Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 22

Paintings literally change the world in upcoming puzzler FRESCO

The years after Portal came out in 2007 were tiring. An influx of first-person puzzle games broke like a tidal wave over the horizon. All of them flaunting what their creators deemed to be the next big “mind-bending” idea. They simply hoped to wow people. But many of these games were were dull, uninspired rehashes. The genre was quickly saturated to the point that it became unbearable.

I’m hit with surprise, then, that upon seeing FRESCO, an upcoming first-person puzzle game, I haven’t held my hands to my face and screamed until my throat was hoarse. Maybe the fallout of 2007 has finally worn away.

holding up paintings to your face to change the environment

Being made by sole French programmer Yannick Gerometta, FRESCO is all about holding up paintings to your face to change the environment—sounds mad but it’s true. Each painting corresponds to a particular view inside the game’s world; objects will match up perfectly and light up green when you find the right spot. But the paintings bear a slight difference to the places they depict: perhaps a doorway, a hole in the wall, or a staircase. And so, once it’s aligned, you can press a button to introduce that new element in the painting to the world around it.

I know, I know, trying to explain how these things work is second to actually seeing it in action. So, here you go, watch this video:

You’ll notice that in the second half of the trailer the paintings seem to become electronic. They have a timeline that can be fast-forwarded and rewound, changing the state of objects the view is pointed out according to where they were at a certain point in time. Presumably, these aren’t hi-tech paintings but some kind of recording device. Gerometta can justify their inclusion in the game as he wishes later on, I suppose; for now these are early explorations of how to expand upon the game’s initial idea. So, yeah, I guess this thing has some legs.

That said, for FRESCO to hold my attention it’s going to have to do a bit more than be “mind-bending,” as Gerometta claims, and that I find to not be the case. It’s the game’s potential to entwine with the art world through its paintings, and with those recording devices perhaps also to the era of VHS technology, that I find my interest in it. If it took those potential themes and ran with them and was smart in how it interacted with these cultural artifacts then I’d be very down to play FRESCO.

Hopefully Gerometta can put that kind of flesh on the game’s bones once he’s worked out its mechanical structure. For if it doesn’t then, unfortunately, it’s likely going to be yet another one of those post-2007 flops. But let’s stay optimistic, maybe we have another Antichamber or Perspective or Museum of Simulation Technology on our hands. Let’s hope.

Find out more about FRESCO on its website.

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Sunless Skies doesn’t take place in outer space as we know it

It’s no surprise that outer space in Sunless Skies isn’t the terrifying vacuum that we know lingers above our heads. After all, the sea in the game’s predecessor Sunless Sea wasn’t the blue ocean of our Earth—it was the Unterzee, an underground sea populated with its own terrible creatures and peculiar folktales to pursue.

In a blog post, Failbetter Games outlined what will likely come to define the High Wilderness, which is the name given to space in Sunless Skies—note: Failbetter has said that this is all in the early stages and “we might revise it, change it completely.” The studio starts out by saying that it wants to avoid the “traditional” space setting for Sunless Skies, hoping to create something “deep, dark, and marvellous.” However, not everything that characterizes the concept of outer space as we know it is missing.

“Some of the winds speak in old, lost voices”

First of all, we’re told that the High Wilderness isn’t unpopulated or empty. There are entire domains, kingdoms even, with ports and parliaments and chapels. Each has their own character that you’ll come to know. “The Empire’s high territories of Albion are mannered, authoritarian. The Reach is verdant and untamed, its throne empty. Eleutheria is sumptuously dark and riotously pagan. The Blue Kingdom is populated by the dead.”

The people who dwell in these domains are able to do so as the High Wilderness is slightly more inhabitable than our own outer space. It has air but it’s thin and toxic. There are also winds that blow through it: “Some of the winds speak in old, lost voices. Some are hot with the embers of forgotten suns. Some are hungry.” Perhaps these winds are used as a way to travel through the vast expanse of the High Wilderness? Just a thought.

Anyway, the people who dwell in the High Wilderness have developed new cultures and practices to deal with life in this hostile space. One new ailment that haunts them is sky-madness, which is apparently a result of being so close to the light of the stars for so long. “Skyfarers fit stained glass in their locomotives’ portholes to filter the light, and pad their brigs so an afflicted crewman may be confined in safe isolation until they can be offloaded at port.”

