family, and he left home as a teenager so his kin could afford to live a better life. It was a “one less mouth in the house” kind of thing, he says. As a young adult, he floated between the streets and stable housing, and he met other young people in similar situations along the way.

Another potential home for Weymouth’s gaming incubator, captured via Google Maps.

“I’ve just seen all these people go through this horrible stuff, and I’m like: That person was a beautiful artist,” he says. “If they just had a place to paint, they might not have gone down that terrible route. They could have seen a future.”

Weymouth had a leg up in terms of job placement. He loved video games from an early age, and that interest put him on a technical path. He taught himself how to program and eventually ended up fixing computers at a “big blue box” retailer. He’s 29 now, married and with a three-year-old daughter.

“There needs to be more business here for creativeness, gaming, entertainment in general,” Weymouth says. “If you don’t want to go to a casino or go to a bar around here, as a young adult, you really don’t have much else to do.”

The gaming incubator could be that business. Weymouth isn’t all talk; he’s been trying to sell the idea to potential investors in groups and at private dinners for a year at least. In his pitch, the gaming incubator offers an affordable monthly subscription that provides access to the studio’s tools and experts. The program helps burgeoning developers create and publish video games, and then takes a slice of the profit to keep itself afloat.

No one has bitten yet. Weymouth says investors have typically responded with things like “No one cares about video games in Mississippi,” and “There is no game industry in the state — for good reason.”

Weymouth says Vellum Wars is like Super Smash Bros., but you won’t need a Wii to play it.

He attempted to secure small-business loans and funding from banks, with similar luck. Interest rates were too high (“financial suicide,” as Weymouth puts it), and other complications blocked those avenues. That’s one reason he’s working on Vellum Wars, his party brawler for PC. If he proves that video games can be financially successful, his incubator pitch might carry more weight.

“I decided, Well, I’m going to have to do it the hard way,” he says. “I decided to sit down and create a game with as much inner resources that I could. Everyone’s always told me my whole life that I don’t do things simply. I always go over the top on things, and here I am doing it again.”

The reality

Weymouth’s incubator idea is mired in red tape, but it isn’t completely unheard of. Rock Band Blitz and Dance Central co-developer Fire Hose Games launched an incubator program based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2013, with the goal of helping new developers create and sell their first games. So far, the studio has brought Chris Chung’s cat simulator, Catlateral Damage, to PC, Mac and Linux, and it’s working with Batterystaple Games on the action platformer 20XX, which is on Steam Early Access.

Embody a feisty feline in Catlateral Damage.

These are two of Fire Hose’s successes, though its first incubator game, Let’s Quip, didn’t do so hot, according to studio co-founder Eitan Glinert. Fire Hose eventually removed that one from the App Store.

“Two out of three? That’s pretty good!” Glinert says.

Even though Glinert calls Fire Hose’s incubator (or “accelerator”) a success overall, he advises caution for someone like Weymouth, who’s attempting to start a program from scratch in a tech-barren region of the country. Glinert correctly guesses that it will be difficult for Weymouth to find both developers and investors in Mississippi.

“No sensible investor wants to invest in video games right now — it’s a horrible industry to invest in at the moment, at least on the small or indie scale,” Glinert says.

Weymouth’s biggest issue may not be funding, though. Glinert says that the most problematic aspect of running an incubator is actually finding talented teams that can keep the business running. Searching for these developers takes time, and supporting their efforts takes money, and it’s best to invest only in those that will churn out profitable, attention-grabbing games.

20XX is on Steam Early Access and it’s already selling well, Glinert says.

“I didn’t expect how hard it would be to do this when I started,” Glinert says. “Plus, you’re limited largely by region — it’s hard for us to compete with accelerators on the West Coast, so we’re really only looking at folks on the Eastern Seaboard.”

A new accelerator would work best if it’s tied to an existing source of quality developers, such as the Independent Games Festival, IndieFund or even a university with a gaming program, Glinert says. That last part might be difficult for Weymouth, since there are no video game–specific programs in Mississippi universities, according to The Art Career Project.

Plus, Glinert says, it’s nearly impossible to find funding for these things. Fire Hose ended up bootstrapping its own accelerator.

“I think your best bet to fund an incubator, if you don’t already have the money, is to find successful or rich game devs who understand the industry, believe in you and what you’re doing, and want to back you,” he says.

Overall, Glinert says an incubator can definitely be profitable, but it’s a long road packed with massive, money-shaped potholes.

Limbo

All of this may not be terrible news for Weymouth.

He isn’t interested in working only with the top developers in the nation; he wants people from his area to have a place they can express themselves and network with other creative types. His incubator is community-focused; it includes plans not just for video game development, but other forms of art, too. He hasn’t explored all of his funding options, and alternative routes like Kickstarter are still on the table, even though Weymouth says he has a problem taking money from people before he has an actual product to deliver. He even likes the idea of running a nonprofit business. Still, he’ll have to figure out some way to keep the lights on.

Finding an investor will be incredibly difficult, but Weymouth already knew that. Besides, he doesn’t want just any investor to throw money at this project. He wants someone who cares about Mississippi.

“The investor who is in the state is doing it for the people here,” Weymouth says. “If I get somebody from out of state, they’re not going to feel the same as I am about the local people here.”

Vellum Wars should be ready to brawl in about six months, Weymouth says.

Weymouth wants to build a hub for future video game developers, filmmakers, musicians and artists to flourish. He wants young people to be proud of their home state, and, in turn, he wants Mississippi to be proud of its creative pioneers. Weymouth wants to show his neighbors, family and friends that there’s a bright future in Mississippi’s gaming and art scene, if only it’s allowed to take root.

“You deserve a future,” he says, speaking to the hypothetical artist at his incubator’s door. “You have talents and skills that you’ve acquired through hard work. You deserve a future. You’re not lazy. You just have struggles — and we all have struggles. It would be cool to just be able to remove the wall and allow creative prowess to get some exposure and a future.”

Weymouth’s dreams are immense, potentially naive, and maybe impossible to achieve. But he’s been dreaming big all of his life. Why stop now?

“I’m not in this to make money,” he says. “If I wanted to make money, I’d go get a nine-to-five where the money is guaranteed. I’m in this for a future where I’m not a cog in a machine. I’m doing something to help people.”

Win college tuition if you’re good at ‘Heroes of the Storm’

If you’re good at throwing, catching or hitting objects with sticks, then it’s possible to go to college for free on an athletic scholarship. Kids who spent warm summer days indoors working out how to trounce their foes online, on the other hand, get nothing more than a raised eyebrow and a sneer from the admissions tutor. ESPN and Blizzard are hoping to rectify that situation with its Heroes of the Dorm contest, which is coming back for a second year. The tournament matches teams from various colleges, with the members of the winning team earning free tuition for the rest of their degree.

2015 was a big year for eSports’ slow creep toward the mainstream and 2016 is already on course to be even better for gamers. A few weeks back, ESPN launched a dedicated section to the sport, and the CW will broadcast a Mortal Kombat tournament for the first time next month. If you’re a college-age Heroes of the Storm player and fancy participating, you can sign up between now and February 18th. The first matches will be broadcast on March 19th, with ESPN3, Twitch and YouTube all taking part in the fun.

Source: Activision, Heroes of the Dorm