South Korean mobile giant Netmarble has raised $2.3 billion through its IPO, falling just short of the $2.4 billion it predicted earlier this year. 

Still, it’s hard to imagine company execs will be too disappointed with the share sale, which is the second biggest on record in Netmarble’s home country. 

As reported by Reuters, the company sold 17 million shares – which roughly equates to a 20 percent stake – for 157,000 won ($138) each. Overall, the IPO saw Netmarble valued at 13.3 trillion won ($11.7 billion).

According to analysts, Netmarble’s roster of hit mobile titles, including big earner Lineage II: Revolution, is what drew investors in. 

“The company not only has just released a mega-hit game the likes of which has never been seen in South Korea, but it is seen to have a strong lineup of games coming soon in the mobile sector,” said Shinyoung Securities analyst Jang Won-yeol. “The amount of shares offered was almost nonexistent compared to demand.”

As for what Netmarble plans to do next, the company seems to be eyeing up more acquisitons, and could spend up to $4.4 billion on big name deals in the weeks and months ahead.

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The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

I have been making multiplayer maps in the Call of Duty modding community for past 8 years. Over the years, I have learned a lot of design rules and principles that I have successfully integrated in my level design process. I will take you through all the steps that will help you make a fun multiplayer map.

For the purpose of this blog, I will talk about designing a multiplayer map for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Lets name this map ‘Tugurios’ and set it in slums. Now we can talk a little about the story and setting of the map.

• Tugurios means slums in Spanish and the map is based around slums in Venezuela



• Gold was discovered in hills and slums developed close to the hills to provide labor



• Years later the hills dried up. With jobs no more available, the slums became the hub for weapons and drug trafficking



• When things got out of control, the government sent in special forces to deal with the situation



• The match takes place at noon time and one team spawns in the slums while the other team spawns on the road on the other side of the map

Here is the top down view, to give you a clear picture of the map

Here are all the locations in the map:

Hills

• Hills and surrounding areas will be shown dry and dusty with a lot of corners and jagged edges to show effects of mining



• Any buildings in this area will resemble corrugated metal sheds with windows which were once being used as offices

Ditch

• Ditch will have a muddy ground with water flowing in the middle and vegetation growing on slopes and banks. Few large rocks will be placed on the bed to provide cover

Slums

•  Small shanties made out of red brick, cinder blocks and corrugated sheets



•  Piles of rubbish and debris everywhere which can also be used for cover



•  Some shanties are piled on top of other shanties to make 2 or 3 story shanties



•  Hanging electrical wires everywhere



•  Walls have a lot of grime and graffiti



•  Ground is either made up of broken concrete with open drains or green grass with plenty of vegetation

Road

• Road is where Team A will spawn. It is made up of broken, dusty asphalt with cars parked at places to provide cover.



• It is half or one story above the ground so that it is not visible from ground and the player has to either climb the stairs or mantle up at certain locations

Crane base

• A large concrete base for a crane that was used during mining operations. The crane is gone but the concrete base is still there.



• Looks like a concrete bunker with rebar and metal rivets poking out of broken corners and surfaces



• Has a large circular bracket on top that hides one entry location from another.



• The base resembles the concrete bases used for heavy anti aircraft guns during Second World War

• The area marked in red shows the slums



• Small, irregularly placed shanties piled on top of each other and some are 3 stories high



• The area marked in green is the road next to the hills. Hills have blocky appearance because of mining



• Both areas are separated by a deep ditch, marked in yellow. It is one story deep and has to be crossed to get on other side of the map

Height Variations

There are a lot of height variations in the map. These are used to block long lines of sight and make the map more interesting.

• 1 is considered ground or first floor which is about 10 feet high from floor to ceiling. It will be used as reference. Ditch is at height 1.



• Other numbers represent the height as number of floors



• For example, the road is 3 floors high from ditch

Team Spawns

• Special forces, or Team A, spawn on the road shown by the green patch



• Militia, or Team B, spawns in the slums shown by red patch

Objectives

I have always designed Call of Duty: Modern Warfare multiplayer maps keeping Domination game type in mind. This helps a lot in designing a well balanced map to make sure that one team does not have unfair advantage over another.

