Most people who have played video games have wondered how they’re made–and maybe even thought about making their own. But it can be difficult to know where to start. The framework for making video games varies so much between different platforms and mediums, and even most experts probably have certain deficiencies in knowledge regarding certain topics.
With this bundle, you’ll get the hands-on experience you need to begin designing steadily more complex games. The bundle includes courses on subjects as diverse as the Python, JavaScript, HTML, Meteor.js, DOM API, Phaser 3, and more. Skills such as being able to code in Python are not only useful for aspiring video game developers. Employers in a variety of different industries use Python for databases and a bunch of other purposes that make it an incredibly valuable program to know. You’ll get access to over 20 hours of content, which you can access at any time along with sequential lessons that help guide you along your path.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge will no longer be working on Amazon’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith series with Donald Glover, who remains attached as co-creator, executive producer and star.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Waller-Bridge, who originally signed on in the same roles as Glover, “had a different creative vision for the series” than the Atlanta star, but sources say the pair remain friends and her departure from the project was amicable. Her role will now be recast, with the series still on track to premiere on Amazon Prime Video in 2022.
The initial idea for the series is said to have been conceived by Glover who is still on board alongside Francesca Sloane who is serving as co-creator, showrunner and executive producer. New Regency’s Yariv Milchan and Michael Schaefer are also billed as executive producers on Mr. and Mrs. Smith, with production on the series expected to begin next year.
Writing is currently underway on the series, which will act as a reboot to Doug Liman’s 2005 action comedy film of the same name, which famously starred Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. The movie followed the explosive adventures of a married couple after discovering that they’re both assassins working for adversarial espionage agencies.
Waller-Bridge, Glover and Sloane all have overall deals at Amazon. Glover signed his eight-figure deal with Amazon this year and immediately started staffing a writers room for a potential new series called Hive, rumored to revolve around a Beyoncé-like figure. He’s also in post-production on the third season of FX’s Atlanta, while the fourth season is in production.
The new Pokemon movie Secrets of the Jungle will debut on Netflix globally on October 8, The Pokemon Company and Netflix announced on Tuesday. A new trailer was also released, while The Pokemon Company announced plans to celebrate the movie in the games Sword/Shield and Pokemon Go later on.
The trailer shows off more of the film and teases out the story, which takes viewers into the jungle. The music you’re hearing are the songs “Always Safe” and “No Matter What,” which recording artist Cyn wrote specifically for the film. Take a look:
The full description for Secrets of the Jungle has also been released:
“Deep within the Forest of Okoya, the Mythical Pokemon Zarude live in a troop and maintain a strict rule that forbids outsiders from entering their territory. Elsewhere in the jungle lives Koko, a human boy raised by a lone Zarude who left the troop. Koko has grown up never doubting that he is a Zarude. But one day, a chance meeting with Ash and Pikachu leaves Koko with his first human friend. Is he truly a Pokemon? Or is he, in fact, a human? When danger threatens the jungle, the bonds between Pokemon and human–and the love between parent and child–will be put to the test.”
The Pokemon Company also announced that Dada Zarude and Shiny Celebi, two creatures that appear in Secrets of the Jungle, will be available in Pokemon Sword and Shield for players who sign up for Pokemon Trainer Club. Everyone who signs up by September 25 will get the two Pokemon on October 7.
A crossover event for Secrets of the Jungle and Pokemon Go is also in the works, with more details coming “soon.”
2021 marks the 25th anniversary of the Pokemon series, and this is just the latest event celebrating the milestone. “During Pokemon’s 25th anniversary year, we wanted fans to have the opportunity to experience the newest animated Pokemon movie simultaneously as a global community,” The Pokemon Company’s Emily Arons said. “Pokemon animation is a much-beloved pillar of the franchise, and Netflix is the perfect partner to once again help us deliver a worldwide moment for fans as we celebrate 25 years of action and adventure with Ash and his Pikachu.”
Far Cry 3 is one of the best entries in Ubisoft’s over-the-top FPS franchise. If you missed out when it launched back in 2012 or simply want to revisit it, you can grab Far Cry 3 for free at the Ubisoft Store for a limited time. You have until September 11 at 2:30 AM (your local time) to claim Far Cry 3. This freebie is only available on PC and launches via the Ubisoft Connect client.
If you don’t already have a Ubisoft account, you can sign up for one for free to take advantage of this giveaway. Once Far Cry 3 is in your library, it’s yours to keep forever.
