Month: April 2022

Nintendo has announced that Splatoon 3 will be arriving to splatter ink all over the Nintendo Switch this fall on Sept. 9, 2022.

The launch date comes alongside an extended look at Splatoon 3‘s 4v4 Turf War multiplayer mode on one of the game’s new maps, Eeltail Alley. It’s an interesting take on third-person competitive shooters like the other Splatoon titles. The goal is not to fire paint at your opponent, but cover the map with your color.

In addition to multiplayer, Splatoon 3 also includes Salmon Run, Splatoon’s version of cooperative Horde modes, and a single-player campaign where players will “join Agent 3 in a fight against the unruly Octarians and discover the secrets of a mysterious place called Alterna and the Fuzzy Ooze.”

To tide folks over Nintendo is also making Splatoon 2‘s Octo Expansion DLC available to Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack subscribers starting today, which brings 80 additional missions to the 2017 game.

It’s Earth Day today, an annual opportunity to demonstrate support for the environment, and to call for policies that help to protect our planet. Apple promotes the occasion as usual with prominent links on its apple.com homepage .

The company kicked things off earlier this month by announcing that it would donate $1 to the World Wildlife Fund for every Apple Pay transaction made in Apple Stores, through the Apple Store app, or on its website from April 14 to today …

Background

Earth Day takes place on April 22 each year. This year’s focal points are on The Great Global Cleanup, sustainable fashion, tree planting, and climate literacy.

The Great Global Cleanup is a worldwide campaign to remove billions of pieces of trash from neighborhoods, beaches, rivers, lakes, trails, and parks — reducing waste and plastic pollution, improving habitats, and preventing harm to wildlife and humans.

The fashion industry is responsible for over 8% of total greenhouse gas emissions. Sustainable Fashion refers to a clothing supply chain that is ecologically and socially responsible. This is your chance to change the fashion industry away from fast fashion and towards sustainable practices in sourcing and production as well as distribution and marketing.

As little as $1 can plant a tree. Home to about 80% of the world’s biodiversity, forests are collectively the second biggest storehouse of carbon after oceans, absorbing significant amounts of greenhouse gasses. Forests also help to increase biodiversity and protect waterways. They can even improve soil nutrition and provide buffers against natural disasters.

Join us in the fight for climate literacy. It is time to prepare a new generation of workers, students and citizens for the climate crisis. We need public understanding of how to stop climate change and environmental harm.

Apple’s homepage emphasizes Earth Day

The Apple homepage features an environmental-focused heading.

Clicking the link leads to Apple’s environment microsite, with the environmental credentials of the company’s products getting the headline. It goes on to describe the company’s plan to make its entire supply chain carbon-neutral by 2030, as well as other steps the company already takes.

Apple typically promotes through the App Store sources of environmental education, as well as causes people can support, and we’ll no doubt see this year’s selections later in the day.

V Buckenham pulled up the Downpour app during our Zoom call Friday, and within a few seconds, we were making a game. Buckenham snapped photos of our faces on the screen, then turned the camera on themselves for a selfie. Buckenham was able to link these images together with a few taps of their smartphone and created a game from them. It wasn’t their best game but it was an enjoyable experience.

“The idea is that you can be waiting at a bus stop, download [Downpour], and then by the time you get off your bus at the other end, you’ll have made a game and released it,” Buckenham said. “That’s the kind of thing I want to be possible.”

Buckenham, the founder of Downpour Limited, is part of a community of creators making game design tools with an aim towards making game design more accessible, approachable, and creative. They said it’s not necessarily the singular future of video games, but one of many futures: an option for creators looking to do something different, not a replacement for traditional game-making methods.

Polygon spoke to Buckenham via Zoom last week to chat about this community of creators making new tools — including Downpour, which Buckenham hopes will come out this year.

[Ed. note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]

Polygon: I’d love to start by hearing about you and your history in the video game industry.