• Three points in the map shown as A, B and C represent the three flags in Domination styled gameplay



• Teams can capture A and C easily as they are close to their spawns



• B will be the hardest to capture and hold as it is in the middle of the map and covered by many positions

Paths

Critical Path

• The red line connecting the two sections of the map shows the Critical or the shortest path



• The path is shortest, but goes through the most dangerous areas of the map

Flanks

• The green lines show the secondary paths



• Both of these paths are longer than Critical path, but offer flanking positions and bypass the action zone in the center



• These paths, however, have long lines of sight making it easier for snipers to pick targets off

Points of Interest

There are several points of interest or hotspots in the map that give advantage to the team occupying them

• The first spot in circled in red. This is a ledge overlooking the ditch. It is 3 stories high from the ditch



• Players can cover the ditch and two other hotspots from here which will be shown next



• It is more accessible to the team A spawning on the road

• The spot is circled in red and is 3 stories high from the ditch



• It is accessible only from the back side therefore players playing as militia can reach this spot quickly



• This spot covers the ditch, the hotspot on the opposite side and one on the upper right side shown in the next slide

• The spot is circled in red. This is a large concrete base for a crane that was used during the mining times



• This spot can be accessed from both sides by stairs



• The spot overlooks the ditch and is 3 stories higher than ditch.



• The players can cover the whole length of the ditch from here and also two other hotspots shown in the previous slides

• The spot is circled in red. Here the three passages meet and is also the Critical path



• A 2 story tall building on the right side of the spot can be used by team A to overlook the critical path



• Enemy team players can go to the ledge on the left from here and take out friendly players overlooking the ditch



• If the enemy controls this spot, they can control the ditch and domination point A

• The spot is circled in red. It overlooks the domination point C and also the paths coming from the ditch



• Its a 2 story tall building that can be accessed from both sides by stairs. A passage on the back side of the building can provide safe passage to attacking enemy players



• Team B has to hold this point to watch the paths leading to base and also lay down fire on domination point C

Lines of sight

Lines of sight are very important in a multiplayer map as they decide the engagement lengths and also control cover and AI placement in a map. I have integrated the lines of sight in the top down view of the map for better understanding.

• Blue cones show the players’ sight from ledges or 2nd or 3rd story windows



• The cones are shown small just to demonstrate players’ sight. Actual lines of sight will be much longer in the level



• This helps in understanding where windows and other high places are located in the map and which areas they cover

These are just some of the basic design principles that I have discussed here, but they will help you start your level design journey. Later I will include other design elements like cover mechanics, level flow, and weapons and vehicle placement.

Valve is hoping to cut down on the number of high-level players that use multiple accounts for ranked matches of Dota 2 by requiring players to register their phone numbers ahead of queuing up. 

The policy change aims to gently discourage players from using alternate accounts in ranked matches, a practice which often would muddle Dota 2’s skill-ranked matchmaking and create a negative experience for those unfairly matched against a high-level player on a lower-ranked alternate account.

The system requires players to tie a phone number to their primary account before queuing for ranked matches. That assignment can be changed down the road, but once a number is removed from an account it can’t be reused for at least 3 months. Valve also notes that online phone numbers, such as those provided by Google Voice, aren’t allowed.

Ultimately, no system is perfect but Valve expects to see a “noticeable reduction” in the number of players using multiple accounts in both ranked and unranked matchmaking after the change occurs on May 4.

“In the early days, animation was about making things come to life. It could be a coat hanger, a tail of an animal, or something’s mustache, or a building….[Everything] was a similar version of that with objects, and with the world itself, with the whole universe.”

– Everything developer David OReilly

David OReilly’s Everything, a followup to his 2014 game Mountain, is an unconventional open-world game that doesn’t rely on quests, or other familiar design tropes to get players to navigate the world. Instead, it builds a game world that exists from the largest to smallest most possible levels and encourages players to become every object in those environments, which range from planets to lions to buildings to cells to one-dimensional objects.

It’s not a game with a “win state” per se, and it doesn’t encourage any competition or conflict, but as OReilly explained to us today on the Gamasutra Twitch channel, there was a lot of thought put into the game’s seemingly undriven nature. For one, OReilly says the game largely became possible after experimenting in different game engines and realizing it was possible to bring any object fo life. 

“I got really excited about every object in the universe being a playable character,” OReilly told us. “That led to thinking about groups of things, and how everything is a member of a group, living or dead.”

OReilly also felt like there was a link between this kind of experimentation and works created in the early days of animation, when 2D animators worked to bring all kind of objects to life, even ones that had no life at all.