Far Cry 3 recently earned a spot in our roundup of the best open-world games. We awarded the open-world FPS a 9/10 in our Far Cry 3 review. “This is a game that ignites the desire to complete every last challenge and check out every last icon on your map,” critic Kevin VanOrd wrote. “You gradually journey across the entirety of two sunny and sinful islands, hunting for rare game, speeding medicine to needy communities, and skinning sharks so that you might craft new wallets with their hides.”
Now’s a great time to play one of the most impressive Far Cry games. The next entry in the series, Far Cry 6, releases October 7 for PlayStation, Xbox, PC, and Stadia. Make sure to check out our Far Cry 6 preorder guide for details on bonuses and the various editions available to order.
Netflix has announced that the next Pokémon movie, Secrets of the Jungle, will debut on the streaming service in October.
Revealed on the Netflix Geeked Twitter account, Pokémon the Movie: Secrets of the Jungle will be available on Netlfix from October 8. The announcement came with a brand new trailer, showing Ash and Pikachu heading into the jungle to discover new jungle Pokémon and meet with Coco and his Zarude.
the next POKÉMON movie is coming to Netflix!
Pokémon the Movie: Secrets of the Jungle — the 23rd movie in the series — will debut on October 8th. check out the brand new trailer: pic.twitter.com/AXur4CrVqW
The jungle is also seemingly home to the Healing Spring, which a group of scientists show special interest in. No doubt Ash and his friends will need to ensure the jungle is kept safe from evil intentions.
Secrets of the Jungle is the 23rd Pokémon movie. The previous movie, Mewtwo Strikes Back – Evolution, was a CGI remake of the very first Pokémon movie.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer.
PUBG creator Brendan Greene AKA PlayerUnknown has left PUBG Studios and is now working on a wildly ambitious-sounding game at his studio PlayerUnknown Productions. Greene shared more details on this project in an interview with GamesBeat, saying the idea is to create a metaverse, of sorts, and give people a new place to exist in a game world that is the size of the Earth.
“We want to give people a new place to live, because this one has some issues,” Greene said of the new game, which is being made under the working title Artemis. Greene didn’t want to say the word metaverse, but it sounds like that’s what he is trying to achieve.
“I don’t want to say that word. I’ve been thinking long and hard about this. I watched Ready Player One and I thought, ‘Holy sh**, that’s what I want to make,'” he said.
Players will get their first introduction to Greene’s vision in the pay-what-you-want tech demo Prologue, which puts players onto a massive map and challenges them to survive against the elements. It’s a single-player game and there is no combat. Greene thinks it’ll be dull and tedious. But it’s meant to serve as a first glimpse into some of the ideas that Greene and his team hope to achieve with Artemis.
“I think it’ll be quite boring. Light fires, board up windows, keep yourself warm against the constant storm where cold weather will knock you out,” he said. “But again, it’s more to show a consistent world with logical points on it where you can do things, and this is systemic gameplay.”
Prologue is a “testbed” for the game elements of the world that he hopes to realize in Artemis. “It’s like what Arma was for battle royale. It was a place for me to test, iterate, get a final game mode, and then be able to say, ‘Okay, it works.’ That’s what we want to do with Prologue,” Greene said.
One of the biggest differences between Prologue and Artemis is the size and scale of the game world. Whereas Prologue takes place on a very, very large map that is 64-kilometers by 64-kilometers in size, Artemis’ world is hoping to be on the scale of a planet. Its radius could exceed 6,000 kilometers, which is about the size of Earth. While the actual size of Artemis’ game world is subject to change, Greene said he has observed a trend among gamers to desire a “digital life” where they can be transported into a new place. The idea is for Artemis to allow users to create cities, societies, and civilizations.
“Providing this space where it’s a big enough world–I love Rust, but if you play on a busy server there are bases every few meters. I want a space where you don’t discover a player’s base for miles. Or when you do it’s a big settlement rather than a box,” Greene said. “This stuff has always excited me, ever since I got back into gaming by discovering really open worlds. Red Dead Redemption is fantastic, but it’s just a bunch of scripts. You go kill all the bears in a region, go away, come back, and they’re all back again. I want to have meaningful life in the world. If you kill all the bears in a region, maybe the deer population explodes.”
To realize his vision, Greene and the team are making a proprietary game engine because they couldn’t find a commercially available option for what the studio had in mind. The team at PlayerUnknown Productions is currently about 25 people, and Greene said the studio only plans to expand to about 50. They don’t need a massive team because the technology and machine-learning will do a lot of the heavy lifting for creating game worlds and systems.
As you might have guessed, Artemis likely won’t be released anytime soon–Greene said it could be five years or longer.