V Buckenham: I’ve been around the games industry for about 10 years, around the indie space. I worked with Die Gute Fabrik on Mutazione, which you might know — many, many years ago, because that was in development for years. I worked at a start-up called Sensible Object on a game called Beasts of Balance, which was a digital and physical stacking game. Niantic acquired the company, and I was able to work on things that are still unknown.

Basically, I was there long enough to earn money to buy a house and put together some savings. I left to go do my own things. While I have been working on several things since then, Downpour has been my main focus. The other thing, which is not actually video games, but it’s pretty relevant to Downpour, is that I was involved in the Twitter bot community around five to seven years ago and made a site called Cheap Bots Done Quick. There’s, like, tens of thousands of people using it to host Twitter bots. That’s my biggest, most notable creative tool. I think the fact that I’d made that gives me a lot of confidence that I can make something and it’s going to find users. This will allow people to achieve things that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to.

Image: Downpour

What is Downpour? What is Downpour?

Downpour is a tool for making games quickly and approachably. You can download Downpour while you wait at a bus stop and release it when you reach the other side. This is what I would like to see happen. It’s just a way of saying that it can be done faster but the amount of things you will make is limited. I don’t know if you know HyperCard, this ancient MacOS thing, but basically if you have an image and you can link bits of that image to other images, there’s a lot you can do with that. You can do a lot with it. You can also use it to create your games by drawing on paper and making silly faces. That just feels much more tactile than doing it on a computer, and it means you can spend time outside of that. We all have smartphones and cameras so we can use it in ways that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to. It was particularly important to think about teenagers, who may not have access to a laptop or other tech.

The bit that’s missing from this [right now] is a button that you can press and then it uploads to my servers, and you can share [your game] immediately. Although there are many other functions I should be focusing on, this is the core of it.

Why is it important to you to make game design more approachable? Downpour seems to be based on Bitsy’s experience with Twine and Twine.

Honestly, with all the things going on right now, I don’t know if I can justify it as actually important. It’s great to watch people make stuff. That brings joy. And if I can make people make more things … the feeling of making an approachable tool and someone does something with it, and you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s really cool. That’s something I wouldn’t have thought of. It’s difficult to match the joy that you can see in others and how they make an impact. That’s great.

Do you think that approachable game-making tools are sort of the future of games? Do you think that game-making tools are the future of games?

Image: Jenny Jiao Hsia

Yeah, this is a movement I’d seen around, and seen some exciting stuff, like some of Llaura [McGee’s] early games. There was the Flatgame Jam. And Jenny Jiao Hsia’s and i made sure to hold your head sideways. This game is incredible. But yeah, it’s just just a style of here’s how we can make stuff more approachable, especially in that assets should ideally be made on paper.

Making stuff on paper feels really great. But then there’s this sticky bit in the middle where I have to get stuff into the computer. Then I need to create scripts in Unity. Yes, Unity can handle scripts. It’s just too difficult for technical reasons. The other part of that is that we had flatgame stuff at Now Play This in the past, and seeing people get really into it. The setup there was that people were drawing on pieces of paper and they were being scanned using this tool that someone had made. That was really good. People were putting together games using the stuff that was made by it. That kind of showing how stuff is made and making it more approachable is great, but at the same time, it’s a shame that people couldn’t make the games themselves. This was quite a while ago. However, it’s something I knew could have been improved upon. OK, actually, I can make this better.

Is there anything else you think people should know about this project or your experience in making it?

Other than the fact that it will be out in late this year, what’s important is that people are creating these tools. Nathalie Lawhead, [their] blog posts on this really give a sense of the vibrant community. It’s not like I’m pioneering this thing that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Because there are so many cool tools, I do this. You can do it too. Also, a shout out to sok-stories, the Sokpop Collective tool. It has you drawing these little things, but the drawing interface is really nicely constrained. And then you’re just dragging and dropping things. And then it sometimes turns into a third thing or produces another thing.