Outside of that, another fear the people have to deal with are the “celestial powers” that consider humanity’s presence in space an invasion. These higher powers consider our efforts an act of “aggressive hubris” and it is implied that they will attempt to get us out. That said, the unusual physics of the High Wilderness might deter our space travelling efforts themselves. Failbetter tells us that there are laws governed by the stars in the High Wilderness: “To each thing its place. For all that thinks, a name. For all that lives, a death.” But these can be bent and overturned. “What holds true in our bijou corner of the universe may not be true everywhere,” reads the blog post. “An example: beyond our solar system, planets are rare. They are places of expression and experimentation for the bright regents of the heavens; warded, prized, inviolate.”

freezing temperatures have encouraged people to form close-knit communities

Those are all of the major differences between the High Wilderness and our understanding of outer space that Failbetter has outlined so far. It has also described two similarities: the High Wilderness is very cold and can kill within quarter of an hour if you aren’t wearing insulated clothing. But the freezing temperatures have encouraged people to form close-knit communities in order to share warmth and meals. Secondly, the High Wilderness has wells (also seen in Fallen London and Sunless Sea), which are essentially black holes.

However, while the wells function practically the same as black holes, the cultures of the High Wilderness have made use of them in ways we haven’t. “Certain unspoken cults gather at their rim to perform distressing rites,” we’re told. “If an enemy is too inconvenient to kill, the courts of the heavens consign them to a well. Do not stray too close. Ignore any voices within.”

Failbetter Games is taking Sunless Sea to Kickstarter in February 2017. You can find out more about it on its website.

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Sea of Solitude’s sublime exploration of loneliness now backed by EA

Sea of Solitude was one of the most intriguing and sublime game concepts that flashed across my eyes last year. It follows a girl called Kay who has been turned into a monster and is on a journey to find out how that happened. Most striking about it is the world it’s set in: a submerged city where gigantic fish and a talking crow-like creature lurk just out of sight, hiding in the cover of fog or the murkiness of the deep. It’s a game about loneliness skewed with a vision marked by both beauty and terror.

And now EA has gone and picked it up. But before you set off the alarm bells and start panicking about a huge publisher throwing its elbows around the confines of a small studio’s office, just chill a sec. Sea of Solitude will be the second independent game to be supported by the EA Originals program—the first being Fe—which is something the publisher was inspired to put together after working with the small studio that made Unravel. The idea isn’t for EA to leech off the studio as much as make sure they have the funding and resources they need to make the best possible version of their game, or so we’re told.

The results of EA Originals is yet to be seen which is cause to hold fire and hope for the best. Until Sea of Solitude is finished, we’ll have to place faith that the its creative lead at the Berlin-based Jo-Mei Games, Cornelia Geppert, is given the freedom she needs to create what she describes as “most artistic and personal project” she’s worked on yet.

The game’s tagline is “When humans get too lonely, they turn into monsters,” so you can have a guess as to what the personal angle of the game is here. If you need more of a hint, last year, Geppert said, “[Kay’s] biggest enemies are not the huge monsters that she meets on her way through the Sea of Solitude, but something way more dangerous.” As with the best monsters throughout the ages, it seems the ones in Sea of Solitude are representative of a terror inside of ourselves much greater than the external threats we may face.

Find out more about Sea of Solitude on its website.

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Your next dose of Uncharted features two female leads

It was revealed during the Playstation Experience on December 3rd that Uncharted 4’s single player DLC will feature a few familiar faces. Returning to steal our hearts is Chloe Frazer as the main character and mercenary leader Nadine Ross as supporting cast. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy is slated for a 2017 release and has been described as a standalone experience.

In true Naughty Dog fashion, the studio remained tight-lipped after the conclusion of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, leading many to wonder about the inevitable DLC. Some fans speculated that it would follow the adventures of Sully and Sam, as the ending was left suspiciously ambiguous for those characters. Other hopeful players wished for more Elena (who could blame them), perhaps wanting to have a closer look at her struggles while attempting to save Nate’s ass once again.

It was a pleasant surprise after the eight minute trailer came to an end, revealing that the woman whose identity was a mystery turned out to be none other than Chloe, the quick-witted treasure hunter from previous installments. The crowd’s surprise and excitement at the reveal should contribute to putting an end to people questioning whether players want female protagonists leading their videogame stories. Nathan Drake had a good run, and Naughty Dog made the right move passing on the torch.

players want female protagonists

According to the studio, the DLC will have the two women “venture deep into the mountains of India in search of the legendary artifact. Along the way, they’ll learn to work together to unearth the mystery of the artifact, fight their way through fierce opposition, and prevent the region from falling into chaos.”