Remedy has announced a full remaster of its cult classic Alan Wake, due to arrive this fall on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC (via Epic Games Store). Perhaps more excitingly, it opens the door more than ever for Alan Wake 2 to come down the line.
After a leak last week, Remedy and publisher Epic announced that Alan Wake Remastered would come with both of the game’s expansions, allow for 4K resolution, and will include a new commentary from creative director Sam Lake. No official release date has been announced, but the previous retailer leaks have pointed to October 5.
Lake himself wrote about the remaster on Alan Wake/Remedy fansite The Sudden Stop, beginning his letter by writing “this is for you”. He confirmed that the game was almost complete, and that it is “the original experience you fell in love with all those years ago. We did not want to change that. But the visuals all around, including the character model of Alan Wake himself and the cinematics, have been updated and improved with some choice next-generation upgrades.”
The announcement of the remaster will undoubtedly see fans getting excited about a long-awaited sequel. When Remedy partnered with Epic Games, the developer was said to be working on two games from the franchise – one was a “AAA multi-platform game”, and the other a “smaller-scale project”. It feels very likely that Alan Wake Remastered is the smaller project, leaving a full Alan Wake 2 more possible than ever.
Despite troubles with the first game – it was designed as an open world game but had to be drastically altered due to production difficulties – Remedy has made no secret of wanting to return to Alan Wake’s world. It’s started work on the sequel before, but never been able to reach the finish line. However, after folding Alan Wake into the world of Control, it seems Remedy has big plans for its own interconnected universe of games – and Alan Wake 2 feels very much like it could be a part of that.
Alan Wake originally arrived in 2010, and told the story of an author on the search of his missing wife, slowly discovering that a horror story he wrote is coming true around him. This remaster marks the first time the cult classic has ever been released on PlayStation.
We awarded the original release a 9/10 review, saying it did “a great job of mixing elements of written work, television, and video games to create an experience full of scares, laughs, and thrills that’s just as fun to play as it is to watch.”
Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
Below is a spoiler-free review of Lucifer Season 6, which debuts on Netflix on Sept. 10.
The sixth and final season of Luciferhas come to its appropriately epic and bittersweet end, one that — in many ways — gives the fans what they truly desire.
That’s impressive, considering Netflix took on a lot when it heeded the fan-run campaign and picked up the admittedly odd show after it was canceled by Fox. How do you wrap up a show where characters live for eternity in Heaven, Hell, or elsewhere? How much fan service do you provide the fans who literally saved it? After the way Netflix ended the similarly toned The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, I admit I had little faith. However, I, like Ella Lopez, found some things to restore it.
At the close of Season 5, Lucifer and his twin brother, Michael, battled at the L.A. Coliseum to decide which would become the new God. Ultimately, Lucifer and company defeated the duplicitous Michael and Lucifer seemed poised to ascend. Yet as Season 6 dawns, Lucifer isn’t quite so sure he’s ready to leave Lux and all his friends behind. Meanwhile, Chloe — who’s agreed to be God’s consultant in Heaven — can’t seem to hang up her detective persona. This becomes clear in Episode 1, “Nothing Ever Changes Around Here,” when they find themselves smack-dab in yet another whodunit while trying to have a last-night-on-Earth date.
But don’t worry, Season 6 doesn’t slip right back into a murder-of-the-week format. It experiments!
While last season saw Lucifer try musical and film noir episodes, this season features a cartoon episode reminiscent of Community’s “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” and a clips episode that eschews the monotony of the format for some insightful (and hilarious) perspective shifts. They make for some fun changes of pace in a genre that often relies on gimmicks.
And hey, gimmicks aren’t necessarily a bad thing; genre shows often do well with them. Just look at Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Wynonna Earp, The Magicians, and even The X-Files. Lucifer’s work well, too, thanks in large part to the cast’s natural chemistry and the show’s sense of humor.
But one big challenge this season had was giving love to its supporting characters, arguably just as cherished by fans as Deckerstar, and here’s where it succeeds most. Season 6 sees a lot of Ella — always a bonus — and gives her more to do than play sidekick. Maze and Eve have some great scenes together, including a fun episode that revisits Eve’s past. Meanwhile, Linda contemplates her time as a celestial therapist, while Dan deals with being in Hell. It would’ve been a shame to nix Dan entirely after he spent five seasons going from Detective Douche to a likeable guy, so it’s nice to see the show catching up with him.
Amenadiel has perhaps the most poignant arc. Last season, he decided to enroll in the police academy, motivated in part by racial disparities he’d seen while trying to help Caleb, a Black teen bullied by cops and gangs alike, in Season 4. Actor DB Woodside has been open about the racist treatment from police he’s faced in his life, and told EW the episode with Caleb had been one of his favorites.
