u/Just_a_Player2
r/GirlGamers r/smosh r/stray r/HiTMAN r/gamedevscreens r/ItsAllAboutGames r/modhelp r/survivalhorror r/SmugAlana
Most players don’t realize how much lighting directs them. Warm light = safety/progress. Cold or red light = danger. Master this and you can guide players almost invisibly.
u/Just_a_Player2 — 7 days ago
Five Nights at Freddy's meets EarthBound and it's a fan-made purgatory adventure!
Five Nights at Freddy's: The Flipside is a fan-made game that indie developer The Blue Hatted has been working on for 2 years. The author was inspired by projects by Toby Fox, the EarthBound series, and OFF.
The game will be a continuation of the official Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator. The story follows the souls of missing children as they try to escape from Purgatory, while also uncovering the secrets of the other side of reality.
A demo version of Five Nights at Freddy's: The Flipside is scheduled to be released in September.
>👉 Guys, help us out! Subscribe to "It's About Games" on other platforms! Support us!
u/Just_a_Player2 — 7 days ago
▲ 30 r/ItsAllAboutGames
One of the most underrated level design techniques: verticality! When a space works in three dimensions instead of two, exploration becomes infinitely more interesting. Which game used height the best?
u/Just_a_Player2 — 7 days ago
▲ 145 r/ItsAllAboutGames
Blizzard Entertainment built the most loyal fanbase in gaming history. Then spent a decade systematically dismantling their trust. What happened inside one of gaming's greatest studios is a case study in how creative culture dies.
In 1994 Blizzard released Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. In 1996 they released Diablo. In 1998 StarCraft. In 2002 Warcraft III. In 2004 World of Warcraft - a game that would go on to generate over $9 billion in revenue and peak at 12 million active subscribers simultaneously.
This is one of the greatest creative runs in gaming history. Five games across ten years. Each one defining or redefining its genre. Each one finding an audience that measured devotion not in weeks but in years.
What followed was a different kind of story.
The founders who built Blizzard's culture left gradually across the 2010s. Mike Morhaime - CEO since 1998, present for every significant release - departed in 2018. The designers, writers and directors who had made the original games were replaced by executives whose primary language was monetization rather than craft.
Diablo Immortal. A mobile game announced at BlizzCon 2018. The audience's reaction - audible, immediate, devastating, became a document of how far the distance had grown between the company and the people who loved it. "Do you guys not have phones?" became shorthand for something much larger than one announcement.
The harassment scandal of 2021. The Activision merger. The layoffs. The cancelled projects.
And yet. Diablo IV shipped in 2023 and sold extraordinarily well. World of Warcraft still has millions of players. The brand retains power even as the culture that created it has largely dispersed.
Blizzard is not dead. But the specific Blizzard that made StarCraft and Warcraft III and the original World of Warcraft - that studio exists now only in the games it left behind.
Which studio do you think lost its identity somewhere between financial success and corporate scale and is there any version of events where you think it could have been avoided?
👉 Guys, help us out! Subscribe to "It's About Games" on other platforms! Support us!
u/Just_a_Player2 — 7 days ago
How "Pragmata’s" Diana almost lost her locks to optimization!
Hair animation has always been a developer's worst nightmare, and Capcom’s mysterious Pragmata is taking that struggle to a whole new level. It turns out the tech team actually pushed for the character Diana to have a short haircut - not for the sake of fashion, but for the sake of the budget.
Unlike standard game hair, Diana’s locks are built from individual strands featuring a staggering 430 000 animation points. It’s a resource-heavy beast that made the engineers sweat, leading them to beg for a shorter style to ease the load on the hardware.
The team went as far as testing a short-haired version, but ultimately, creative vision won the day. The designers stood their ground, keeping the long hair to preserve Diana's essential character and personality. However, that insane level of tech isn't going to waste - Capcom has already integrated this advanced hair simulation into Resident Evil: Requiem. It looks like our GPUs should prepare for a workout.
👉 Guys, help us out! Subscribe to "It's About Games" on other platforms! Support us!
u/Just_a_Player2 — 7 days ago
▲ 10 r/ItsAllAboutGames
Bioshock's Rapture tells you the entire history of its own collapse through architecture alone. Just water damage and well yeah...audio diaries.
