The best concepts, mechanics, and innovations to come out of indie game development in 2020 — With so many games being released on an almost daily basis, it’s easy for a lot of great ideas to slip under the radar. Vista Magazine is all about focusing on the unique aspects of indie games, and so as we look back at 2020, we want to highlight some…

After nearly a decade of play, I can’t seem to put this game down — I have a confession. Some might call it an open secret. I own about 100 games on Steam. Sadly, that’s not the issue. The issue is that I’ve played more hours of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim than all 100 of them combined. I bought Skyrim back in 2011. This…

An explanation and an exercise in understanding default values. — Like most web development beginners, my first instinct with CSS was to jump right in. I wanted to make websites immediately. And that’s a good instinct — as human beings, we learn through projects, through getting our hands dirty. But I quickly became frustrated. Things just weren’t looking right. The spacing was off, text looked out of place. I felt like the page I was…

A beginner’s guide to using CSS units like em, rem, px and more in your responsive web designs. — Absolute Units Absolute units are divided mainly into two categories: pixels (px), and the rest (cm, mm, in). Absolute units are good for laying out precise screen dimensions, but they will not scale with the viewport, so they aren’t so great for creating responsive designs on tablets and mobile phones.

A chat with the storytellers behind Wintermoor Tactics Club, a charming visual novel/tactics RPG. — Interweaving two genres is a complicated task. It forces you to interrogate a game down to its very base, to ask questions — what makes a tactics game a tactics game? How about a visual novel? What will you lose in one by attempting to transform it into another? In Wintermoor Tactics Club, a strong narrative thread is the key to successfully uniting these disparate parts. The richly developed characters and environments serve as both a justification for the gameplay as well as a consequence of it; you battle because high school is rife with tension, emotion, angst —…

Enter the world of nineteenth century mountaineering in Peaks of Yore, a gorgeous, nostalgic climbing experiment. — Standing 60 metres high on the serrated coast of Sutherland, the Old Man of Stoer reigns above The Minch, a sinuos Scottish channel flanked by ancient rocks and mossy terrain. Stoer is a sea stack, a land-form constructed of columns of sea rock. It is formed by wave erosion, the mouth of the ocean gnawing endlessly at landscape until sharp, steep embankments form. These unnatural beauties are a great gift to sight-seers, but an even better treasure for mountaineers.

Katherine is what happens when you buy the wrong VHS tape at the video store. You decide to play it at the dead of night, insatiably curious, and wind up with a migraine-inducing fright when the television starts chanting incantations. With its chattering TV-static and found footage theme, Katherine has all the usual markers of a retro horror flick. Today, in our inaugural Minute Indie column, we talk to developer Keziban about how he and his team crafted this particular fright-fest.

Jet Set Radio meets Pokemon Snap to tell a story about youth rebellion in a time of Bushfires, COVID-19, and government apathy. — At the turn of the century, SEGA released an unconventional new classic: the exuberant Jet Set Radio, a videogame about roller skating, graffiti, running from the police, and, above all else, being young, stylish, and pissed off. Riffing off of the raw, riotous energy of the Japanese youth in the 1990’s, Jet Set Radio painted a brightly colored picture of youth rebellion. Japan in the 90s (“The Lost Decade”) was plagued by a sharp economic downfall that stymied job growth and led to a wave of young…

Hi! I’m Celia, and welcome to Learn/Apply installment numero dos. If this is your first time here, this series focuses on learning a cool concept fast and rapidly putting that concept to work, whether it be through art, code, or whatever medium tickles your fancy. We’re going to be building off a few concepts from Learn/Apply #1, an Introduction to Color Theory, however that reading is by no means required. Every L/A issue stands by itself.