Amenadiel has perhaps the most poignant arc.
So, while Lucifer ignores the pandemic, it does revisit police brutality and racial injustice without mentioning specific real-world reckonings. It rightfully points out that Chloe, a white woman whose dad was a cop, wouldn’t have the same experience on the force as Amenadiel, an angel perceived on Earth as a Black man. As a white-passing Latina, I do not experience police harassment the way Black and Brown people do, so my ability to gauge how well this arc works is limited. What I do appreciate is that Lucifer didn’t back down on or forget the issue, chalk it up to “a few bad apples,” or cheerily wrap it up, the way shows might have in the past. It treats it as the ongoing, systemic problem that it is.
As for the main arc, the crux is obviously Lucifer’s upcoming job change, and it doesn’t come easy. There are new and old faces that come with whirlwinds of chaos, plus numerous Easter Eggs from seasons pasts. All told, it makes for a mostly satisfying conclusion, despite some timey-wimey plotting and unanswered questions. Will hardcore fans like it? It likely depends on what they see as the best endings for Deckerstar and company. Like Lucifer himself, it’s a little exasperating, but still a good time.
Alan Wake Remastered, a refreshed 4K version of the 2010 game and its two expansions, is on the way from Epic Games. The remaster will launch this fall on PC via the Epic Games Store, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.
According to a press release, the remaster will include the core 2010 game, plus The Signal and The Writer DLC, along with a new commentary track from creative director Sam Lake. This also marks the first time the game will be available for PlayStation owners–it was previously exclusive to Xbox 360 and PC. Lake announced the remastered version of the game in an open letter to fans on Alan Wake and Remedy fan site The Sudden Stop.
Alan Wake centers on the titular horror writer as he searches for his missing wife across the Pacific Northwest town of Bright Falls. The third-person shooter pairs your standard weapons with a flashlight, which you have to use to weaken the supernatural monsters by shining lights on them. It was inspired by mystery and thriller series such as Lost and Twin Peaks, and the works of Stephen King. It received a follow-up, the more arcade-like, combat-focused Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, in 2012.
A remaster of Alan Wake is kind of a big deal for developer Remedy Entertainment, particularly right now. First, the game became something of a cult hit when it was released on Xbox 360, taking Remedy away from its more action-focused roots with Max Payne into the realm of a psychological thriller. But Remedy made the game as an Xbox exclusive, and for quite a few years, Microsoft owned the publishing rights to the property–so an Alan Wake 2 never materialized, and Alan’s story was never fully resolved.
So returning to Alan Wake at this moment, as Remedy works on whatever’s next for these two big properties, seems pretty pointed. Remedy has already said its next game is in the shared Control-Alan Wake universe. This feels like it could be providing fans with a refresher course on what happened in Alan Wake, so they’re ready for Remedy’s next big offering–which suggests it might be soon that we start to hear about what’s next for Alan and Jesse. Alan Wake Remastered also includes a new commentary track from Sam Lake, which might include some further insights about how Remedy means to bridge the two stories even further.
Even if Alan Wake Remastered doesn’t shine more light on the future for the series, though, this should be an excellent opportunity to revisit Remedy’s cult classic. The original title still holds up pretty well even a decade later, but having access to it on new consoles and with improved graphics should allow Alan Wake to scare a whole new batch of players.
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 developer Ninja Theory has been revealing tidbits of information about the upcoming game, and the latest tweet from the studio shows just how far it’s willing to go to achieve fashionable accuracy.
“Sometimes to create, you must first destroy,” Ninja Theory tweeted as someone at the studio took a blowtorch to some leather material that looks similar to the costume that Senua actress and video editor Melina Juergens wore recently.
It’s not a video of the office pyromaniac in action–probably–but a demonstration of how Ninja Theory plans to use real-world assets in its games, creating a library of scorched materials that it can reference when needed. “It’s high-quality scans like this that will help us reach an amazing level of detail in our games,” the developer explained in a separate tweet that showed off the digital replica.
Ninja Theory showed off some behind-the-scenes footage from Hellblade II at the Xbox Games Showcase in June, which founder Tameem Antoniades said came from a “chunky slice” of the game that had been developed exclusively so far for PC and Xbox Series X|S.
It’s still early days though, and Ninja Theory is looking to create something more ambitious than a simple sequel so Hellblade II won’t be arriving anytime soon. For more on the game and the impressive amount of prep work being done for it, you can watch Juergens undergo warrior training as part of her process to make Senua more authentic.