New blog post!
Reality is a fiction created by our brains, a mental model of the outside world. Knowing how this works is crucial to game development and these mental simulations has a huge effect on how a game feels and plays.
Playing a videogame can put you in a state where the borders between your self and the character gets blurry. This is one of the major differences that sets games apart from other mediums such as films and literature. When creating games, evoking this feeling of presence is worth trying to achieve.
Latest blog post:
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2017/04/evoking-presence.html
Share your best Frictional Games inspired creation!
We know there’s a lot of great things being made all the time, inspired by our games. We’d love to see more of it, and make it visible to all of the community!
Share your creations with us on Facebook or Twitter (use the tag @frictionalgames) before Tuesday, April 18th. A very unbiased jury (the Frictional Games team) will pick four winners. And the prize? A brand new Tobii Eye Tracker 4C, courtesy of Tobii Gaming!
https://tobiigaming.com/eye-tracker-4c/
Resident Evil and the power of narrative context
Blog post on combining narrative and gameplay, making a game even more immersive.
At Frictional Games, we want our games to be as immersive as possible. And that's why we're extremely happy to reveal our collaboration with Tobii Gaming - as from today Tobii eye tracking is enabled in SOMA on Steam!
We're so excited that we will launch a big sale on Steam, starting in 4 hours.
SOMA 66% off.
Amnesia The Dark Descent, Amnesia: a Machine for Pigs, Amnesia: Collection, and Penumbra 80% off. Enjoy!
https://youtu.be/9hVauJMni1w
Videogames - too fun for their own good?
A sneezing engineer was more than enough to keep the audience spellbound during the early days of film. But soon, filmmakers had to add the element of storytelling, in order to keep the viewers' attention.
As a medium, videogames are getting along just fine by relying on fun gameplay. But is it time to disassemble games and start building them with a focus on storytelling, as well as gameplay?
New blog post: http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2017/03/videogames-too-fun-for-their-own-good.html
New blog post on traversal
How do you handle travel time in games, and how do you keep the players intrigued and content during these periods. How do make going from one place to another fun? And what's the difference in our expectations depending on the type of game we choose to play?
Read our new blog post, where Thomas shares his thoughts on the subject. And let us know what you think in the comments!
People of Frictional - Meet our Executive Producer!
Time to get to know our executive producer, Fredrik, a little bit better. He shares some thoughts on our future projects, and let you get an insight on how Frictional Games is transforming into a two-project studio.
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2017/02/people-of-frictional-meet-fredrik-our.html
Patch notes
Game:
- Fixed a rare bug which caused the Omnitool not to activate near door panels
Modding:
- Added more script documentation to the helper scripts
- Fixed bug that prevented editor dialogs from being opened more than once
- Fixed the cMatrixf constuctor using the wrong arguments
SOMA Update released: Modding goodies!
Version 1.10 Changes:
- Support for mod dependencies in game: a mod can be built on top of other mods without the need of messing around with resources now.
- Support for mod dependencies in tools: this means tools will resolve dependencies and all added assets will become available to the user (and no more tweaking of resources.cfg file needed!)
- Fixed long startup times in LevelEditor, also reduced memory footprint when using a mesh object creator (static objects, entities, detailmeshes edit modes).
- Brought back random scale and rotation controls in LevelEditor.
- Added some nice icons to the tools and minor bugfixes.
And last but not least: thanks to the awesome work by Patrik, we now have an Amnesia asset pack! This is published on Steam Workshop and can be used as dependency to create your own Amnesia-esque custom story for SOMA:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=570600440
And here a sample mod using the asset pack:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=570668616
