Have you ever wished a character from your favourite book would leap off the page?
Imagine if they actually could.
That’s the concept behind The Plucky Squire, a new video game set inside – and outside – a storybook.
The game follows title character Jot, and his quest to save the Land of Mojo from evil wizard Humgrump.
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It’s a classic fairy tale setup, but the tongue-in-cheek adventure, heavily influenced by classics like The Legend of Zelda, has a trick up its sleeve.
Jot has the ability to jump between the 2D world of its pages and the 3D world outside – a cluttered desktop where everyday objects become towering obstacles for the tiny character to navigate.
The Plucky Squire is one of this year’s most anticipated independently developed games, and has landed to favourable reviews from critics.
And its release marks the end of a four-year quest for one of its lead designers, James Turner.
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James has a fairy tale story of his own.
A keen artist, he studied computer graphics at university and got a job at a London game studio.
During a holiday to Japan, he tells BBC Newsbeat, friends encouraged him to send his portfolio to games companies and he got an interview with Pokémon spin-off developer Genius Sonority.
There was just one problem – James didn’t speak Japanese.
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He turned up anyway, bringing a friend who translated, and he got the job.
“The good thing about being an artist is that your work can speak for itself,” he says.
“And then I was moving to Japan the next month to work on Pokémon Colosseum.”
James’s work was eventually noticed by Game Freak – the makers of the mainline Pokémon titles – and he ended up credited on about 20 games, working his way up to art director on 2019 Nintendo Switch titles Pokémon Sword and Shield.
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James speaks fondly of his time in Japan but says he’s “always had a passion for doing, building things from scratch”.
He was looking to return to the UK, and had long wanted to set up his own studio, and discussed the idea with longtime friend Jonathan Biddle, who’s based in Australia.
Despite being on opposite sides of the world, they took the plunge and founded All Possible Futures.
Now they just needed a game to make.
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James says the idea for The Plucky Squire came from picture books he’d been reading to his young son.
“I thought that could be a fun new twist on an action adventure where you’re walking around inside the pages,” he says.
After landing on the idea of a game set inside a book, James says he and Jonathan discussed putting “a surprise on every page”.
This got them thinking: “What would be the ultimate surprise?”
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“We thought the ultimate surprise would be if you could actually jump out of the book and into the 3D world,” says James.
“That could be really kind of jaw-dropping, Matrix-style twist where you think you know the world but suddenly it’s completely different.
“And that caught our imagination.”
It also caught the public’s imagination.
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The first glimpse of The Plucky Squire was a trailer seen during a showcase at 2022’s Summer Game Fest.
The 90-second clip ends with hero Jot popping out of the storybook’s pages and emerging into the 3D world outside.
There was a huge, positive response, with comments describing the moment as “mind-boggling”.
James and Jonathan had talked about keeping the dimensional switch under wraps until release, watching word-of-mouth spread as people discovered the secret.
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“But you do want to get people excited and interested,” he says.
“And so it made sense to reveal that surprise.”
The reaction showed the team it was the right decision, says James, and also reassured him they were on to something.
“The more people are excited for what you’re making, and the greater the amount of people excited for what you’re doing, the more energy that feeds into the project,” he says.
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“And it’s quite a positive reinforcement.”
But with excitement comes expectation, and The Plucky Squire was pushed back from its original 2023 release date to allow the team to polish it.
James admits the decision led to a “difficult conversation” with publisher Devolver Digital – the indie-focused company that’s released hits including Cult of the Lamb and Enter the Gungeon.
“And then it’s uncomfortable, but so what?” says James.
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“Discomfort is just something you have to deal with in any walk of life and in development.
“You just have to do what’s right each step of the way and then hopefully you can work things out, and in this case we did.”
Throughout development, James and Jonathan worked from their homes in the UK and Australia, recruiting other team members based around the world as the project grew.
James says things have worked well despite the geographical spread, though he admits time differences did make things trickier once deadlines started looming.
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Delaying The Plucky Squire had another, probably unplanned benefit.
Do people value games over graphics? And have blockbuster games lost their sense of fun as big companies race to create a new multiplayer hit or cinematic narrative adventure?
These are less pressing questions in the more creative indie space where James operates these days, but he agrees that people see a gap in the market.
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“I think the desire for those kind of games are definitely there as an alternative to those kind of AAA more serious, darker kind of games,” he says.
“It’s nice to have a broader palette.
“Some people can enjoy that kind of game, other people might enjoy this one.
“And I am glad that we’re there – this bright and breezy console game to hand to those people.”
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Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays – or listen back here.
Last month, two young paddleboarders found themselves stranded in the ocean, pushed 2,000 feet from the shore by strong winds and currents. Thanks to the deployment of a drone, rescuers kept an eye on them the whole time and safely brought them aboard a rescue boat within minutes.
In North Carolina, the Oak Island Fire Department is one of a few in the country using drone technology for ocean rescues. Firefighter-turned-drone pilot Sean Barry explained the drone’s capabilities as it was demonstrated on a windy day.
“This drone is capable of flying in all types of weather and environments,” Barry said.
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Equipped with a camera that can switch between modes — including infrared to spot people in distress — responders can communicate instructions through a speaker. It also can carry life-preserving equipment.
The device is activated by a CO2 cartridge when it comes in contact with water. Once triggered, it inflates into a long tube, approximately 26 inches long, providing distressed swimmers something to hold on to.