For more information on The Lost Legacy, click here.

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Watch Dogs 2 is a love letter to a San Francisco I no longer recognize

I’m playing as Marcus Holloway in Watch Dogs 2, traipsing around a digital recreation of San Francisco. Angry at the system, Marcus has embarked on a romanticized hacking-heavy quest for revenge on nefarious corporations. In Watch Dogs 2, they’re evil personified within the Blume Corporation and ctOS 2.0, the operating system that runs the city.

As Marcus awakens in a hungover daze across the bay in Marin County near the start of the game, he finds himself overlooking San Francisco, no signature Karl The Fog in sight. It’s a beautiful city, if a bit unrealistic. There’s always fog, and maybe two weeks of sunshine a year.

this isn’t the San Francisco I once knew

I direct Marcus to steal a car and drive across the Golden Gate Bridge into that picture-perfect vista. As I roll into the squashed forested area of the Presidio and Golden Gate Park (two woodsy parks conveniently combined for the sake of an open world game), I realize that this isn’t the San Francisco I once knew. And not just because in Ubisoft’s condensed version of the city, the neighborhood I’ve lived in for the past three years literally doesn’t exist.

///

It’s the morning of November 9th and I wake up groggy as usual. It takes a minute to hit me that the Orange Man had been elected as our next President the night prior. After scrolling through the other local results, I felt even more disappointed and angry. Propositions to build desperately needed affordable housing got shut down, and homeless people now live with the worry of having their shelters (tents) being forcibly removed in the streets on the promise to offer them beds in a shelter—an impossible task, considering there are only 35 beds per 100 homeless in the city.

That morning, I realized that I was falling out of love with San Francisco. Maybe for real this time.

But it’s been a long-time coming. In the five years since I officially moved into the city from the East Bay where I grew up, six-figure making technology entrepreneurs have risen up, while seemingly everyone else has been pushed out. This has happened before with the two dot-com booms, except new tech is showing itself to be more persistent—and it has more money. Techies aren’t leaving, and the bubble shows little signs of popping anytime soon in spite of constant predictions, even as San Francisco prepares for the inevitable, eventual fall out.

Yet in the years since moving here, I’ve still seen friends and family members priced out of their homes. I’ve seen entire communities uprooted in favor of overpriced condos. I’ve seen the homeless community continuously ignored and villainized, just for visibly existing. That morning I saw the election results of offices and ballot propositions, and realized that, yeah, apparently the majority of San Franciscan voters don’t care about any of this. On the morning of November 9th, it was hard to face my city again, let alone the world.

///

Marcus is about to infiltrate faux-Google with the help of his friend Horatio, a fellow black hacker who works at the company. As they walk through the pristine tech campus, they note the uncomfortability that comes with being not-white in Silicon Valley. And later, Horatio wrangles with being racially profiled by his own employer (even if said employer alleges he has dirt on him, Marcus wipes it clean). It’s one of the few moments that acknowledges the intersection of race and tech culture and how oppressively white and male it all is, before quickly ushering the storyline into questionable new directions and brushing aside the commentary it brought up in the first place.

the Bay Area’s issues aren’t worthy of dwelling on

This is how Watch Dogs 2 decides the Bay Area’s issues aren’t worthy of dwelling on. There are bigger fish to fry in DedSec’s eyes, like corporations, duh. When Marcus grows angry at the revelation of police targeting lower-income areas because of a “crime-predicting” algorithm, his pals merely bid him to channel his anger into—what else—hacking.

“They’re setting schools, clinics, stores as shoot-on-sight? That’s subsidized housing, I mean those are people who got priced out of San Francisco,” Marcus says. “Where the fuck else are they supposed to go?”

A couple missions later, and everyone—Marcus included—is back to joking around, paying no mind to the terror they just witnessed. It’s a tonal bait and switch that ultimately feels pointless. Watch Dogs 2 is both a chipper game that’s tonally opposite from its predecessor—though still buried in tedious and often hypocritical open world trappings—and a game that’s superficially aware of its troubled surroundings. But it doesn’t commit beyond a piece of on-the-nose street art, an ephemeral quip in a side mission, or a fleeting conversation by one of the city’s few NPCs. Watch Dogs 2 doesn’t get to know San Francisco; it just reminds you that you’re there.

