Jay Castello | The Verge

This coming-of-age adventure game made me feel a little too seen

2026-01-23T11:19:45-05:00

There’s a lot about Perfect Tides: Station to Station’s Mara that I find relatable. Like me, she’s recently moved to a place simply called “the City” from the middle of nowhere, and like me, she’s an avid writer. But these biographical details aren’t the important thing; it’s the way she’s painted by the game’s incredibly sharp writing where I start to feel uncomfortably seen. There are a lot of characters in media that are awkward or socially anxious, but few that are drawn with such piercing specificity.

The point-and-click game is minimalist in its mechanics. Consisting mostly of conversations, it’s broken up by a few puzzles, object interactions, and minigames. This is not a complaint: it’s in talking to people that the game shines, because it’s how we get to see most of Mara. And she’s such a realized and resonant portrait of a person that I found myself grasping at where we were different as a coping mechanism against spending the whole time introspecting. I pride myself, for example, on never having had an awful boyfriend. In this, surely, I could find some self-soothing superiority over this poor video game character.

The dynamics of Mara’s relationship with her controlling, older, long-distance partner are sketched with both narrative and mechanical thoughtfulness. In one conversation, a health bar suddenly appears, and you must navigate a particularly difficult conversation without losing all of your hearts, some of which you gain only if you’ve spent time nurturing other connections. It’s one of many neat metaphors, and combined with the clever moment-to-moment writing, led to a particularly notable moment, which wrenched an “oh, for fuck’s sake” out of my mouth in real life.

It was then that I had completely bought into Station to Station . I thought I had the shape of it. Dear relatable Mara and her messy relationships that I could hold as a simplifying buffer between us. But the game wouldn’t settle for simplicity.

Aside from conversation, the other important mechanic is Mara’s writing. These manifest in assignments for school, guest blog posts, and, in one real low moment for Mara, an overly involved forum post, and you’ll need to combine topics together to complete the piece in question. These topics include the city, music, and sex, and they level up as you talk to people and experience the world. It’s a pretty simple but effective representation of how writing works: you learn things through living and then combine ideas into, hopefully, something new and expressive.

There’s one piece that works differently. Mara writes a story that is clearly a thinly veiled allegory for her own life, and a tutor gives her some relatively harsh feedback. For the rest of the game, the story looms in the back of her mind. You can’t fix this just by combining a thought your friend had about movies and your own ruminations on death caused by your ailing grandmother. But each of those might help a little as you chip away at it bit by bit. Without getting too self-indulgent about my own recent writing experiences, suffice to say Station to Station had once again skewered me. I had Mara work on it whenever I could, every time reminded of my own festering project and the trust necessary to wait and address it slowly.

At this point in the game, it’s clear that the aforementioned partner is not Mara’s only problem. In fact, most of her interactions with other characters are marred in some way or another. I, for one, would simply not get involved with these people! But again, the game resists simplicity. Although it always presents harmful interpersonal dynamics honestly and without excusing bad behavior, it absolutely refuses the idea of shutting yourself away to avoid them. Because you would miss out on too much. Too much joy, too much connection, too much potential.

In one of the only conversations in the game that feels purely uncomplicated and productive, a character tells Mara “you just have to risk it with someone and see.” Station to Station argues, over and over again, that being open to others, despite the risk of awkwardness, and of not being treated well, is worth it. Mara is naive, and not very good at knowing what she wants, let alone asking for it. And she does get hurt. But she also lives a much more beautiful life when she doesn’t close herself off to experiences and people. She deals with the consequences, and through this she learns and grows and flourishes. My knee-jerk perceived superiority in being avoidant is suddenly the crack through which Station to Station has sunk its claws into me. I will be thinking about it for a very long time.

There’s a lot more I could talk about, like the multiple excellent musical interludes, or the hugely exaggerated animations that feel genuinely expressive while also being consistently comedic. I could even complain bitterly about some of the incidental environmental puzzles and the way they ground the story to a screeching halt if you happened to miss one small interaction point. But what kept me thinking about the game long after the credits rolled was its emotional honesty and the emotional honesty it demanded of me while playing it.

After playing the game, I stewed for a couple of days, thinking about Mara, myself, and one particularly memorable bit of karaoke. And then it hit me: I never finished Mara’s rewrite. No matter how important it felt in the moment, it turned out to be much less crucial than Mara and I opening ourselves up and accepting the consequences, good and bad.

_{Perfect Tides: Station to Station is out now on PC.}

The hottest trend in speedrunning is flipping a coin

2025-11-05T11:36:01-05:00

Unfair Flips is a game about flipping a coin. And despite being designed around random chance, it has a vibrant speedrunning community, racing to see who can get to 10 heads the fastest.

That’s the only goal. You earn money with each heads and can spend that on four things: a more valuable coin, a combo multiplier for heads streaks, a faster flip time, and an increased heads chance, which starts at 20 percent and maxes out at 60 percent. When you get lucky enough, you flip 10 heads. Until then, the only thing you can do is keep flipping the coin. The current world record took 96 flips and two minutes and 52 seconds by a speedrunner who goes by ravspect. It was, he says, “nearly complete luck.”

But only nearly. The perfect run would essentially be entirely good fortune — it is hypothetically possible for someone to load the game and flip 10 heads in a row instantly, ending it in about 20 seconds. The odds of this are a hair under one in 20 million. But the thing about probability is that if enough players try for long enough, it eventually becomes statistically likely. Until then, there are a few things that can give a runner an edge, predominantly around upgrade strategy. A Discord community that originally grew up around some of developer Heather Flowers’ earlier games now has channels dedicated to figuring out the perfect approach. “Talking about the ‘nuance’ of flipping a coin might sound crazy, but they were a massive help,” says ravspect.

One of these community number crunchers, Laika, made a spreadsheet calculating how much money you make depending on combo multiplier and coin value. “I hoped it would help us understand the game better and to develop the best strategy for buying upgrades,” she says, but tells me so far the only concrete discovery is that it’s not worth it to buy a second combo multiplier before upgrading the coin twice. In other words, Unfair Flips is not a solved game.