Rapture is a city that explains itself.....if you know how to read architecture.
Ken Levine and his team at Irrational Games built something unusual when they designed the underwater city of Bioshock: a location whose history is encoded in its physical deterioration. Every crack in the wall. Every flooded corridor. Every intact chandelier hanging above a ruined ballroom floor. Each detail is a timestamp.
The wealthy districts of Rapture: Arcadia, Fort Frolic, Apollo Square's upper levels - show later stage decay. The furniture is damaged but recognizable. The walls have cracks but the structural integrity is visible beneath them. These areas held longer. The people who lived here had resources, options and reasons to maintain what they'd built.
The service corridors tell a different story. The maintenance tunnels, the worker districts, the areas beneath the city's polished surface show earlier, more complete destruction. Mold has reached ceilings. Water damage has obliterated entire sections of wall. The infrastructure that supported Rapture's elegance collapsed first - because the people responsible for maintaining it were the first to lose faith in Andrew Ryan's vision.
Irrational built a political allegory into the physical deterioration of their game world. Rapture was founded on libertarian philosophy - the belief that the exceptional should be free from the burden of the ordinary. The architectural evidence of Rapture's collapse makes a specific argument: the exceptional cannot sustain themselves without the infrastructure that the ordinary provide.
The wealthy districts lasted longer. But they are ruins too.
Players who never engage with a single audio diary or piece of readable text can still absorb this argument - because it's built into the geometry of every room they walk through.
What Bioshock achieved that few games before or since have matched is the integration of narrative, philosophy and level design into a single coherent experience. The story of Rapture is told simultaneously through audio diaries that players choose to engage with and architectural decay that players experience simply by moving through space.
The best level design communicates before a single word of dialogue is spoken. Rapture communicates an entire ideology's failure through the specific pattern of water stains on a wall.
Which game world communicated its history or politics through environment alone - through what the space looked like rather than what any character said about it?
👉 Guys, help us out! Subscribe to "It's About Games" on other platforms! Support us!
u/Just_a_Player2 — 7 days ago
How Night City powers its chrome? In Cyberpunk 2077
Chrome is cool until you ask a boring question: "Where’s the plug?" Cyberpunk 2077 stays quiet on how V powers a Sandevistan or Mantis Blades. Fan theories often point to Deus Ex-style stomach bioreactors - a peak corporate nightmare where your digestion is a feature with a monthly subscription.
The real answer lies in Mike Pondsmith’s tabletop lore. In Cyberpunk 2020, heavy gear ran on internal batteries surgically replaced by ripperdocs annually. Modern lore expands this to kinetic generators (powered by movement), thermal elements (body heat), and direct nervous system draw for smaller tech.
This fuels a brilliant theory on Cyberpsychosis: high-end implants are essentially energy vampires. By drawing synaptic current directly from the nervous system, they starve the brain sectors responsible for self-control. Your personality doesn't just "snap"; it literally browns out from an internal power surge.
Next time you double-jump, remember: you’re taxing your soul’s electricity.
👉 Guys, help us out! Subscribe to "It's About Games" on other platforms! Support us!
u/Just_a_Player2 — 7 days ago
Father builds private AI-powered Roblox for his son!
What happens when parental anxiety meets generative AI? Adam Little, fearing the potential dangers of online predators on Roblox, decided that the only safe internet is one with no other people in it. Using Three.js and generative models, he built a private, completely isolated clone of the platform for his son.
The world is a sophisticated illusion. Instead of live multiplayer, the game plays back recorded sessions of other players (including Adam himself). To simulate a "live" community, ChatGPT-powered bots populate the text chat, bickering and greeting the player as if they were real kids. The project even moonlights as a tutor: the boy must collect letters and spell out words to unlock the exits to each obstacle course.
According to Little, the ruse worked perfectly - the son had no idea he was in a digital bubble, believing his dad was simply "grinding" Roblox alongside him. While Little used Claude to automate level design, the internet was quick to label the project a "loneliness simulator," drawing heavy comparisons to The Truman Show.
