In many respects, as someone who has played a lot of automation games, Substructure is very familiar. It begins with you landing on the surface of an alien world and using nothing but pluck, the tools on your UI, and the schematics in your tech tree to construct a sprawling factory that claws up resources from the planet and transforms them into materials and components to build ever bigger machines.
But it also hints at more.
Ubisoft have initiated talks over voluntary redundancies at three German studios under their banner, reportedly seeking to cut around 100 workers via the move. Ubisoft Dusseldorf, Ubisoft Berlin and Ubisoft Mainz are the studios set to be affected, with talks over the plans between Ubisoft and a works council representing staff having been initiated by the publishers last week.
Update: Following a request for comment, Ubisoft have confirmed that they are proposing to close Redlynx, affecting "up to 52 positions", subject to negotiation under local labour laws. As regards Ubisoft Singapore, "70 positions have been impacted to align the studio with upcoming production needs". Ubisoft's statement stresses that the Singapore team "remains an important part of Ubisoft’s global production organisation."
Our original story continues below.
I'm not your guy for computerised automobile magic picture shows, or "car videogames" as they are popularly known – for that, we turn fearfully to Mark Warren, whose every word during Gchat meetings is screamed against a backdrop of throbbing motors. Still, once in a blue moon a car game hooks my interest. Take Shifu: Traffic Masters, which we can approxiately translate as Driver and/or Midtown Madness (those are explicit inspirations), but set in northern China during the 1990s. It's got a demo on Steam. Cars emit steam, don't they? How poetic of them. Here's a trailer.
I generally find it quite frustrating how limited the medium of games insists on being when it comes to engaging in a wide breadth of genres. One particular genre that its filmmaking cousin frequently utilises but is rarely seen within games is comedy. Sure, occasionally a game makes an attempt at telling a joke within a cutscene (failing more often than not (comedy's hard!)), but rarely is it a genre mechanically. So I'm quite pleased to learn of Send in the Clown, a turn-based RPG where you play as a clown that has to save a 12 year old's birthday party… and it only has one turn.
Ludeon Studios, developers of sci-fi colony construction sim RimWorld, have announced in a Steam update that the game will be moving over from Unity to the studio's own in-house Waylith Engine in its upcoming update 1.7. Ludeon states that the game will "look and play exactly the same", but performance will see an improvement of around 2-4x.
Update 1.7 on Waylith promises "faster startup time, game load time with big mod lists, map generation, world generation, general ticks-per-second, and just about everything else", with an example given that "a modpack with 1500 mods went from 14 minutes to 6 minutes to load." While this would be a pretty major improvement in itself, the simple fact that community mods still work after an engine switch is what really impresses and slightly confounds me here. Ludeon notes that some may appear as "potentially unsupported" due to the version changing, but will still function just the same. Saves also can be carried over from 1.6 to 1.7, meaning there'll be no loss of progress just for updating.
The happy-go-lucky bigwigs at Epic Games have instructed the creators of an unannounced shooter that features Marvel and Star Wars characters to complete their project using an "AI first" production model, according to a report, with generated art and code. The Disney collaboration in question was allegedly due for release in March, but has now been delayed indefinitely. The game's makers are, we're told, being ordered to make heavier use of Anthropic's Claude and similar tools.