Not without using additional software, anyway. But a player called Four spent about 20 hours in a single weekend to prove that it’s possible to force a perfect run by cracking the random number generator seed to find one where it’s predetermined that the coin will land heads 10 times. An alternative option would be to figure out the perfect time to start flipping by using software to “watch” the figure in the background sip their drink, since this is also partially randomized. (The figure’s name is Gar, and the drink is milk, although you won’t find these details in the game, which is about flipping a coin and only flipping a coin.) It’s estimated that this would take “days or weeks,” but since the speedrun timer only begins on the first flip, the run itself would be under 20 seconds.

“You’re literally just rawdogging random chance.”

A more concrete tactic than obsessively watching a masked man drink milk is multi-instancing. Players open multiple versions of the game after their first heads, and if none of those flip heads, they can try again by beginning the quit-out process in the original version and then canceling it by instead muting and unmuting the game, which resets the save. “This process takes like three to four minutes if you’re really good at the tech,” says Flowers. These runs are listed separately, and the world record is currently 2:51, a single second faster than ravspect’s pure-luck world record.

Unfair Flips is a game that very directly addresses our relationship to probability as humans and within the games industry. “It is saying, how little of a game can somebody make while still keeping that same level of compulsion to continue playing?” Flowers tells me. “It’s very much inspired by other gambling games that have come out in the past few years and reductio ad absurdum — making the smallest, most absurd version.”
There isn’t supposed to be a way to cheat the randomness inherent in the game. “I think the line that people latch onto is ‘There is no way to beat these odds. There is only time,’” says Flowers. “I was wrong.”

Although Flowers says she didn’t expect speedruns to take off, she thinks runners get her design philosophy. “I think everybody in that community is doing it because they know that it’s really funny to speedrun this game in particular, because you’re literally just rawdogging random chance.” It’s a sentiment echoed to me by most of the runners I spoke to who talked about how they first got into the game. “There is just something very silly about speedrunning coin flipping and without some silliness life would be very boring,” says Laika.

There are other speedrunning categories. The game actually has five endings. When you’ve flipped nine heads, it randomly decides whether you’d normally flip heads again using the percentage chance you’re currently at. Then, if so, it decides which ending you’ll get. The leaderboard for the “All Endings” category has a single entry, a seven-hour run by enbyzee.

“[It] nearly broke me,” she says. “I’ve never been mentally battered by a speedrun as much as [that one]. Getting multiple streaks of nine heads in a row only to have tails come up on the 10th. Getting multiple endings I already had when I just needed the last unique ending to finish the run. It was absolutely brutal.” Although she’s done long speedruns before, they always have a lot going on, keeping things fresh and interesting. Unfair Flips does not. “I pressed the spacebar over 20,000 times during that run.”

After five hours and four unique endings playing alone, enbyzee took a quick break, considered quitting, and decided to continue on stream instead. A little over 90 minutes later she got the last ending she needed. “I wanted to scream and cry when it happened. My sister actually called me and told me off for being too loud but I didn’t care because it was over.”

“I pressed the spacebar over 20,000 times during that run.”

Ravspect adds that “hitting those 10 heads feels just as amazing on your first playthrough as it does on your 100th.” The community comes together in search of that feeling on Flippin’ Fridays. Every other week, “we connect, share our passion for this weird little speedrun, and just have a good time,” says Laika. One recent Friday, MsTruffles was one of the runners trying to improve her personal best while streaming to the community. In her first-ever session running the game, she set the then-world record at eight minutes and 20 seconds, the first sub-10-minute run. Since then, “I still haven’t been lucky enough to improve my time, even after about a hundred attempts,” she says.

She also adds that Flippin’ Fridays are a good opportunity to bring in new runners. “This is such an accessible game to speedrun because you don’t need to learn difficult tricks, practice hard glitches, or remember complicated routing,” says Laika. “You just flip.”

How The Roottrees are Dead ditched AI and became a hit

2025-06-18T12:05:01-04:00

The game’s updated artwork was made by illustrator Henning Ludvigsen. | Image: Evil Trout Inc.

Robin Ward was recovering from a broken arm when he fell in love with The Roottrees are Dead, a free browser game hosted on itch.io, an indie games salesfront. He reached out to its creator, Jeremy Johnston, and told him, “This should be a bigger deal than it is.” At the same time, Ward says, he “knew why” it couldn’t be.

The browser version of The Roottrees are Dead used AI-generated art for its images, a central part of the puzzle game that tasks players with investigating dozens of people and filling out its complex family tree. At the time, Steam, the biggest platform for PC games, did not allow the use of generative AI in games released using the storefront. In addition, Ward and Johnston agreed that they felt it was “unethical to sell artwork created in this way.”

Johnston had originally released the game for free, despite spending 11 months building it up from what was originally a Global Game Jam project cobbled together in less than a week in 2023. In the jam’s tight time constraints, and in a time before generative AI was quite so well known, he reached out to a friend who was “super into” using Midjourney and asked if he’d be willing to generate images based on prompts he had come up with for his puzzles.

Left: the original AI-generated artwork with a photographic style. Right: the illustrated replacement.

The images were far from perfect. Both Johnston and Ward point out a warped, staring image of a young girl in the original version of the game (which is still available for free) — Ward calls it “demonic.” Other portraits have the twisted hands that were a telltale giveaway of generative AI at the time.

But despite expanding the game for almost a year, adding to the story and puzzle aspects, Johnston says he “never really thought” to replace the art. Not being an artist himself, he was focused on the photographic quality of the existing artwork, and he knew he would never be able to afford to hire models and a cameraperson to recreate it.

And although he was putting a lot of work into the expanded version, he wasn’t expecting the reaction it would eventually get. “I’ve released other things — not games, necessarily, but things that I spent a lot of time and energy on, and then they came out and no one cared,” he says. So although he spent a lot of time on Roottrees, he did not want to invest money he was never expecting to get back.

Left: a particularly cursed AI-generated child. Right: the vastly improved illustrated replacement.

