The huge new 1.5 update to beloved farming town simulation Stardew Valley surprise launched this week. I already told you about on Wednesday, but I’ve played a good several hours of it now so I’m going to tell you more about it because gosh it’s so good. The new beach farm is worth starting a new save file for, as are all the other cool new quality of life changes.
Now that Cyberpunk 2077 has been in players’ hands for a couple weeks, progress has been made in two talented but different groups of goofs. Already this week, modders have cooked up a mod to change your hairstyle since V isn’t able to after leaving character creation. Let’s see what the speedrunners are up to then. Oh, they’re racing to have sex as soon as possible. Of course they are.
Alright I admit that I may be a big dork, which is how I wound up here writing this for a living, but I really do think that user interfaces for games are quite interesting. The tiniest tweaks can separate amazing from abysmal and designing for keyboards versus gamepads is a bigger gulf than most people realize. I am one of at least two people in the entire world who feel this way, I’m pleased to find, because one developer has put together a whole searchable database of the stuff for other UI artists and designers to use as a reference. It’s very neat, I promise!
Bundle up for this one, folks. Genshin Impact has launched its first map addition and it’s not just here for the holidays. The new Dragonspine zone is here to stay and it’s quite chilly. Update 1.2 for Mihoyo’s open world battler has arrived, adding a new chilly status effect, a new in-game event, and plenty of other changes.
Several years later than planned, the sequel to 2010 smash hit Super Meat Boy has arrived. Super Meat Boy Forever is its name, and more murderously tough platforming is its game – though this time with an auto-running twist.
Contract terms are one of those things that—no, wait, don’t go. I promise this is important. Negotiating a contract is tough no matter what industry you’re in, including publishing agreements for small game developers. The process of reaching an agreement is only made tougher by the lack of examples available. How do you know if you’re signing a potentially bad deal if you don’t have anything to compare it to? At least two indie game publishers so far have begun sharing the standard terms of their publishing contracts so that developers can see what they’ll be agreeing to ahead of time.
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To open this door, you’re going to need a little electronic fob clicker thing. You’ve not got one to hand, but you can make one easily enough, right? You proceed to do just that, and learn a valuable lesson about the dizzying hidden complexity of technological civilization along the way. By the time you stride out of the continent-spanning purgatory of machines that proved necessary to assemble the fob, it is February. Of 2026.
Now that Steam’s servers have recovered from the marauding horde of bargain-hunters who arrived when the Steam Winter Sale started last night, we can look at what’s actually worth buying. Normally at RPS we do a big batch of recommendations from the whole gang, but everyone else has already sacked off for the year so it’s just me and my factual opinions. Probably the best RPS recommendations ever, I’d imagine.
Back in late March/early April, I got to know all the corners and bits and pieces of my house a little better. There’s a small bit of wood chunk missing from the threshold into the kitchen, and a crooked staple in the doorway to my office. The golden afternoon light in my bedroom is unparalleled, but the light in my office before 10:00 is perfect for getting work done – bright enough without too much glare. I even took some time to clean and bleach the grout on my kitchen floor.
I originally played the Bitsy game Vertigo around that same time: back at the beginning of quarantine. In April, those halcyon days where the idea of isolation was somewhat novel. Magma Subterraneo made Vertigo as a part of the Bitsy Isolation Jam, which sought to explore all the various feelings of isolation via the medium of Bitsy. In it, you explore bits of your (or the dev’s?) apartment. You reminisce on various objects until you, very literally, begin to float away.
Chinese media conglomerate Tencent have bought Leyou, a name which might not mean much to you but you’ll know some of their subsidiaries: Warframe developers Digital Extremes, and Dirty Bomb devs Splash Damage. Both those studios have issued statements saying hey, don’t sweat it, this will be fine.