Born from an Unreal Tournament 2004 mod in 2005, Tripwire's Killing Floor created a splash when it launched in full in 2009. By 2014, the zombie-slaughtering FPS had shifted close to three million copies.
The in-development Killing Floor: Incursion offers familiar Zed-slashing fare but with an up close and personal VR twist. At the PC Gamer Weekender, Tom invited Tripwire president John Gibson to the Dev Stage to talk all things Killing Floor, not least its incoming virtual reality-inspired iteration.
Expect trailers, in-game footage and questions from the presentation's live audience. Over to Tom and John:
Apparently a new holiday has been christened today, as Frontier Developments declared it Planet Coaster Cheat Day and took the opportunity to reveal some previously undiscovered cheats hidden in its theme park builder. There's a whole slew of them, but the one in the video above is easily the coolest. Name a go-kart track in your park "Bollard" and you'll be able to take direct control of a go-kart in first person.
WASD steers the kart, Shift honks the horn, and there you go: it's no Mario Kart, but you can drive around a course of your own design at ground level. For an extra boost, name an NPC "Andy Chappell" and take control of their kart. If you can avoid spinning out, you'll rocket past the other racers in their pathetic, normal speed go-karts. Hopefully the modding community will find a way to make this multiplayer, and we'll give it a week before horrific first person go-kart accidents start showing up on YouTube.
Some highlights from the other revealed cheats include being able to take control of a park guest in first person as they walk around your park by renaming them "TegidCam", turning off roller coaster friction by renaming a guest "Andy Fletcher", and giving security guards the ability to plow through guests like a bulldozer by renaming them "Lockettman". You can also make all of your guests simultaneously vomit by renaming a shop "MCLINTHE" if that's the sort of thing you are into.
You can see a full list of all the cheats Frontier showed off today on Planet Coaster's official forums, though it's safe to assume there's more where those came from waiting to be found. I thought cheats were nearly extinct nowadays, so it's nice to see a game keep the unscrupulous torch lit.
After months of murmurs within the farming role-player's forums, Stardew Valley now has localisation in six new languages. Update 1.2 also brings with it improvements to controller support as well as a host of bug fixes.
Surplus to its default English option, players can now sow and socialise in German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Brazilian-Portuguese.
Publisher Chucklefish bills this as the latest update's "biggest" new feature, however controller support has been improved across a couple of key areas—such as snapping between menu buttons as default, and accelerating faster in the event this function is disabled.
On the bug fixes front, the following points have been resolved/adjusted:
Fixed lighting shader not covering the whole screen on Mac and Linux.
Switching from 'Windowed Borderless' to 'Fullscreen' should now go straight to fullscreen instead of Windowed mode.
Wallpapers and floors no longer have a tile placement indicator showing a random object.
Increased stability of preference-saving code. This should fix infrequent crashes that require the player to delete startup_preferences.
Fixed a crash that can happen when a pig tries to spawn a truffle but there’s no space for it.
Fixed a couple of rare crashes that could have occurred at any time during the game.
Fixed a typo of the word ‘pronounce’ in the marriage event.
Fixed the player not getting the recipe for Cookies if they skip Evelyn’s event.
Farming level now affects crop yield prior to level 10.
Chucklefish also notes that update 1.2 is for now exclusive to PC and that while Steam players should see the update installed immediately, GOG players may notice a slight delay in its implementation.
After developing Prison Architect for six years, three of which were in Early Access, developer Introversion Software's next game is getting a much quicker turnaround. In fact, the first-person exploration game called Scanner Sombre will be coming out this Wednesday, April 26. No Early Access, no beta, just a full launch later this week for what Introversion's lead designer Chris Delay tells us is a "palate cleanser" after Prison Architect.
Scanner Sombre uses a unique visual mechanic that mimics a real-life LIDAR scanner. The game's world is completely invisible, but you can send out thousands of points of light to cover the landscape and slowly reveal the space around you. Delay told us the whole game is essentially one giant particle cloud with no limit to the number of LIDAR dots you can create, and every dot's position is saved exactly where you put them. A rainbow color scheme indicates distance and depth as you slowly work your way through the game's mysterious cave system.
Scanner Sombre is a shorter game compared to ones Introversion has made in the past, obviously with a much shorter development cycle than Prison Architect, and Delay said that was the goal from the very beginning. "We've actually spent longer on it than we initially intended. We wanted it to be a really quick turnaround, nice breath of fresh air, nice palate cleanser as we called it internally."
It was also apparently no small task to get this particle effect working. "It was really hard," Delay said. "It took us ages. We started out using a particle system that stopped working after about 10,000 particles, and then ended up [restarting] basically entirely from scratch just so that we could have enough particles on screen to make it look as dense as it does."
The Witness designer Jonathan Blow has shown off an early prototype of a new game. While not official in any capacity, the unveiling happened during his talk at the Reboot Develop conference in Croatia. Thankfully, it was livestreamed on Twitch, so we're able to get a look at it as well—it's been uploaded to YouTube by Daniel Bross, and you can see it in the embed above.
It looks like it's a puzzle game that consists of pushing blocks around. According to Blow, it's still very early on in development, as most of the work has been focused on creating the level editor and engine, which will be made available to other developers for free. He said that he "should make and ship" a game on this engine, so we could could end up seeing it come to fruition. And apparently, he's already thrown together more than 25 hours of single-player gameplay, but he noted that it's unpolished and the visuals aren't final.
It might be a while before we see or hear anything else about this untitled game, but we'll be sure to report back when something is revealed. Blow's last two games, Braid and The Witness, were both puzzle games that garnered many positive reviews.
