Japanese Engineering Firm Wants To Build Underwater City

As rising sea levels pose an increasing threat to island dwellers, a Japanese civil engineering company has come up with an ambitious solution: an underwater city.

BioShock Creator Teases New Game

While we still don't know for sure what the "smaller, more entrepreneurial" project BioShock creator Ken Levine and his team are working on, we now have somewhat of a better idea as to the direction it will take.

In a piece for Medium, Levine wrote about his love for Lord of the Rings game Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, specifically the way in which it offers a flexible narrative. This is at the heart of what Levine wants to do with his current project, which remains unannounced.

"Two years ago, I started thinking about how to build a system to let story be as variable as gameplay and still be awesome in the way story can be awesome," he said. "Could you have characters, conflicts, and dialogue that could end not in 100 states, not in 1,000, but in X to the Y states? Goodbye linear, hello geometric!"


"The goal is to make a flexible narrative that is broadly replayable and strongly adaptive to player choice" -- Levine

"And that's the new big thing that my colleagues and I have been working on at our yet-unnamed new studio. In March, I gave a talk at the Game Developers Conference about some of our ideas. We called it 'Narrative Legos.' The goal is to make a flexible narrative that is broadly replayable and strongly adaptive to player choice."

Levine went on to say that, at one time, he wondered if anyone would care about a game of this nature. Then Shadow of Mordor, with its ambitious Nemesis System, came along.



"Even as we've made huge inroads into our design, even as we work on our prototype, there are days when I wonder: Will it be fun? Is there a there there? Even if there is, will the audience give a sh**?," Levine said. "And then Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor showed up.

Double Fine Lending A Publishing Helping Hand So Other Indies Can ‘Stay Indie’

Today’s release of Escape Goat 2 on PC is important to developer MagicalTimeBean, but what you may not know is that Double Fine is part of the celebration. The studio known for Psychonauts and Broken Age is lending a helping hand by helping other indie developers publish their titles.