For more insight from OReilly on the development of Everything, including how the game’s “cheap” movement animations for animals are actually very complex, and how he compares his work in 3D animation versus game development, be sure to watch the full video seen above. 

And if you enjoyed this conversation, you can follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel for more developer interviews, editor roundtables and gameplay commentary. 

“I love story and narrative and I think you can use that story and narrative to tie your action together and that will give your action meaning and context in a game. That was my idea and that was what really drove what I was doing.”

– Chris Roberts, speaking in 2013 about what drove him to create the first Wing Commander game.

Game designer Chris Roberts is best known these days for sitting in the command chair of the capital ship that is Star Citizen, the massively crowdfunded (to the tune of over $146 million) space game currently being developed by Roberts’ Cloud Imperium Games.

Some devs may be unfamiliar with his long history in the game industry, which stretches back beyond Origin Systems (where he created the venerable Wing Commander series of games) to the bedroom computing era of ’80s British game development. 

Video game history buff Jimmy Maher has set out to tell a bit of Roberts’ story on his Digital Antiquarian blog, and the first post is a fascinating read that speaks to the state of Origin Systems in the ’80s and ’90s. According to Maher’s reporting, Roberts came to join Origin thanks to a chance encounter at an Austin tabletop game shop, and eventually wound up working on what became perhaps one of the (now defunct) game studio’s most high-profile franchises: Wing Commander.

Maher tells the story of how Wing Commander was honed down from Roberts’ vision of a proposed “space-conquest game” into an in-cockpit game about flying combat missions in space, one with a unique focus on keeping players engaged by removing all artificial reminders that they were playing a game.

“I didn’t want anything that made you sort of…pulled you out of being in this world. I didn’t want that typical game UI, or ‘Here’s how many lives you’ve got, here’s what high score you’ve got,"” Roberts said in a 2013 interview cited by Maher. “I always felt that broke the immersion. If you wanted to save the game you’d go to the barracks and you’d click on the bunk. If you wanted to exit, you’d click on the airlock. It was all meant to be in that world and so that was what the drive was.”

As Maher points out, this philosophy of design (coupled with what sounds like a sort of seat-of-the-pants approach to development) led Roberts and the rest of the team to implement intriguing design features like a branching mission structure, meant to avoid sending underperforming players to a “Game Over” screen and thus breaking their immersion in the game.

The rest of the blog post is worth reading in full, though it doesn’t quite get up to the point where Wing Commander was released in 1990, chronicling instead Roberts’ route from Manchester, England to Origin Systems in Austin, Texas and his early work.

Stephens College has joined the ranks of the growing number of American colleges that offer scholarships for varsity eSports, but unlike the other schools on that list, Stephens College is attended exclusively by women.

According to ESPN, the Missouri-based institution now counts eSports, specifically Overwatch, among its nine athletics programs and is offering partial scholarships for players that join its team. With this, Stephens College becomes the first all-women’s college to offer scholarships for varsity eSports.

“Our mission is to ensure that women can succeed and can make choices about anything they do in any environment and in any profession,” Stephens College president Dianne Lynch told ESPN. “That’s our mission. So why would we not do it in eSports?”

The college plans to assemble a 12-person team, which includes a starting lineup and bench of six Overwatch players each,to compete in the Tespa Collegiate Series this coming fall.

Additionally, this makes Stephens College the 31st college to join the National Association of Collegiate eSports, which ESPN notes makes up 95 percent of the current varsity eSports teams nationally.

One of the most memorable features of the recent PlayStation 4 title Horizon: Zero Dawn are the sophisticated robots, known as Machines, that wander the game world like a natural part of the landscape. They are clearly automatons, with all their inner workings plainly visible. But they also exhibit unmistakable animal-like behaviors and movements. These Machines are a key feature of the game’s unique primordial futurist milieu.

How were these distinctive robot/creatures conceived of and designed? We talked with several devs from Guerrilla Games, the studio behind HZD, to see just what went into the making of the Machines.

At the start of the design process, the team queried local Holland universities, including the Delft University of Technology’s robotics department, for assistance. (Among the insights gleaned — far-robots would potentially be 3D printed.) One question the developers posed: Are there areas of nature that could be improved upon?

“Skeletons, they told us,” says Jan Bart van Beek, studio art director. “Skeletons are kind of shit, because they’re on the inside,  surrounded by very soft tissue. And it’s a single point of failure — if your leg breaks, you’re pretty much dead as an animal.”

