DeNA Unveils New Photorealistic Shooter "Lawless"

by Joe Jasko, Gamezebo, Posted Oct 23rd 2013 5:30PM

DeNA is back with another high-octane free-to-play shooter for iOS devices calledLawless, and the law will be the last thing on your mind once you see this beauty of a mobile game in action! The game itself is being developed by EightPixelsSquare, who previously worked on Dead Space: Extraction for home consoles, and overseen by the guidance of Ben Cousins from DeNA's Scattered Entertainment, who already brought us some delicious scares earlier this year withThe Drowning.

Lawless will be set in 1990s Los Angeles, where players take control of a ruthless criminal and engage in a number on gritty cover-based shootouts as they complete mission that range from bank robberies to assassinations, and everything else in between. Cousins describes the upcoming game as "an intense, skillful game designed as an ode to classic 'light gun' shooters and filled with the retro Californian feel of '90s bank robber movies."

I can personally attest to this 'light gun' design, as the debut trailer for Lawless instantly gave me a strong Time Crisis vibe, not to mention a glimpse of the insanely cool "photorealistic" graphics that the game promises to provide. While there's no firm release date for Lawless just quite yet, interested gamers can sign up to be notified on the game's official website, where they can also receive an exclusive duel-wielding Glock 17 weapon for use in the game. Tags: DeNA, free to play, free-to-play, IOS, ipad, iphone, LA, Lawless, los angeles, new games, new shooter game, shooter, tablet games

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Facebook unveils school-specific groups, allows file sharing among users with designated .edu email addresses

Facebook announced a new groups for schools feature that enables users with active school email addresses join online communities related to their college or university.

Groups for schools differ from Facebook’s other groups in that they can be exclusive to students and that members can share documents with each other. The company seems to position these groups as a utility for coordinating schedules, sharing lecture notes and messaging classmates. But university-specific groups might also increase engagement among college users who don’t feel comfortable using the social network the way students did before their teachers, parents and bosses joined.

Not all schools are eligible for groups yet. Users can check the groups for schools page or wait to see a message appear on the left side of their home page when the feature is available to them. Once users join their school community, they are able to create subgroups for individual classes, study groups, clubs, teams, dorms or friends. Users can join groups for multiple schools as long as they have an active email address for each. This is necessary for study abroad or transfer students.

On group pages there will be a tab for files. Users can share non-copyrighted documents and other files with members of a school group. Anyone in a school group can upload and download files within that group. When users upload a revised version of a file, the previous version of the file remains available. Users can also message any confirmed member of their school community without being friends first.

Facebook began testing school-specific groups in December 2011, among Brown and Vanderbilt students. At the time we wondered whether university groups would be a start to a broader initiative to get more people familiar with Facebook’s offerings around small-group sharing. Since then the social network has redesigned groups a few times and given events more group-like functionality.

The way groups for schools restrict access to users with a designated .edu email address is reminiscent of the way networks operated when Facebook began in 2004. File sharing is another former feature from the social network’s college-only days. Founder Mark Zuckerberg built a peer-to-peer file sharing application called Wirehog on top of the social network, but then-Facebook president Sean Parker encouraged him to shut it down to avoid copyright infringement issues. File sharing would be a useful feature for other non-school groups, but preventing illegal media sharing would certainly be difficult.

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Adobe Unveils Flash Player 11, AIR 3 Software for Next Generation of Social Games

Developer Adobe is ready to release its next suite of multimedia software in the Flash family that’ll take Flash games into new territory on multiple platforms. Adobe Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 will be available on October 4.

Speaking to Inside Network, Adobe Director for Product Marketing Anup Murarka walked us through a slideshow presentation of what the new software can do for games. By the developer’s estimates, more than 70% of all casual games on the web (including those available on social networking sites) are written in Flash. Demands from Flash game developers include improved graphics capabilities, faster download times, quicker rendering, support for more gameplay features, and a smoother cross-platform transition experience. Flash Player 11 and AIR 3, Murarka says, addresses many of these demands and ultimately change the nature of Flash game development.

“We’re enabling a completely new generation of apps,” he explains. “Social games have a lot of data that has to get downloaded and it’s got to be rendered. [Cross-platform] development is all siloed and that gets to be an unmanageable cost. And we’ve had mobile developers tell us that they want to port games to desktop and web. You can save time [...] and support a wider range of features with [Flash Player] 11, depending on the platform.”

Graphics are by far the most significant update to the software package. For desktops and connected TVs, Flash Player 11 will support 3D graphics with one thousand times faster rendering versus Flash Player 10. Games can run at 60 frames per second, the rate at which many triple-A console video games run. Murarka says that the APIs are supported on most GPUs and there’s a software fallback so that the games will still work even if the game is running on a GPU Flash doesn’t recognize.

AIR 3 also supports platform-native extensions for hardware and software such that developers could experiment with light sensors or dual screen setups for new gameplay mechanics. Previously, social games have tried with limited success to implement webcam support (e.g. Punch Punch Revolution) and Murarka says it could be possible to enable motion controller support depending on the device and its manufacturer’s policies around creating supporting drivers (e.g. Microsoft’s Kinect controller).

A third feature of the software relevant to social games is captive runtime. This allows developers to automatically package AIR 3 with applications for installation on Android, Windows, iOS and Mac OS so that potential players do not have to leave the game to go download AIR separately. Captive runtime also allows developers to manage version updates to their apps independent of AIR updates made by Adobe.

The big question for social and mobile game developers is whether or not AIR 3 will work well enough for developers to port their Flash 11 games to mobile devices with minimal effort. As Murarka says, costs of cross-platform development are rising as developers either have to invest resources in building native apps for or troubleshooting converted Flash apps on iOS, Android and tablet platforms. Additionally, many developers are also spending resources on exploring new cross-platform solutions like HTML5, which represents an opportunity cost of the time they could spend building new games in a language they already know.

As a success story, Adobe cites Machinarium, an indie game originally developed 2009 as a downloadable Flash game for PCs, Macs, and Linux. Very recently, the game was released on iPad 2 — still built in Flash and repackaged for the iPad interfact. A quote from game developer Amanita Design included in the Adobe press releases say that the studio was able to revamp the game with Flash and get it onto iPads in less than two months. Amamita Design goes on to say that Android and BlackBerry versions are coming soon.

As for the big players in the social games space on Facebook, Zynga also throws in a quote with the press release, saying that the company is “committed to building mainstream entertainment across all devices, platforms and applications, whether it's through Flash or HTML5.” Zynga acquired HTML5 engine Dextrose almost a year ago and continues to develop its games in Flash — sometimes resorting to storing assets on players’ hard drives to handle all of the data its games require players to download and render.

Adobe says that, to date, Flash Player is supported on more than 98% of Internet-enabled PCs. By the end of this year, it expects that Flash-based applications will be supported on more than 200 million smartphones and tablets (including iOS devices) via AIR. By the end of 2015, Adobe estimates that the number of devices that support AIR will hit 1 billion.

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