When he did release the itch.io version of Roottrees, though, it was surprisingly popular. It spread on forums and Reddit, and it received some attention in the games press. He did not charge for it, on account of the AI artwork, although he did include a donation link and says he made around $2,000-$3,000 from more than 10,000 players.

And one of those players was Ward. After reaching out to Johnston, they agreed that Ward would reprogram the game and hire an illustrator to replace the AI artwork and get it ready for a Steam release. The illustrator he brought on, Henning Ludvigsen, says he used the AI art as a kind of concept sketch. Ludvigsen then did his own research into the era and style the picture was supposed to evoke, eventually making almost 40 illustrations across nearly a year of work.

“I’m not a big fan of generative AI,” he says, saying his peers in the illustration industry have seen a reduction in work, particularly concept artists. “[Companies] kind of skip that step now [using AI], which I think is not great.”

Left: a composite AI illustration of the Roottrees. Right: Ludvigsen could create more consistent characters who actually look like they’re in the same world.

When it comes to finished products, though, he still sees generative AI as “not doing that well in general” among players. Large video game companies like Take Two Interactive have noted that players tend to not only avoid games that use AI but also react negatively to them online and in ratings, calling it a potential avenue for “loss of players, revenues…and reputation harm.” Johnston mentions the case of Cyan Worlds, the developer behind Myst, receiving backlash for using “AI assisted content” like texture assets in its latest game.

The Roottrees are Dead seemed to skirt these issues by being transparent about its use upfront, as well as releasing for free, Johnston says. Ward also points out that “in this case, it’s the case of ‘there would be no game’ versus ‘there is a game.’” Johnston agrees that without the use of AI-generated artwork, the initial version would never have been released, meaning the eventual full version with Ludvigsen’s work in it would also never have existed. Ludvigsen himself says he “really enjoyed” replacing the illustrations, given he’s “not a big fan of” AI art generation in general.

“I think some people would say, ‘Well, I would prefer that there is no game in this case,’ and I think they’re entitled to their opinion,” Ward says, citing the environmental concerns and the scrapping of artists’ work for training corpuses as potential arguments for that approach. “But I ended up playing something that I really loved,” he says.

Left: the AI-generated original. Right: the illustrated version more clearly reflects the setting of the photograph.

The game was released on Steam in January 2025. “The vast majority of people are like, ‘I’m very happy you got rid of the AI,’” Ward says. Although some have said they prefer the more photographic quality of the generated art, Ludvigsen’s work is undeniably an upgrade, from the untwisted fingers to the increased consistency in design for characters who appear in multiple photographs, which makes some puzzles more understandable.

The Roottrees are Dead is now a critical and commercial success, which would not have happened without both generative AI and a human artist. Both Ward and Johnston note that the game took an unusual route to its current state. But with the increasing prevalence of AI tools, it’s possible more games will end up on the same path.

Real-world map data is helping make better games about farms and transportation

2025-05-23T14:20:20-04:00

City Bus Manager.

I’m feeling a strange sense of pressure as I set up my first bus route in City Bus Manager. I want to get things right for the public transportation users of this city, probably because it’s the city I actually live in. City Bus Manager uses OpenStreetMap (OSM) data to populate its maps, so I can see all the familiar streets and points of interest laid out in front of me. These are my neighbors, who, like me, want an efficient transit service. I want to be able to provide it to them — even if only in a simulation.

City Bus Manager is part of a small group of management sims that are using OSM’s community-generated database to make the whole world their game setting. Other examples include Global Farmer, NIMBY Rails, and Logistical: Earth. In these games, players can build farms, railways, or delivery networks all over the globe, using data about real fields, settlements, and infrastructure to inform their decisions.

When the idea of using OSM was first raised at PeDePe, the studio behind City Bus Manager, “we had no idea if it would be technically feasible,” says Niklas Polster, the studio’s co-founder. But once established, the license gave them access to an entire world of streets, buildings, and even real bus stops. And these do more than just form the game’s world. They’re also used for gameplay elements like simulating passenger behavior. “Schools generate traffic in the mornings on weekdays, while nightlife areas such as bars and clubs tend to attract more passengers in the evenings on weekends,” ” Polster says.

Typically, Polster says, people are drawn to playing City Bus Manager in their local areas. (This seems to be confirmed by looking at YouTube playthroughs of the game, where creators often begin by saying they’re going to dive into their own city or town.) That personal connection appears almost hardwired into people, says Thorsten Feldmann, CEO of Global Farmer developer Thera Bytes. When they showcased the game at Gamescom in 2024, “every single booth visitor” wanted to input their own postal code and look at their own house.

There’s a specific fantasy about being able to transform a space you know so well, Feldmann says. In addition to your own home or town, the marketing for Global Farmer suggests using famous tourist locations, such as Buckingham Palace, as the beginning of your new agricultural life. “[Players creating their] own stories around those places can be even more impactful than in purely fictional environments,” Feldmann says.

There is something inherently fun about being in control of a place you see every day or one that is deeply iconic. In particular, tearing down a perfectly manicured gated garden from which the British royal family takes £510 million per year and turning it into land to grow food for a country where 4.5 million children live in poverty might not be a one-to-one political solution, but it is emotionally compelling.

“We’ve heard stories of players who became interested in public transport as a career thanks to the game.”

The quality — or lack thereof — of public transportation is another key political topic where I live. The local buses are currently in the process of being nationalized again after what South Yorkshire Mayor Oliver Coppard calls a “failed experiment” in privatization. Maybe that’s why, even though these might just be pixels on a screen, I want to do it right. That’s a feeling many players seem to experience. “Our Discord community is full of players who are passionate about public transport,” Polster says. “We’ve heard stories of players who became interested in public transport as a career thanks to the game.”

Of course, game developers using OSM data are still making games, rather than exact simulations. The real world is not always a well-balanced game design space. “In smaller towns and villages, routes can be unprofitable with realistic numbers,” Polster says. City Bus Manager compensates for this by giving players more financial support, which is a straightforward and useful bit of game design. But when it comes to treating the games as direct representations of the world, it elides some complexity. For example, according to Polster, some players have reached out to their local transportation agencies with data they’ve gathered from playing in their local areas — despite the fact that the game is not actually designed as a faithful recreation of the real world, even if its map is.