Critics argue that replacing human interaction with Large Language Models (LLMs) stunts a child's social development. They suggest that standard parental controls or classic offline titles like Spyro would be a far healthier alternative than gaslighting a child into a fake reality. On the other side of the fence, some parents applaud the move, citing the very real risks children face on unmoderated platforms today.
Is this a visionary move for child safety or a creepy step toward a dystopian childhood? While the ethics are debated, the technical feat is undeniable. Little has released a test build, allowing other parents to see if they want to give their own kids the "all-AI" experience.
>👉 Guys, help us out! Subscribe to "It's About Games" on other platforms! Support us!
u/Just_a_Player2 — 7 days ago
Failing grades: Why Agefield High is the worst "Bully" successor in history.
Remember that recurring school nightmare where you show up for a final exam completely unprepared? That is exactly what the launch of Agefield High: Rock the School feels like. Marketed as the spiritual successor to Rockstar’s legendary Bully, the game didn't just stumble - it face-planted into a locker.
Currently sitting at a dismal 35 on Metacritic and a "mostly negative" 30% on Steam, the game is being torn apart by everyone. Critics are calling it one of the biggest disappointments of the year. Gaming Nexus (40/100) was particularly brutal, describing the characters as "soulless sex robots" and the technical state as a "man-made disaster."
Reviewers and players alike are pointing out the same glaring flaws:
- A dead world: Unlike the living, breathing campus of Bullworth Academy, Agefield High feels like a ghost town populated by wooden mannequins.
- Technical chaos: The game is riddled with game-breaking bugs. From FPS drops to the "eternal loop" where loading a save just teleports you back to the starting bedroom, losing all progress.
- Cringe factor: The humor, heavily reliant on crude sexual jokes, fails to land, causing more "second-hand embarrassment" than actual laughter.
- Odd design choices: For some reason, the devs included German classes but completely forgot about Science - denying players the classic fun of chemistry lab mishaps.
At $29, the community feels robbed. Instead of a deep, nostalgic sandbox, they received a raw, unpolished mess that lacks the charm of a twenty-year-old game. Agefield High has officially earned its spot in the "hall of shame" for 2026. Unless the developers pull a miracle out of their backpacks, this project is headed straight for expulsion.
Don't waste your lunch money. This school is closed for maintenance - permanently.
>👉 Guys, help us out! Subscribe to "It's About Games" on other platforms! Support us!
u/Just_a_Player2 — 7 days ago
▲ 110 r/ItsAllAboutGames
The “safe room” concept is brilliant psychology. Give players a moment of calm after tension, and the next threat hits twice as hard. Resident Evil perfected this decades ago. Which game had the best pacing between calm and action?
u/Just_a_Player2 — 7 days ago
Firelink Shrine in Dark Souls contains the entire game's map visible at once. FromSoftware hid a masterclass in environmental foreshadowing in plain sight!
Stand at Firelink Shrine and look in every direction.
The bell tower of the Undead Parish rises to the northeast - weeks of gameplay away from where you're standing. The distant silhouette of Anor Londo's cathedral catches the light on the horizon. The cliffs that descend into Blighttown are visible below the plateau's edge if you know where to look.
Dark Souls shows you everything before it gives you anything.
This was not accidental. Hidetaka Miyazaki and his team at FromSoftware positioned Firelink Shrine with architectural deliberateness that goes beyond game design into something closer to cartography. They built a hub that functions as a map because it is one.
Most games reveal their worlds sequentially. You move forward, unlock new areas, discover new environments. The world expands as the narrative permits. This is the default model of game world design and it works, but it creates a specific relationship between player and world. You are a visitor. The world is being shown to you.
Dark Souls inverts this. The world exists in its entirety from the moment you arrive at Firelink Shrine. You can see places before you know what they are. You can see destinations before you understand why you're going there. When you eventually reach the bell tower you've been seeing on the horizon - the visual recognition creates a feeling that most open world games spend enormous budgets trying to manufacture.
You feel like you've arrived somewhere you've been looking at for a long time.
There's a specific neurological response to visual recognition - the brain releases dopamine when it identifies something it has previously observed. Miyazaki exploited this consciously. By placing the entire journey's visual landmarks in view from the beginning, he guaranteed that every major arrival in the game would be accompanied by the specific pleasure of recognition rather than merely the neutral experience of discovery.