///

Growing up in the Bay Area, I always personally looked up to San Francisco and the surrounding Bay as a unique community, be that because of its tolerance, diverse enclaves, bondage festivals, or even its quintessential hyphy music (something that has always tied my generation together—Mac Dre’s Thizzelle Washington might as well be our unofficial bible, a central beacon of Bay Area togetherness and positivity). But of course the same diversity I see in our community exists in other densely-populated cities. I asked Joseph Amster, board member for the San Francisco History Association, a simple question: what sets San Francisco apart? What makes it different? He told me a story.

In the 1800s, there lived a merchant named Joshua Abraham Norton. Norton was a prominent merchant in San Francisco, until one bad investment (in rice, of all things) left him bankrupt. Ashamed, he left San Francisco, never expected to return. Until one day Norton turned up and declared himself Emperor of the United States—a proclamation that most cities would probably deem insane. But instead, San Francisco found itself embracing his title, and even the faux-currency he used. “He’d walk around in his military uniform, a long blue coat, top hat, decorative feathers, and acted as if he were the Emperor of the United States, and everyone went along with it and treated him like he really were that for the rest of his life, around 21 years,” Amster said. “And that’s very much in the spirit of San Francisco.”

San Francisco’s welcoming attitude is why so many diverse communities flourish here

Amster explained San Francisco’s welcoming attitude is the reason why so many diverse communities have gotten the chance to flourish in this city, from the Hispanic community in the Mission to Italians in North Beach to the LGBTQ+ community in the Castro. Before the tech boom drove so many away due to an upswing in hate crimes and skyrocketing rents, the city itself was once friendly to others. “I think that in most cities in the U.S. people drive, but here we walk a lot more,” Amster said. In a city that’s only 46.9 square miles (compare that to New York City’s 309 square miles), you often find yourself walking more than opting to take a $20 Uber. In situations like that, you meet people naturally. “You interact with your surroundings and other people a lot more [when you’re walking]. It’s certainly in the spirit of tolerance, diversity, the idea of letting somebody be who they are. I don’t see that in other cities.”

I try to follow Amster’s advice as I play Watch Dogs 2. As I walk through the city, I stop when I see a speech bubble floating above a NPC’s head. I engage with them, no matter how bland their words might be. Sometimes they’ll talk about something unrelated to the city, others will randomly explain a pervasive issue, like the reality of gentrification—which always feels out of place, like if I walked up to a stranger in the Mission and said, “So gentrification sucks, huh?”—but most of the time our conversations are forgettable, or lack the punch to feel worthwhile. I wished the game would linger on actual issues or bring them to light more in the core narrative. But it never did. Everything about the Bay Area is relegated, again, to the sidelines.

Watch Dogs 2 keeps with San Francisco’s spirit of acceptance to an extent. Marcus’ central gaggle of hacker buddies—no matter how grating I personally found them to be around—are a community with diverse backgrounds, and they accept and care for one another. Some are well-drawn versions of familiar hacker stereotypes, but others escape being pegged down by a stereotype at all. In Watch Dogs 2’s San Francisco, much like IRL San Francisco, the only caricatures are the tech-entrenched villains.

///

San Francisco itself isn’t above Watch Dogs-y hijinks. Over this year’s Thanksgiving weekend, hackers commandeered over 2,000 computers in the Muni transport system, rendering rides free for a brief time. These hackers aren’t as benevolent as DedSec, though. Instead of exposing Muni’s nefarious ways through a corny viral video, they held up Muni for ransom. 100 Bitcoins in ransom.

There is hope though, beyond ransomware giving commuters free rides and inconveniencing employees in the process—always the victims in the wake of “hacktivism.” In the weeks since the election, at the 16th Street and Mission BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station, people began leaving post-it notes of their economic and life anxieties, labeling it as the “Wall of Empathy.” Some wrote notes of hope, some wrote notes of sadness for the future. But all of them, the hundreds that accrued there before a rainy weekend drove them away, shared a sense of community. They shared a love for San Francisco and the people that still reside here or nearby, in spite of all the disconcerting election results: local, statewide, and national. They showed that we’re all here together, and we should stay and fight for what we believe and love. Even if the city and its newfound inhabitants don’t seem to want us anymore.

