This week’s Xbox One releases (July 13-17, 2020)

Injustice 2 and NASCAR Heat 5 are this week’s Free Play Day games on Xbox One.

NetherRealm Studios’ excellent superhero fighting game and 704Games roundabout racer are free to download and play on Xbox One until 11:59 pm PT on August 16, 2020.

Injustice 2 pits Batman against Superman in a one-on-one combat jamboree. It’s a well-liked game that balances an engaging story with improved fighting mechanics. NASCAR Heat 5 is the official game of the 2020 season, but – other than a roster update – it offers few improvements over last year’s entry.

As ever, all save progress and unlocked achievements carry over to purchased copies of either game. As luck would have it, there’s a crop of new discounts to encourage such a purchase.

It’s also worth remembering that The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited remains free to play on Xbox until August 19, 2020.

Xbox One Free Play Day Deals

Injustice 2

• Standard Edition – 75% off
• Ultimate Pack – 80% off

NASCAR Heat 5

• Standard Edition – 20% off
• Gold Edition – 20% off

The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited

• Standard Edition – 50% off

For even more video game bargains, visit our dedicated sales and free games pages. You can also follow Thumbsticks on Twitter and Facebook.

A Total War Saga: Troy just launched today, but it’s already free on the Epic Games Store.

Creative Assembly’s brand new strategy game will begin retailing at $49.99 tomorrow. But, for now, you can grab the latest entry in the long-running series for free.

Reviews for the new Total War are strong, too. Not quite as strong as the reviews for last year’s game-changing Total War: Three Kingdoms,but, IGN and Eurogamer both recommend it.

All that said, A Total War Saga: Troy isn’t even technically one of this week’s free games. Remnant: From the Ashes and The Alto Collection are the titles currently highlighted in the store’s Free Games section.

Remnant is a 2019 third-person co-op shooter. Its punishing difficulty and tough bosses earned it comparisons to Dark Souls. But, its game feel is more akin to Gears of War.

The Alto Collection is also up for grabs, assembling mobile sand/snowboarding games, Alto’s Adventure (2015) and Alto’s Odyssey (2018).

But, for me, the most interesting free game is 3 Out of 10 EP 2: “Foundation 101.” This is the second episode in Terrible Posture Games’ five-part series. Unlike most episodic games, this one is releasing on a weekly basis, with plans to conclude by early September. I thought, the first episode, “Welcome to Shovelworks” did a pretty good job blending the game’s animated sitcom storytelling with short and varied interactive sections. I haven’t been blown away by the writing so far, but, hey, you can’t judge a show by its pilot.

With all these games up for grabs, Epic has unveiled next week’s freebies. Expect to get Enter the Gungeon (a free game for the second time) and God’s Trigger next Thursday. Plus, 3 Out of 10 will be back with its third episode.

Following a successful charity drive, Bethesda is making FPS classics Quake II and Quake III free for a limited time.

Both games will be free to download from the Bethesda Game Launcher following an impressive fundraising effort from fans during the recent Quakecon at Home event. Over $30,000 was raised which will be distributed among good causes including Unicef, the Legal Defense Fund, The Trevor Project, and Direct Relief.

Quake II is available to download until 12:00pm ET on August 15, 2020. Quake III will unlock at 12:00pm ET on August 17, 2020.

THANK YOU! The total is in, and you raised over $30,000 during #QuakeCon at Home for @NAACP_LDF, @DirectRelief, @TrevorProject, and @UNICEF!

As a thank you, we'll be unlocking Quake II on 8/12 and Quake III on 8/17, free for 72 hours each on the Bethesda net Launcher. pic.twitter.com/dfNM6F1qaH

— Bethesda (@bethesda) August 10, 2020

Head over to the Bethesda Game Launcher to download Quake II and embark on Operation Alien Overlord.

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Organisers of the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) have confirmed the dates for next year’s event, which will be a physical/virtual hybrid.

This year’s GDC was one of the first major video game events to be cancelled due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Some virtual talks were released in March as a short-term replacement, and last week’s digital-only GDC Summer streamed a larger programme of content to over 9700 virtual attendees.

GDC has confirmed that next year’s conference  – once again planned to be held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco – will run from July 19-23, 2021, rather than in its usual spring window. The format will again be a mix of lectures, exhibits, and roundtables, but it will now include a full programme of digital content for virtual attendees. It’s a welcome, safety-first approach that will hopefully make more content accessible to a wider audience.

Additional virtual events are also planned in the coming year, beginning with a collection of virtual GDC Master Classes in late 2020. They will be day-long and multi-day virtual workshops examining specific aspects of video game development. Finally, a GDC Community Celebration will run from March 1-5, 2021. It will stream behind-the-scenes content on recent games, talks from industry luminaries, and various Q&A sessions.

The new format looks like a positive and overdue change for GDC that will hopefully benefit its organisers and the development community at large. In the meantime, readers interested in game development should check out the fascinating story behind Mixolumia.

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This Twitter thread charts the development of indie puzzle game Mixolumia. It’s a brilliant insight and you might just learn a thing or two.

“idk what this is yet but I had an idea,” wrote Dave Hoffman, AKA davemakes, on Twitter. As it turns out, “this” was a brilliant idea for a puzzle game.

The tweet was dated January 29, 2019, and marked the development of what would eventually become Mixolumia.

But back then, it was just a simple idea: What if a block-dropping puzzle game, like Tetris or Columns, took place on a grid that’s been rotated by 45 degrees?

idk what this is yet but I had an idea pic.twitter.com/w9JbNxZ0Zt

— davemakes 🎶 mixolumia ✨ (@davemakes) January 29, 2019

It seems like such a simple idea, and it’s a wonder nobody has never thought of it before.

It’s not unusual for developers to tweet out early ideas to see if they attract any interest – just take a look at this Bugsnax tweet from 2014 – but what’s really interesting is that Hoffman continued working on this fragment of a game, from prototype to eventual release, all in this one Twitter thread.

That means every time they came up against a problem, or had a small breakthrough, or just made a tiny little tweak, it went in the thread. It also meant they got to ask questions of their followers and crowdsource design solutions for the game that would eventually become Mixolumia. Like what happens when you hit a corner, for instance, a problem that wouldn’t occur on a traditional vertical grid:

we have a winnerhttps://t.co/SEsWq4Y2Dx

— davemakes 🎶 mixolumia ✨ (@davemakes) January 30, 2019

Which, a few days later, got refined further into this:

Blocks no longer break on corners. They fall in the last direction you pushed. Makes things way more predictable, should be better for strategy! pic.twitter.com/3GXfriocM1

— davemakes 🎶 mixolumia ✨ (@davemakes) February 2, 2019

It’s interesting to trace the very public development of an indie game. Twitter may be lots of terrible, awful, no good things, but that sort of instantaneous insight? You’d struggle to get it any other way. It’s not all fun gifs and flashy effects, though:

I'll get to this stuff, but I think it's important to recognize some of the most time consuming yet crucial aspects of developing a game make for totally unremarkable gifs

— davemakes 🎶 mixolumia ✨ (@davemakes) February 13, 2019

From there, you can see the addition of a Patreon demo – which offered a boost to development – and the addition of a scoring system, pausing and an options menu, music from Hoffman and Josie Brechner, colour palette choices, particle effects, and plenty more. Even accessibility features and multiple game modes, including a chilled out relaxing mode, are covered.

And now, a year and a half later, Mixolumia is available to buy right now through indie storefront Itch.io. It features a 10% launch discount for a limited time and will set you back just $9. That’s a bargain, sure, but the insight into the process through the Twitter thread is priceless.

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