Another challenge is that OSM data isn’t always fully reliable. Polster explains that there can be errors or missing data that break very specific areas in the game, requiring PeDePe to manually find the issues and fix them. But OSM is also a volunteer-run program, meaning players can correct the data at the source. “Many of our players contribute directly to OpenStreetMap,” if they find errors in their local area, Polster says, which improves the dataset for everybody, no matter what they’re using it for.

Density of data is also a particular issue for the Global Farmer developers, who found that OSM has a lot more information about roads than field systems. There are plenty of areas where individual field boundaries aren’t mapped, making “total grey areas where gameplay actually couldn’t happen.” The developers compensated for this by making a map editor, where players can copy satellite images from other sources to correct the data, but it means that those who don’t want to build their own maps are limited to the places where OSM has detailed data or where other players have shared their creations.

Management sims have often reached for a sense of realism, and OSM data is a useful tool in that toolbox. It also allows players to control environments they know well and can connect with. But it is not a perfect recreation of the world, and even if it was, that isn’t always what games need. According to Feldmann, navigating these factors “can be very frustrating.”

But, just like players, developers are drawn to the idea of blurring the lines between places they know and places they simulate. “It is also super rewarding whenever you manage to find a solution and get great results that are connected to the real world,” Feldmann says.

It took more than a decade for a surreal RPG to get its final translation

2025-02-01T12:59:47-05:00

In 2008, Mortis Ghost made a game with his friend, composer Alias Conrad Coldwood. It was a surreal roleplaying game about a baseball player fighting ghosts called Off. He shared it for free on a French-speaking forum, where it garnered a small audience. One player was a French artist who was inspired to make a piece of fan art, which she shared with her then-girlfriend. “I was very intrigued,” says Quinn K, now a writer and game developer. At the time, she was a 15-year-old living in Austria who had no idea how influential Off would be for her, nor she for Off.

After beating the game, K lay awake at night thinking about the ending. “Something had gotten its hooks in me,” she says. Wanting to show it to more friends, she resolved to translate the game from French to English — neither of which were her first language. “I wasn’t the right person for the job,” she says. “I was just the person that did it.”

Fan translation for games is often a tricky process, not just because of linguistics but also technical limitations and potential copyright claims by the original developers. But K knew it was possible to make her version work because there was already a partial translation, and when she contacted Ghost, he gave his approval. With the help of some friends in proofreading and asset creation, she put together a translation of the 10-ish-hour RPG by 2011. She posted it on the forums for a website called Starmen.net, which was popular among fans of the Mother / EarthBound series. K was partially inspired by a Mother 3 translation, and other Mother fans quickly connected with the similar vibes in Off.

After the initial release, K put out an improved version in 2012. By 2013, Off was an “astonishing success,” says Ghost, with users who discovered it on the Starmen forums spreading it via fan creations like art and cosplay to DeviantArt and Tumblr. On the latter, it was the sixth-most-talked-about game of the year, behind major franchises like Pokémon, Animal Crossing, Kingdom Hearts, The Legend of Zelda, and Mass Effect. Unlike those established hits, Off was free, spread only through word of mouth, and was still clearly finding a devoted audience.

Despite its popularity, K was aware that the translation wasn’t perfect. “A lot of people rip [it], and I get why,” she says. “It was full of very severe flaws, just born from the fact that I’m neither an English native speaker nor a French native speaker. So it was possible to make mistakes in both languages.” There were also other fans making their own translations or patches that added to K’s work. One of these, released in 2017 by artist Lady Saytenn, added an option for the player themselves to be referred to with they / them pronouns.

“It was full of very severe flaws”

“That inspired me so much,” says K. Having had a few years of space from Off, and having improved in both English and French as well as “grown a bit wiser as a person,” she embarked on making a third version of her translation. This time, she collaborated directly with Lady Saytenn, as well as another artist who created image assets, Rosie Brewster.

K categorizes the second translation as the one that “most millennials” have played, while the third reached a younger wave of fans. K says that she was actually surprised to find that many people who encountered Off through the third translation hold it in high regard because “back when it first came out, that translation was not particularly popular.”

Some changes were straightforward, like correcting pop culture references that K had been unaware of, as well as an error where she had interpreted the French word femme as “wife,” rather than “woman.” It can mean either, but K’s choice changed the implication of a key line, and Ghost let her know it wasn’t what he originally intended.

However, some fans felt that the newest translation was overly sanitized; K says she deliberately made some characters “a little less crass” since “a big sign of an inexperienced translator is swearing a lot.” She also removed an instance of the R-slur, which upset “some edgy people.”

More nuanced was the shift to clearer language and a tendency to stick more closely to the original lines. The 2.0 translation had been vague and sometimes confusing in a way that players appreciated; it seemed to reflect the atmosphere of the game. “The little weirdnesses [in the 2.0 translation] really twist the knife on how strange and off putting the world of the game is,” says K.

“I’m excited to rediscover the game.”

But some of that was down to K’s imperfect French and English, so in the third version, she chose to clarify some lines, leading some players to feel that she had removed an aspect of whimsy and poetry that they had actually enjoyed.

These are tensions inherent to the act of translation, which is always adaptive. Now that Off is getting an official remaster, there will be a fourth version later this year, and it’s not clear how they’ll balance clarity and atmosphere, as well as its own adaptation, with K’s. The announcement was careful to acknowledge K’s work and says that the remaster will be “based on” K’s translation. She’s also been paid for what was once years of fan labor. But it does seem that the script is in the process of being readapted by professional localizers. (Publisher Fangamer did not respond to requests for confirmation.)

For K, the readaptation is a good thing. “The one thing I can say from everything I’ve seen of their updated version of the translation is they’ve improved it in every conceivable way,” she says. “I’m excited to rediscover the game.”