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I’ve sunk around 20 hours into Watch Dogs 2 at this point. As a farewell to Marcus, the only person I like in this game, I make a loop around the condensed Bay Area. Through San Francisco, Oakland, San Mateo and the rest of Silicon Valley. I blast Mac Dre, DJ Quik, and that one song with Danny Brown. Beyond Mac Dre, there’s not much hyphy or Bay Area representation here. My hip-hop playlist in-game is a lackluster substitute. As “Get Stupid” plays, I imagine Oakland-raised Marcus would be stoked about one of the Yay Area’s unofficial anthems. But, in another disappointment to confirm what the game misses about the Bay Area, he has no reaction.

It’s a shame. Marcus represents what I still love about the Bay Area and the locals here. He’s enthusiastic, stylish, passionate, artistic, kind-hearted, accepting of all. He’ll go out of his way to help a friend having a panic attack, and he won’t hesitate before gushing about some dorky thing he likes.

It’s just a shame that Watch Dogs 2 never rises to meet him or his city.

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An aside: Tragically, there was a fire in Oakland in early December at the Ghost Ship warehouse. As of this writing, 36 lives have been claimed, with the death toll still expected to rise. This is painful for the entire Bay Area artist community, especially the artists that have been continuously pushed out of San Francisco and Oakland due to skyrocketing rents and forced to live in unsafe environments like warehouses in order to survive in this community. You can read more about the victims and donate to the Oakland Fire Relief here .

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Watch a computer desperately try to express itself as it faces death

A bodilesss hand floats sideways through a knife. The knife swings wildly to dissect a watermelon, cutting it into ever smaller chunks, until all that’s left is juicy debris in zero gravity. An explosion. Large rocks fall. A humming bird appears, flapping wildly, then it disappears. Another explosion. Over the next few seconds, a small dinosaur, a chicken, and a creature made of pink intestines will each spend a second on-screen. It’s fair to say that WTF is the first reaction you’re going to have to “How To Everything.” There is a lot going on and no chance of a narrative to guide you through it.

“How To Everything” is a live simulation performed by Greek digital artist and game maker Theo Triantafyllidis—he previously made a chaotic videogame tribute to French architect Le Corbusier, as well as a bunch of other wild projects. Until December 18th, it’s on display as an exhibition titled “A Mountain Made To Look Like A Person Holding A Knife” at the Sargent’s Daughters art gallery in New York.

As far as I can tell, the best way to make sense of “How To Everything” is to see it as an artwork from a parallel world, one where humans no longer exist and the computers we have left behind start to piece together their own version of reality. This is the narrative that the notes accompanying the exhibition outlines. It goes on to describe what these unmanned computers carry on to do: “Fragments of today’s internet culture are treated as archeological finds that are repurposed to fit the needs of artificial life. Youtube ‘how to’ videos, trompa-l’œil, videogame artifacts and computer graphic demos inform this new language of painting, hopping around the uncanny valley. The result is a never-ending orgy.”

the computer desperately attempts to find something to cling to

The actual process that goes into making this live simulation reflects this narrative. Triantafyllidis uses the computer’s archiving algorithm to endlessly create new virtual objects, giving a “physical presence to digital information.” The point of this is to, as Time Out brilliantly put it, offer “a phantasmagoria of images reflecting on the relationship between virtual reality and the physical world it tries to emulate.”

Triantafyllidis considers “How To Everything” as a reference to vanitas, which were still life paintings popular in the Renaissance period in Europe, which use imagery to allude to the transience and fragility of life. Skulls, mirrors, and poppies often featured in these paintings and so Triantafyllidis has included these objects in his screen simulation. “The works are a playful nod to the tradition of still life paintings as self-contained narratives frozen in time, driven by the symbolism imbued to everyday objects,” reads the exhibition’s notes. “They are governed by the rules of intelligent artificial life and constantly reminded of their imminent destruction.”

What you’re seeing in “How To Everything,” then, is the supposed technological equivalent of a human-made vanitas. The chaos of the simulated objects is a visual manifestation of the panic of an artificial life as it is faced with the concept of mortality. Without human interaction, the computer desperately attempts to find something to cling to, constantly trying to output a still life that represents its feelings as it moves towards death.

Find out more about “A Mountain Made To Look Like A Person Holding A Knife” on its website.