You earned the view by reaching it. But you were given the promise of it before you took a single step.
This technique has roots in classical architecture - particularly in cathedral design, where spires were made visible from the city below so that worshippers would carry the destination in mind throughout their approach. Miyazaki, who studied literature and has spoken extensively about his influences from European architecture and fiction, applied this principle to interactive design.
The result is a game world that feels ancient - as if it existed before you arrived and will continue to exist after you leave. That feeling is architectural. It comes from being able to see the whole before you've experienced any of the parts.
Which game world made you feel like you were arriving somewhere real - somewhere with history that predated your presence in it?
>👉 Guys, help us out! Subscribe to "It's About Games" on other platforms! Support us!
u/Just_a_Player2 — 7 days ago
Pro tip for aspiring level designers: Never put the fun part behind a long, empty corridor. Momentum is everything. If the player has to walk for more than 15 seconds without something interesting - you’ve already lost them.
u/Just_a_Player2 — 7 days ago
▲ 35 r/ItsAllAboutGames
The immersive trap: Why "smart games" must abandon the AAA race to survive!
Randy Smith, the legendary designer behind Thief: The Dark Project and a veteran of System Shock 2, believes that the Immersive Sim genre is currently suffering from an identity crisis. The issue is simple: these games are trying to play in the AAA league, competing with titans like GTA 6 and Ghost of Tsushima, but their core audience is far too niche to justify $200M budgets.
Smith argues that the push for hyper-realistic graphics and massive scale - seen in titles from Arkane or the later Deus Ex games, forces developers into a financial corner. When a niche genre has to sell 10 million copies just to break even, disaster is inevitable. We’ve already seen the fallout: the closure of Arkane Austin and the commercial "failure" of masterpieces like Prey and Dishonored 2 due to Bethesda's unrealistic expectations.
The solution? Go smaller. Smith suggests the "Double-A" or "Triple-I" route:
- Budgets: $3M to $10M.
- Focus: Passionate, experienced teams prioritizing deep mechanics over graphical bloat.
- Sustainability: A game like Gloomwood or Heat Signature doesn't need to sell 5 million copies to be a massive success; 500k is plenty to keep the lights on and the innovation flowing.
In Smith's view, a $3M ImSim in 2026 will likely reach the same core audience as a bloated AAA project, but with a fraction of the risk. To save the soul of the genre, developers must stop chasing the "Bigger and Better" dragon and return to the focused, experimental roots that made Thief a legend in the first place.
Immersive sims aren't dying - they are just too expensive to live in the current AAA ecosystem. The future of the genre is AA.
>👉 Guys, help us out! Subscribe to "It's About Games" on other platforms! Support us!
u/Just_a_Player2 — 8 days ago
The most exhausted stalker in history: Why your insomnia is breaking Skyrim
Spending hundreds of hours in an open world and completely ignoring a core mechanicin Skyrim, it’s a lifestyle choice. We’re talking about sleep. In Todd Howard’s masterpiece, rest isn't a survival requirement; it’s a decorative button that grants a measly XP bonus. Naturally, most players spend months slaughtering dragons and toppling empires without ever touching a mattress.
The Case of the Missing Assassin
This led to a hilarious psychological phenomenon. One fan spent his entire playthrough haunted by a "false memory." He was convinced he had already botched the Dark Brotherhood questline by killing Astrid in that infamous shack. He could practically see the blood on his hands, yet his quest log was suspiciously empty.
The reality? He just never went to bed. You see, Astrid’s kidnapping script only triggers when the Dragonborn actually closes their eyes. If you don't sleep, the quest remains in limbo. Imagine poor Astrid, the deadliest assassin in Tamriel, forced to stake out her target for two hundred straight days, watching her victim devour dragon souls and cheese wheels, desperately praying for them to just take a five-minute nap.
Sleep in Skyrim is actually a "plot key" for exactly three moments in this massive game:
- The Dark Brotherhood Initiation: The only way to get "hired" is to be kidnapped while unconscious.
- The Ghost of Old Hroldan: You have to sleep in Tiber Septim’s historical bed just to summon a ghost who demands his sword back.