On the other hand, “it’s a strange feeling to be most well known for the work that you did on somebody else’s work,” says K, who has made several of her own games and is now working on Blanksword, a roguelike RPG “very strongly inspired by Off.” Ghost, too, says he’s changed a lot in the 17 years since Off’s original release. “I am of course very proud to have produced a game that has touched so many people, but I think that the game now belongs much more to the community,” he says. He is currently working on a new game called Help.

The remake won’t just feature an improved script but will also have updated combat mechanics, new animations, and some additional content written by Ghost. The goal was to “completely preserve the original atmosphere, while polishing everything that could be [polished],” he says. As with all remakes, this will be a difficult balancing act; adding in the complex adaptive work of translation, there will always be divided opinions over which of the now four major versions is the best.

But K’s efforts undeniably made Off what it is today, and the remake acknowledging and building on that history is a rare step in an industry where fan translations are usually unacknowledged at best and taken down at worst.

Modders are using AI to create chatty companions in Skyrim and Stardew

2024-10-17T12:00:00-04:00

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In Stardew Valley, you can usually only speak to characters a few times per day. This limitation has led to a number of mods that add things for them to say so that players can spend more time with their virtual pals. But like many games, Stardew recently turned to AI, resulting in the addition of a mod with the ability to have theoretically endless conversations with your favorite farm companion.

“The reception has been a lot better than I initially thought [it would be],” says modder DualityOfSoul. In the comments on Nexus Mods, users have called it “brilliant” and “one of the best mods out this year.”

To function, the mod plugs into OpenAI’s API. The implementation is impressive but limited in its own way. Every character takes on a similar jovial personality that I’ve come to associate with the built-in parameters of these large language models. Grumpy camper Linus first tells me bluntly to leave him alone; this is his prewritten dialogue since he hasn’t warmed up to me yet. But click again, and I get the OpenAI dialogue — three long text boxes run one after the other. He calls me his friend and says he hopes I’ve “been finding peace in the beauty of nature.” Next, Pam complains that “every day is the same routine” before changing her tune to say she hopes “you’re enjoying the season as much as I am.”

The responses are somewhat tailored to the characters, and it works better when I’m not talking to grouchy NPCs. But the mod can’t easily escape that underlying voice. Stardew is a largely cheery game, especially after you’ve befriended everyone, so I can see how it can fit into the vibe for some players. But it’s a noticeable limitation.

Stardew Valley. | Image: ConcernedApe" data-portal-copyright="Image: ConcernedApe" />

That limitation is less present in Herika, an AI companion mod for Skyrim. Herika acts like most Skyrim companions, following the player and helping out in combat and elsewhere. But she will also respond to conversation, both written and spoken. The LLM can draw from an understanding of the game’s map, quests, and key features and be assigned a personality. This means that she can be prompted to use a different style from the standard LLM voice, at least to a point.

Reece Meakings joined the Herika project after seeing the first iteration created by his now-coworker who goes by Tylermaister. The pair have expanded the mod from a tool to summarize the many books of Skyrim into a fully-fledged follower and intend to expand it again into a framework for any NPC to become an AI companion.

Nonetheless, Meakings doesn’t think that AI is ready to be used in game development more broadly. “It’s not going to work right now,” he says. For starters, using Herika or AI Stardew costs money. Both use OpenAI’s API, which charges the user a fraction of a cent per generated dialogue line. From the comments on Nexus, that low-level cost has put off a lot of players who are used to mods being entirely free. (Herika does offer a free option, but this requires running the LLM on your own setup, which is resource-intensive.) On a larger scale, any company will have to deal with the price of connecting to an API or running their own servers, multiplied across every player.

Then there’s the open-ended nature of how people interact with LLMs. “That completely changes how you [would] have to design the game,” says Meakings. Developers would lose linear control of dialogue trees and script triggers, quickly opening up possibilities that they didn’t account for in the narrative or worldbuilding. LLMs might be able to help NPCs keep up, but the rest of the game’s scripting wouldn’t have any way of adapting. Plus, he says, despite the safeguards companies attempt to use, it’s “very easy, if you know what you’re doing” to make these LLMs say things that are NSFW, potentially causing PR problems for companies that modders don’t have to consider.

At the moment, these larger-scale problems mean Meakings sees the most potential for AI in NPCs like Herika, particularly in the mod space. There are also AI NPC mods for games like Hogwarts Legacy, Cyberpunk 2077, and Garry’s Mod. Mantella, another Skyrim mod that gives LLM interactions to every Skyrim NPC, has 30,000 unique downloads. (Herika has 25,000.) All of them have positive feedback — limitations aside, people are enjoying playing with AI-generated content.

Meakings’ own interactions with Herika give an indication as to why. In his experience, “you’ll really end up having meaningful conversations with something which isn’t human.” Although he understands that Herika is just a program, he’s clearly engaged by the fact that he’s been able to interact with her on a different level than previous characters. You don’t need to make small talk with Herika or stick to “ritualistic” social niceties. You can jump right to debating the philosophy and theology of Skyrim. In fact, you might need to because she can judge your actions.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. | Image: Bethesda Softworks" data-portal-copyright="Image: Bethesda Softworks" />

He gives a specific example. Playing as an Argonian, Meakings heard a rude comment about the lizard-like race from a standard NPC. “I [said,] ‘Hey, Herika, can you kill him? Please? He’s being racist to me.’” Herika refused, apparently either because of her own morality or because they were in a place with guards watching, which could have landed them in jail. Then, she started wandering away, talking about visiting the catacombs under the settlement.

At first, Meakings thought it was a bug. “But then I realized, ‘oh, I know what she did.’ …She realized, ‘oh, Reece is very angry. We can’t kill this person because we’re in the middle of a city — you can’t just kill people. I need to get him out of the situation… what if I lure him to his catacomb for treasures where we can get some space away from the situation?’” She seemed to be trying to diffuse things based on the tools available to her.

This kind of experience is not unique to this form of AI. Procedurally generated content creating emergent narratives through a combination of interesting behavior and player-led meaning-making is well documented. But AI mods may open up more possibilities for these kinds of moments.

For that to happen, though, the LLMs need material to work with. Meakings is clear that Herika would not function without the wider framework of Skyrim since much of how she communicates relies on the writing of the original team. In a scenario in which LLMs are used as NPCs in a produced video game, they still could not exist without writers.