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See how far the incredible alien planet of Rain World has come

Unveiled over the weekend during PlayStation Experience, the new trailer for Rain World opens with a heavy, droning noise, and a single white slugcat, in a dark industrial world. First it states “you are alone.” Then, a moment before the cut, a question mark appears. “You are alone?” As the soundtrack blooms into a driving synth song, the world also opens up, revealing an elaborate ecosystem where the slugcat is both predator and prey.

Rain World was originally funded on Kickstarter in 2014, and was slated to come out later that year. But this new trailer shows just how far the game has come, and why it’s taken so long. What shines the most in the trailer is the movement, both of the little slugcat, and of the other creatures throughout the world.

Portents of death slither, swim, swoop, and lope

The slugcat moves similarly to a weasel, darting back and forth in a way that is simultaneously fluid and erratic. When the slugcat finally gets some food it wolfs it down ravenously. The slugcat straddles the dichotomy between hunter and hunted, clearly a carnivore, but also small enough to be eaten by, well, most things. The movement of the world’s many large predators feels just as inspired by real-world creatures. Portents of death slither, swim, swoop, and lope heavily towards you with violent hunger. When the slugcat and a predator clash, it mimics a nature video, the movement unpredictable and frenzied.

But even among all this chaos, Rain World forces a somber silence with its weather. The rain comes down with a bone-crushing force, bullying this savage world into submission. No matter what is happening, you must get out of the way of the rain.

There are times when Rain World is earnestly soft, and allows you to soak up the wonder of this place. There are herbivore giants with antlers and gentle gaits who slowly look at you, then turn their eyes back to the path ahead. There are little glowing rodents that guide you forward with their light. There are rotting structures in the distance, beautiful in their decay. But the beauty is only a momentary break in the chaos, and danger is always only inches away. In Rain World, every beautiful moment might be your last.

Rain World is coming to PC and PlayStation 4 in 2017. Learn more about Rain World here.

 

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SHENZEN I/O is here to make you code like it’s the 1980s

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SHENZEN I/O (Windows, Mac)
BY ZACHTRONICS

Some games and educational apps try to ease you into the art of writing code. SHENZEN I/O isn’t so soft. It’s a throwback to the 1980s, when there wasn’t much so media geared towards teaching people how to code. Hence, it begins its lessons by throwing a hefty manual (which you can print out) and a number of circuit-based challenges at you, and then leaves you to figure it out. There’s a little bit of guidance at first but it’s experimentation and intuition that will see you advance for the most part. If you can stick with it, and you really should, then you should manage to surprise yourself. There’s nothing quite like being sat in front of a piece of code for half an hour and then, on a whim, you try a new mix of commands and suddenly it all works.

Perfect for: Coders, wannabe programmers, science teachers

Playtime: 10+ hours

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Why Retired esports Stars Turn to Twitch

This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel .

Most professional gamers call quits on their careers long before they turn 30, but streaming platforms ensure these players can do what they love without the stress of competing in the big leagues.

Imagine falling into fame and fortune at the age of 16, flying around the world to compete in videogame tournaments with prize pools totaling thousands and even millions of dollars. This is the world most esports athletes live in, skyrocketing to success before they’re old enough to drive. Even the brightest esports stars, however, can burnout fast: The average esports player’s career barely extends past age 25. Rather than hang up their headsets after retiring from competitive gaming, eSports athletes use their skills to transition into a career on livestreaming site, Twitch, a platform where millions of people tune in online to watch and interact with gamers while they play.

the average esports player’s career barely extends past age 25

That’s the case for Marcus “Dyrus” Hill, one of the top League of Legends (2009) talents in the world. Dyrus retired at the ripe old age of 24. In the six years he spent competing, Dyrus experienced all the lows and highs of a typical esports career. He didn’t set out to become a professional gamer. Two years after Googling “free online game” and discovering League of Legends (LoL), Dyrus and his mom flew to Sweden to compete in the 2011 Riot Season 1 Championship. It was the first time he’d ever left his home state of Hawaii. Just four years later, Dyrus was already talking about leaving the world of competitive LoL behind.

“I think I’m going to make this my last run and try my best,” he told his Team SoloMid teammates just prior to the 2015 World Championships. “I’m just going to step down and let someone else step up to the plate.”