- The Solstheim "Sleep-Working": In the Dragonborn DLC, if you sleep before cleansing the Earth Stones, Miraak hijacks your brain. You wake up miles away, mindlessly hammering at a monument like a supernatural intern. Some players actually mistook this for a lore-friendly fast-travel system!
The mystery of the "missing quest" was only solved when the player finally clicked on a bed out of sheer curiosity and woke up in that familiar, damp shack. It turns out that in Skyrim, sleep isn't for the weak - it’s for people who want the plot to actually happen.
Are you a "roleplayer" who finds a bed every night, or are you a "coffee fueled Dovahkiin" who hasn't seen a pillow since the intro in Helgen?
>👉 Guys, help us out! Subscribe to "It's About Games" on other platforms! Support us!
u/Just_a_Player2 — 8 days ago
▲ 74 r/ItsAllAboutGames
Game about sperm wins award at Tokyo Game Show 2026
The sperm management simulator Become was awarded "Gold" in the indie segment and was nominated for the finals of Sense of Wonder Night 2026 – a competition for games with the most unusual concepts.
Become will be released on Steam this year. The developers promise epic battles with other sperm for the egg, a leveling system, and even a small linear storyline.
Finally, some worthy contenders for Game of the Year.
u/Just_a_Player2 — 8 days ago
▲ 33 r/ItsAllAboutGames
Most players never notice good level design… until it’s bad. A single poorly placed checkpoint can kill immersion faster than any bug. Great designers make the path feel inevitable, not forced. What’s the worst checkpoint you’ve ever hit?
u/Just_a_Player2 — 11 days ago
▲ 16 r/ItsAllAboutGames
You find yourself alone on a tropical island, where one of the dangers is the local wildlife. Based on your gaming experience, what is your survival strategy? For one year!
u/Just_a_Player2 — 12 days ago
The red headed stepchild vs. Star wars: How "EA" tried to stifle Dragon Age for years
In the vast Electronic Arts family, there has always been a favorite child and one that is merely "tolerated." Former BioWare Executive Producer Mark Darrah has decided to air some dirty laundry, revealing how the publisher actually viewed the Dragon Age series. Spoiler alert: if it weren’t for the developers' stubbornness, we’d probably be playing a generic live service shooter with dragons right now.
According to Darrah, EA’s top brass looked at Dragon Age with poorly hidden skepticism for years. While Mass Effect was basking in the limelight and drowning in marketing budgets, the fantasy saga remained in a perpetual state of "playing catch-up." The publisher simply couldn't grasp why anyone would want complex tactical mechanics, walls of text, and spreadsheets when they could just have something "cinematic."
>"In the eyes of EA’s leadership, the Dragon Age franchise was always something too niche, too backward, and too nerdy compared to Mass Effect."
The root of the problem was a fundamental misunderstanding of the CRPG genre. For top managers used to thinking in terms of "mass-market products," Mass Effect was clear and sexy: it’s basically "Star Wars" with guns and a third-person view! On the other hand, dice rolls, tactical pauses, and deep micromanagement gave marketers nothing but an itch to "simplify everything."
Darrah ironically notes that to someone far removed from RPGs, trying to understand the mechanics of the classic Baldur’s Gate or the first Dragon Age looks like studying accounting. Consequently, the team was under constant pressure to pivot 180 degrees, cutting "boring" elements to chase fleeting market trends.
This clash of interests - the attempt to turn a complex RPG into "chewing gum for the masses" - was exactly what led to the production purgatory that birthed Dragon Age II and Inquisition. Each entry in the series was a battlefield between BioWare's creative vision and EA's corporate vise.
The tide only began to turn when external studios (hinting at the massive success of Baldur’s Gate 3 and other single-player hits) proved once and for all: players still love "smart" games. Only this financial argument allowed the authors to defend Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s right to stay true to its roots.
The history of Dragon Age is a textbook example of how years of interference from leadership that doesn't understand its own audience can distort the face of a legendary universe. It’s a miracle the series survived at all, managing to keep at least a fraction of its original identity.
>👉 Guys, help us out! Subscribe to "It's About Games" on other platforms! Support us!
u/Just_a_Player2 — 13 days ago