The video game performers strike raises crucial questions about how these technologies will deal with digital replications of voice actors, something Nexus Mods treads carefully around. AI mods are allowed, but affected creators, including voice actors, can ask for them to be removed if they feel the “work is damaging to them.” (Herika has multiple options for generating her voice.)

The rollout of AI on the web has been fast and messy, and how it might go in the game industry is still an open question. But thanks to modders, tens of thousands of players are already experimenting with it.

The five-year journey to make an adventure game out of ink and paper

2024-05-19T09:00:00-04:00

“I couldn’t walk away from the pen and ink thing,” says John Evelyn, creator of The Collage Atlas, a dreamlike storybook adventure recently released on Steam. The entire game is hand drawn, from tiny flowers and insects to huge buildings and the clouds that float over them. Exploring this world unwraps its dreamlike story, with environments folding out in response to your approach.

“I had been drawing for many years before that […] and I’d always draw with ink straight away, without any kind of prior pencil work or sketching,” he says. “I liked all the incidental details and the accidents that come out along the way.” He compares it to improv music — “actually, sometimes it goes horribly wrong!” — but says that the feeling of getting into a stride and being surprised by unexpected outcomes was important to the whole game.

It’s because of this that the art style underpins the rest of the experience. Where individual pieces of game art can fall into the background, The Collage Atlas requests your attention to detail — and rewards it. At the very start of the game, a pinwheel appears from a grassy plain; look at it, and it begins spinning. It was one of the first things that Evelyn created, for what was originally an app meant to accompany a picture book.

The book, a follow-up to a self-published work called Asleep As The Breeze, was intended to explore themes of agency and the feeling of disempowerment that can come from traumatic or chaotic life experiences. “You can start to feel like life is something that’s kind of happening to you rather than something that you have meaningful control or authorship of,” says Evelyn.

While experimenting with that theme, “everything clicked into place,” when the pinwheel spun, he says. “It suddenly made sense that, actually, this was the crux of what I was trying to talk about. That, actually, even when it doesn’t feel like it, just your presence within the world is genuinely meaningful and actually does have an impact on it. Even your gaze and your observation is also meaningful.”

“Even your gaze and your observation is also meaningful.”

Evelyn built on the app idea for a short art experience, which he exhibited at the Leftfield Collection at UK gaming convention EGX in 2016. At the time, he says, he had no intention of continuing to expand it into a game that would eventually make it to Apple Arcade and then Steam. Instead, he says, it was “something that I personally felt like I really needed to do.”

“I had gone through a pretty bad run of years,” he says, “and I was finding it difficult to find media that spoke to me about the things I was experiencing.” Other media seemed deeply specific to others’ situations, whereas Evelyn wanted something broader. “Things that just nudge at universal themes I find really useful.”

At the show, people connected with his piece. In particular, Evelyn was swayed by the attention of “business-type people,” who would ask him how long the full game would end up being. “In my mind, I was like, ‘Oh, do you actually think that people would want that?’” He says he was swayed by them because, if they were coming at it from a “fairly cold financial standpoint” and thought there would be an audience for it, he might be able to believe it himself.

He knew that he wanted the experience to be something that could “slowly absorb you” — meaning a couple of hours, rather than 10 minutes. For the next four years, he threw everything at filling out that scope. Although he had experience and knowledge from a career that included time making Flash games, working in freelance illustration, and releasing music EPs, he also had a lot to learn. “The day that I started The Collage Atlas as it is now, not the little demo version, that was the very first day I opened up [game engine] Unity,” he says.

In order to convert illustrations to 3D, a process he had never done before, he began by creating the models in Unity before printing their maps and drawing in the details with pen. Once scanned back in, those textures were readded to the model to create the world of The Collage Atlas and everything that makes it up.

“Works don’t have any kind of permanence — they can just vanish.”

After nearly five years of work, in 2020, the game was released on Apple Arcade, but in 2023 it was delisted when the exclusivity period ended. Not long afterward, even people who had downloaded it weren’t able to launch it. “This is the sad thing about the way our kind of creative mediums are going: works don’t have any kind of permanence — they can just vanish,” he says. Evelyn felt he owed it to his past self who did all that work to make sure the game was still available and recently launched it on Steam.

After the game’s Apple Arcade release, Evelyn thought he might be done working on games. “I spoke to one of my friends who’s a AAA developer and I said, ‘That’s it. That’s me done. I’m never doing this again.’ He said, ‘I’ll give you six months.’” Almost exactly six months later, he started working on his next game, The Wings of Sycamore. Also hand-drawn, it’s something of a spiritual sequel to The Collage Atlas.

“Atlas is trying to explore the idea of falling inwards,” he says. “Wings of Sycamore is about flight. After you manage to climb back out of the depths, hopefully, that’s when you just have the pure joy of flying.”

Inside the quest to finish Super Mario Maker’s disappearing levels

2024-04-12T10:30:00-04:00

In 2015, Nintendo released Super Mario Maker for the Wii U, a game that allowed players to make and share their own 2D Mario levels. In 2021, the company ended the ability to upload courses, the game having been eclipsed by its sequel on the Switch. But in January 2024, Nintendo announced an end to all online services for Wii U and Nintendo 3DS games on April 8th. For Super Mario Maker, that meant the millions of player-made levels would be unceremoniously shuttered.

Or at least, it would have been unceremonious, if it weren’t for a group called Team 0%. The group had been trying to beat every uncleared level in the game for years, which was made easier once they had a fixed target in 2021. When the announcement came that the Wii U’s online services were being shut down, there were approximately 26,000 levels made by hand in Super Mario Maker that hadn’t ever been beaten. The team mobilized to try to make that zero within the four months that they had.

“I just wish I had more time with the game”

“I was pretty disappointed when the announcement hit,” says group member LouMarru. “Several people felt it was on the horizon, I just wish I had more time with the game.” That sense of disappointment — but not shock — is shared among all the members of Team 0% that I spoke to. “It seems that all online communities have the same life cycle,” says The0dark0one, who made the first list of uncompleted levels back in 2017.