Many of their futures in flux, the members of Team SoloMid failed to make it out of the tournament’s Group Stage. While one member transferred to another team, two (including Dyrus) chose to retire. But Dyrus lasted longer than many other pro gamers. In part, the rapid turnover in esports comes down to the extreme level of technical precision needed to be the best. Esports is not an easy lifestyle: Pro players are expected to practice for up to 14 hours a day, and the pressure of constant practice can wear thin on anyone. “I started to have less of a grip on things for myself and for my team,” said Dyrus. “It started to feel like I was getting burnt out. Like, what’s the point? There’s very little motivation.”

There’s also the hazards that come from mastering a game: sore wrists from repetitive motions on a controller or keyboard, blurred vision from staring at a screen for long periods of time and the many risks associated with sedentary lifestyles. Even slight degradations in twitch response times or mental focus can mean the difference between placing at a top-tier tournament like Worlds and never making it there. “It’s super stressful because if you’re not winning, you’re not making money—and you’re not having fun,” said Dyrus.

streaming becomes a whole other career after retirement

This is why Tobias Sherman, co-founder of eSports Management Group, counsels pro gamers to be mindful of the full arc of their potential career. This can mean limiting factors that lead to burnout or transitioning into an esports arena where response time and dexterity don’t matter as much. That’s also where streaming platform Twitch can help. Players can continue doing what they love without the high-stakes pressure of competing. Esports streams make up nearly a quarter of all content broadcast on Twitch, with 100 million viewers watching 800 million hours of eSports in the last 10 months alone. For former pros with established personas like Dyrus, streaming becomes a whole other career after retirement.

“When I first started streaming, the initial idea was ‘I want to have fun,’” said Dyrus. “I wanted to show people my cool plays, and I wanted to teach them.”

With more than a million followers, Dyrus’ Twitch fans not only recognize his raw technical prowess, but also appreciate the knowledge of an experienced player. Nowadays, when Dyrus makes a mistake, it’s not the end of the world. It’s a learning opportunity to explain how he and other players can avoid it next time. While response times aren’t as cutthroat in Dyrus’s new streaming arena, speed and top-tier equipment are still the name of the game.

“When I stream, it’s important to have a really good PC because, if you don’t, you’re going to have FPS lag,” he said, referring to the frames-per-second rate displayed on a computer screen.

Streamers are also huge multitaskers. The CPU needs to handle the gameplay while it’s encoding the video stream, streaming and running chat sessions simultaneously. Dyrus tells his followers that his Intel Core i7-5820k CPU at 3.30 GHz was one of the only CPUs that could keep up with his high-speed needs. Consistent frames-per-second are not only critical to his gameplay, but also ensure his stream is a high enough quality to grow subscribers, win sponsorships and collect donations from fans. For Dyrus, streaming has allowed him to go back to enjoying the game he originally picked up to have some fun.

“I still have a lot of things to work on,” he said. “Because of all of the fans and people who support me so much, I’m able to do this and live out a pretty stress-free life.”

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Alto’s Adventure creators tease their next game, Alto’s Odyssey

“Long before Alto’s Adventure had even been released, we started working on an idea for what might come next,” Ryan Cash tells me. “Today, we’re finally ready to announce it: Alto’s Odyssey.”

This is all that Cash and his crew at Toronto-based studio Built By Snowman will say about their next game. Alto’s Odyssey, due out in 2017, is the follow-up to last year’s downhill snowboarding game Alto’s Adventure, which was released on mobile, and memorable for its stunning moutainscapes, wordless storytelling, and pleasantly looping play.

a return of the angular art style

The only clue we have as to the direction that Built By Snowman is taking this sequel is a teaser image released on the game’s official website. It depicts a city surrounded by mountains in silhouette. It’s hard to tell what flavor the studio is going for here but the architecture and birds suggest that it’s different to the Peruvian influence of Alto’s Adventure. It’s hard to tell.

In any case, I’d hazard so far as to say that it doesn’t seem to be a place where there’s much snow, so perhaps we won’t be snowboarding this time around? I’m at least glad to see a return of the angular art style and the purple / pink hue of the place recalls the color-coded cycles of the sun as seen in Alto’s Adventure (demonstrated in shots like this).

For now, all we can do is sit on our hands and hope that Built By Snowman has more to reveal soon. Oh, and it’s worth noting that the studio is also collaborating on and publishing games now, with the first two titles being Where Cards Fall and DISTANT.

Look out for more updates on Alto’s Odyssey on its website.

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