Tallneck

Instead, the profs suggested the possibility of something more like exoskeletons to the team–think lobsters, not humans, and you’ve got the right idea.

“If you look at some of our robot designs, you can see the outside has sort of a metal framework, and there is soft tissue on the insides, which also creates a convenient soft spot for arrows to be pumped into, ” Bart van Beek says.

“All these things came from the inspiration of the robotics engineer explaining to us how they would build a robotic T-Rex if they had to do that,” he adds.

Thunderjaw

Originally, the machines weren’t intended to have such animal-like movements. The team initially made the machines behave in a way that was more, well, mechanical. “It felt too much like a bug, like it wasn’t moving the way it should be moving,” says Richard Oud, lead creature animator.

To bring the designs into the game — instead of waiting for a perfected model — the team would take unpolished models directly from ZBrush, slap a skeleton in, and bring it right in. Even if it was running at a slow FPS, it would give them some idea of the creature.

“You had to have big tough ones that were fast and deadly, and you also wanted ones that were easier at the beginning of the game,” says Blake Politeski, machine designer. “And at the same time, we needed to find ways that these would fit in with the fiction of these sort of robots that are maintaining nature. They’re part of nature, so it had to fit with that narrative as well.”

Watchers

The modeling was in and of itself a colossal task. It took “man years” of work, and Bart van Beek believes that it took five modelers around eight months for the T-Rex-like Thunderjaw. And that was just on the modeling end: it was around 18 months from the initial sketch to get it working and enjoyable in-game.

Despite the work, the team had a “realization that if we would nail the Thunderjaw, we would sort of know how to make the game,” Bart van Beek says.

And to dial in how these robotic animals should move, the team even pulled in Dr. Stuart Sumida, who has done anatomical consulting on myriad projects including films The Lion King, Dinosaur, Hercules, and Harry Potter, and Disney World’s Countdown to Extinction and Expedition Everest rides. Oud also took a several month long course focused on animal and creature animation, as well.

Stormbird

Balancing the design of the animals with their in-game functions was another challenge, especially in terms of the visual complexity of the machines. 

“There was always a risk maybe that it would just overload everything, you’d end up with a Christmas tree problem, where you have all these kinds of blinking lights and different colors and you’d actually have no idea what’s going on anymore,” Bart van Beek says.

Animation and design worked together on this issue, so that all of the various machines’ gameplay elements were kept intact, while also keeping it clear to the players what they were there for.

Weight was also a challenge. The bigger things are, the harder they fall, as they say. But it also tends to mean the slower they move. Dennis Zopfi, lead machine designer, mentioned this difficulty in the Behemoth in particular.

Behemoth 

“From [an] AI and animation point, it was very hard to get right … you can’t make the thing turn too fast, because then it loses its weight,” Zopfi says. “But if it cannot turn fast enough then, because the player’s very agile and athletic, so the players run by very fast and we had a lot of issues with making it look right but also making it responsive enough to deal with the player.”

Conveying weight to the player was a combination of factors, including the sound, animation, particles, and how the camera shakes.

“There’s lots of subtle little things maybe that can make a bunch of polygons colliding with a bunch of other polygons sort of look like a real thing,” Bart van Beek says.

Guerrilla Games shared a series of images and videos with us that show the process of creating one particular type of Machine. Specifically it’s the LongLeg, a flightless avian robot that’s somewhat reminiscent of the extinct apex predator known as “terror birds.”

1. Visual concept art of the LongLeg

2. Final model of the LongLeg

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3. Animation rig of the LongLeg

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4. Reference footage: a real flightless bird

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5a. Blocking (CTRLs)

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5b. Block (No CTRLs)

6. LongLeg animation network

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7. LongLeg final polish

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8. The end result: LongLeg in the game

Looking back at the team’s past work — like the giant spider-like MAWLR in KillZone 3 – brings into perspective just how quickly gaming technology continues to improve.

“That was incredibly complex at the time,” Politeski says. “And I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God we can’t do anything bigger than this.’ And then I look back now and it’s like, even our most basic robots overshadow that a lot. The amount that goes into each of these and how technically detailed they are and how complex they are is not really going to be seen by the players. But  to me, it’s actually amazing how big and complex these things are, and how we somehow managed to get it all working together.”