The shuttering of company-hosted servers is one way games are constantly being erased. A large chunk of Super Mario Maker is officially unplayable nine years after its release. Go back more than 15 years, and only 13 percent of games are accessible outside of an archive, piracy, or getting your hands on legacy equipment.

“Super Mario Maker is my favorite game and I have so many memories of playing [it], so to think about all of these levels being deleted for good is pretty sad,” says Black60Dragon, one of Team 0%’s founding members. “A lot of people, myself included, have been trying to make as many alternate accounts on their Wii Us as possible to download their favorite levels before they’re gone for good.”

But with a deadline, there was one more thing to do. “My reaction [to the announcement of the shutdown] was just to put out the call for help for 0%,” says group member Louis_XIX. And plenty of people responded. “It brought back hoards of people,” says LouMarru. The majority of these players weren’t skilled enough to beat the most intense levels, but they provided the numbers necessary to get through the bulk of the easier ones. And it also motivated the highest-level players, some of whom had drifted away, like Jeffie, who made the Team 0% Discord server back in 2017. “I decided to come back for one final grind,” he says.

“This felt like the best possible way to send off a game that has meant so much to so many of us,” says Black60Dragon. “I know what it was like to spend a lot of effort in making a level I really liked, only for nobody to play it. So making sure every single level gets at least one clear is a very satisfying thing to do.”

“I decided to come back for one final grind.”

That journey was something of a rollercoaster. The remaining levels were examples of “Kaizo Mario,” a design philosophy that can be roughly summarized as “very, very difficult.” On screens cluttered with death traps, players must move, jump, and interact with extreme precision — often using consecutive frame-perfect tricks or inputs that must be done within the right fraction of a second. But by mid-March, there were only two levels remaining: “The Last Dance” and “Trimming the Herbs.”

When “The Last Dance” was beaten on March 15th, for a while, Team 0% and the watching world thought that they had their final boss, “Trimming the Herbs,” which required 18 perfect jumps in a row. Super Mario Maker users had to have beaten their own levels to upload them, meaning it should have been humanly possible. But on March 26th, the creator of the level admitted that it had been made using illegitimate assistance. “Trimming the Herbs” was no longer a part of the list. Super Mario Maker had been 100 percent completed. (On April 6th, two days before the servers went down, a player called sanyx91smm2 went ahead and beat it anyway.)

Completing Super Mario Maker probably would have happened regardless of whether the servers shut down or not. “The simplest reason is a completionist urge,” says Louis_XIX. But in the dramatic story of the road to completion, it’s clear that the announcement of the servers’ closure had a somewhat paradoxical effect. Although disappointed that it was happening, the group was massively galvanized to achieve their goal before it was no longer officially possible.

“To say that it would have been less exciting [if the servers had never shut down] is an understatement,” says Black60Dragon. “We probably would have still done it, eventually, but it was just a small group of people chipping away at the mountain of levels. […] With the announcement of the deadline, it lit a fire under everybody to make it happen.”

“It lit a fire under everybody to make it happen”

Team 0% is now focusing on pulling off the same goal for Super Mario Maker 2, the still-active Switch successor. For now, it’s a fun way to keep up the momentum generated by the SSM1 shutdown — they’ve so far completed every level made in 2019 and are making progress on the courses from 2020.

But eventually, it’s likely to become the same sort of timed challenge. The online servers will only last as long as Nintendo leaves them open, and all of the levels in Super Mario Maker 2 will one day officially disappear as well. The members of Team 0% know this well. “To me, the shutdown announcement was inevitable, and only a matter of time,” says Louis_XIX. “I’m just glad we were able to finish everything.”

Nidus turns a beautiful ecosystem into a frantic shooter

2024-03-17T10:00:00-04:00

Scavengers Reign is a beautiful exploration of a complicated, fascinating, sometimes brutal ecology. Nidus is also a beautiful exploration of a complicated, fascinating, sometimes brutal ecology. Their approaches and styles are different, but the underlying themes share a connection — and an artist. Caleb Wood is an animator and now game developer who worked as a concept artist on Max’s sci-fi show while simultaneously solo-developing his recently released arcade bullet hell game.

Having begun his animation career 15 years ago, Wood decided that he wanted to figure out game development in 2020. Nidus was meant to be something simple that he could use to teach himself programming. “But because I’m able to produce some pretty good art quality,” he says, “I felt like I had to at least try marketing and see what I could accomplish.”

In Nidus, players simultaneously control a flower and a wasp in a symbiotic relationship, as they struggle against all manner of strange insects and critters in their wider ecosystem. Wood draws parallels to the symbiosis in Scavenger’s Reign, where dozens of strange alien creatures live in tenuous, dangerous harmony. In some moments, the humans who crash land there also figure out how to coexist with the nature around them, to varying degrees of success.

But he calls these parallels “autonomous” — he says he wasn’t deliberately planning much about them as he worked on each project. “I definitely gravitate towards natural themes and that sort of thing,” he says. “[But] the only thoughts going in my head [for Nidus] were that I wanna use these creatures and bugs and even the background as a canvas for looping animation.”

Much of Wood’s professional experience is in creating these looping animations. Nidus specifically draws a lineage from some of his earlier short films, like 2015’s TOTEM. Here, animations build up from intricate details, becoming more complex over time, and it’s easy to see it as another example of both the natural themes and the fluid, repetitive style present in Nidus.

During development these kinds of animations became increasingly influential on the game overall. Woods began to create “weaving loops” in specific areas, such as insect shells. “It was a way of putting more and more information into a small piece of animation,” he says. And as these animations became increasingly detailed, he began to realize that overwhelming the player’s attention was ultimately going to become a part of the game’s difficulty.

“Because the game was slowly becoming about splitting the players’ ability to focus, I just decided, ‘Okay, what if I lean into that and make everything absolutely overwhelming and hard to look at?’” Wood says. Combined with the neon colors and simultaneous control of two characters, Nidus is frenetic. (Perhaps more frenetic than intended — Wood says that he might not make design choices like the twin controls again, calling it “not super accessible.”)

By contrast, Scavengers Reign has a much more stripped-back art style. “It’s like you’re playing with geometric shapes whenever you’re designing,” says Wood of his work on the creature designs. It was “refreshing,” he says, to switch back and forth between the two projects.

Both animation for TV and games felt similar in that he was trying to create solutions to restrictions. On Scavengers, Wood would get requests from the show’s co-creator and art director Charles Huettner to fill a certain narrative function. In Nidus, the art would need to fit in with the game. “Whenever I’d work on creature designs for the show, it would clear my mind to go back into the mess of Nidus,” Wood says, and vice versa to get back to the reduced designs of Scavengers Reign.

He also says that working on a team for Scavengers meant things were simpler for him personally. “You’re just focusing on your small part that is going to serve a larger purpose,” he says. Working solo, making one design choice also meant dealing with all the knock-on effects. Changing an enemy’s weak spot, for example, isn’t just editing the art, but also everything further down the line of dominos — code, game design, and so on. “That spirals out of control real quick,” says Wood.

Wood isn’t sure exactly what’s next, but he would like to keep making games — in a team, if possible. Although he says Nidus was useful to give himself a rounded understanding of all the different parts of game development, he says it would be “amazing” to get a dedicated programmer. But whatever his next project ends up being, given his existing body of work, it’s fair to say there’s a good chance it’ll involve strange creatures and the ways they coexist.

After 100 games, indie collective Sokpop wants to make 100 more

2023-04-11T09:30:00-04:00

Berry People. | Image: Sokpop Collective

When indie video game development collective Sokpop finished its 100th game, it took a while for the achievement to sink in. “It felt like, ‘Woah, we made 100 games. How did this happen?’” says Tijmen Tio, one-fourth of the group alongside Aran Koning, Ruben Naus, and Tom van den Boogaart. (Three of the four spoke to The Verge; van den Boogaart was unavailable.)

So how did it happen?

Well, it began with the group releasing GIFs of its prototypes on Twitter. But after a few years and some encouragement from fans, they realized that they should actually be releasing the prototypes themselves. In 2018, they launched the subscription model, and five years later, they’re still going. With 100 game releases under their belt, though, they’re ready to make some changes.

“How did this happen?”

When their Patreon first launched, subscribers could sign up for $3 per month and would receive a small game every other week. The games were also available on indie storefront itch.io for the same price. Their earliest works are small, lasting maybe 15 minutes, exploring an idea or concept that could be created quickly to keep up with the pace of delivery. They’re often small spaces to wander around in, with descriptions like “go on an antventure” or “explore the swamp.”

After its first year, the collective spoke to The Verge about its first 26 games, finding a footing on Patreon, and figuring out how to make the endeavor sustainable. The biggest change since then, they say, was adding games to Steam. Koning says it lent them a sense of legitimacy. Tio, in part, agrees, although he also mentions another piece of the puzzle. “On one hand, it made us feel like we started to matter a little bit more,” he says. “On the other hand, it also doubled our income.”

It was after adding Steam releases that they were each able to make minimum wage from their work as part of the collective, which splits all the money between the members. From about 2020, they no longer had to take on additional freelance work to make ends meet.

But around the same time, the games they were making were growing. “The standard has raised a bunch,” says Naus. He mentions save states and title screens as two big examples of features that only appear in later Sokpop games; Tio and Koning add tutorials and settings options. They slowed down their output so that games were released monthly, making way for them to become a little more involved. Recently, they’ve been able to put out a word puzzler, an action RPG, and a festival to celebrate the big 100.

Their ambitions have continued to expand — along with their desire to remain sustainable. After hitting 100 releases, they took the time to evaluate what it was that they wanted to do next. Their eventual decision: make another 100 games. But perhaps not as quickly.

“A few of us were really feeling overworked,” says Tio, who also just became a father and wants to take some time off to spend with his family. Naus notes that the deadlines sometimes became demoralizing, especially because it made it difficult to catch up if they ever fell behind schedule.

But as well as wanting to avoid burnout, the idea of more freedom is clearly an exciting one for Sokpop. Tio says that the short deadlines often meant that the games were limited in scope, which led to some repetition of ideas, whereas the collective is evidently looking forward to being able to work on bigger projects.

But sticking to experiments and manageable scopes remains important to them. “We’re still looking to make a lot of games,” says Koning. The four started the collective because they enjoyed participating in game jams, collaborating and working quickly to create smaller experiences, and always wanted that to be the focus of their work. And dropping the pace will allow them to return to that collaboration without feeling as though they’re putting pressure on one another.

“At first, we were really worried about the change.”

“When we decided to drop the monthly schedule, we were like, ‘Is this the end?’ We felt very sad about it,” says Tio. The new goal, then, is a promise to continue and to focus on the most enjoyable parts of their system.

Fans and Patreon supporters seem not to be worried about a reduction in the number of games they’ll be receiving, either. “I think, at first, we were really worried about the change,” says Koning. “But I think the major feedback we got was just, ‘Okay, great, take your time.’”

The average download rate for Patreon supporters of each monthly game was about 50 percent. The collective theorizes that some people just want to support them without playing every game, while others aren’t actually able to keep up with the speed of releases. “Maybe that’s why they’re happy,” says Koning. “They’re like, ‘Oh, I finally have time to play them.’ Instead of ‘Please stop making games! There’s too many of them!’”

They also attribute their friendly community to the direct communication they have with them through videos about the games. That’s a development of the boy band veneer they wanted to put across in their earlier days. Now, they’re not entirely sure whether the label still fits.

“When do you stop being a boy band?”

“When do you stop being a boy band?” Koning asks, referring to the fact that they’re no longer in their early 20s. For a moment, he wonders if they’re a “man band” or even “washed up” before changing his mind: “I think we’re thriving.”

“Maybe just a normal band,” Naus suggests. “But a bit more tired. We should take more time off.”

Taking more time off, avoiding burnout, focusing on collaboration and slightly bigger games: it might take more than five years for Sokpop to make its next 100 games, but it’s clearly excited to get started.