In a real-life rescue, after a 911 call from shore, the drone spotted a swimmer in distress. It released two floating tubes, providing the swimmer with buoyancy until help arrived.
Like many coastal communities, Oak Island’s population can swell from about 10,000 to 50,000 during the summer tourist season. Riptides, which are hard to detect on the surface, can happen at any time.
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Every year, about 100 people die due to rip currents on U.S. beaches. More than 80% of beach rescues involve rip currents, if you’re caught in one, rescuers advise to not panic or try to fight it, but try to float or swim parallel to the coastline to get out of the current.
Oak Island Fire Chief Lee Price noted that many people underestimate the force of rip currents.
“People are, ‘Oh, I’m a good swimmer. I’m gonna go out there,’ and then they get in trouble,” Price said.
For Price, the benefit of drones isn’t just faster response times but also keeping rescuers safe. Through the camera and speaker, they can determine if someone isn’t in distress.
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Price said many people might not be aware of it.
“It’s like anything as technology advances, it takes a little bit for everybody to catch up and get used to it,” said Price.
In a demonstration, Barry showed how the drone can bring a safety rope to a swimmer while rescuers prepare to pull the swimmer to shore.
“The speed and accuracy that this gives you … rapid deployment, speed, accuracy, and safety overall,” Price said. “Not just safety for the victim, but safety for our responders.”
Manuel Bojorquez is a CBS News national correspondent based in Miami. He joined CBS News in 2012 as a Dallas-based correspondent and was promoted to national correspondent for the network’s Miami bureau in January 2017.
It’s been quite some time since we heard anything about Netflix’s animated adaptation of Splinter Cell — but the streamer has finally provided some details on the show. The reveal comes in the form of a very brief teaser trailer, which shows a little bit of the show, but mostly showcases Liev Schreiber’s gravelly take on lead character Sam Fisher. We also have a proper name now: it’s called Splinter Cell: Deathwatch.
Horseshoe crabs: Ancient creatures who are a medical marvel – CBS News
Correspondent Conor Knighton visits New Jersey beaches along the Delaware Bay to learn about horseshoe crabs – mysterious creatures that predate dinosaurs – whose very blood has proved vital to keeping humans healthy by helping detect bacterial endotoxins. He talks with environmentalists about the decline in the horseshoe crab population, and with researchers who are pushing the pharmaceutical industry to switch its use of horseshoe crab blood with a synthetic alternative used in medical testing.
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Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.
SPOILER WARNING: Information about NYT Strands today is below, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know the answers.
Your Strands expert
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Your Strands expert
Marc McLaren
NYT Strands today (game #201) – hint #1 – today’s theme
What is the theme of today’s NYT Strands?
• Today’s NYT Strands theme is… A way with words
NYT Strands today (game #201) – hint #2 – clue words
Play any of these words to unlock the in-game hints system.
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DIRTY
STRICT
POSE
POSED
DEAN
DOSE
NYT Strands today (game #201) – hint #3 – spangram
What is a hint for today’s spangram?
• A bard’s domain
NYT Strands today (game #201) – hint #4 – spangram position
What are two sides of the board that today’s spangram touches?
First: left, 4th row
Last: right, 5th row
Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THEM.
NYT Strands today (game #201) – the answers
The answers to today’s Strands, game #201, are…
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RHYME
VERSE
METER
STANZA
SYNTAX
DICTION
SCANSION
SPANGRAM: POETRY
My rating: Moderate
My score: 2 hints
I’ve never been a fan of poetry, though I love words and language. Set it to music and it’s a different matter – and I guess the best lyricists are also poets. But ask me to talk about SCANSION and STANZAs and I’m a little lost. All of which is a way of justifying why I needed two hints to complete what for some people will probably be a fairly simple Strands puzzle.
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I worked out what the theme was early on, with the clue of ‘A way with words’ and the fact that I found RHYME by accident combining to set me on the right track. But though I spotted a couple more, I couldn’t get them all without needing a helping hand for METER and STANZA. After that I spotted the spangram, and the others were solved pretty much by a combination of guesswork and my modicum of knowledge.
Yesterday’s NYT Strands answers (Thursday 19 September, game #200)
SPIDER
MILLIPEDE
BEETLE
TERMITE
EARWIG
SPANGRAM: CREEPYCRAWLIES
What is NYT Strands?
Strands is the NYT’s new word game, following Wordle and Connections. It’s now out of beta so is a fully fledged member of the NYT’s games stable and can be played on the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile.
I’ve got a full guide to how to play NYT Strands, complete with tips for solving it, so check that out if you’re struggling to beat it each day.
A blockchain entrepreneur, a cinematographer, a polar adventurer and a robotics researcher plan to fly around Earth’s poles aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule by the end of the year, becoming the first humans to observe the ice caps and extreme polar environments from orbit, SpaceX announced Monday.
The historic flight, launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, will be commanded by Chun Wang, a wealthy bitcoin pioneer who founded f2pool and stakefish, “which are among the largest Bitcoin mining pools and Ethereum staking providers,” the crew’s website says.
“Wang aims to use the mission to highlight the crew’s explorational spirit, bring a sense of wonder and curiosity to the larger public and highlight how technology can help push the boundaries of exploration of Earth and through the mission’s research,” SpaceX said on its website.
Wang’s crewmates are Norwegian cinematographer Jannicke Mikkelsen, Australian adventurer Eric Philips and Rabea Rogge, a German robotics researcher. All four have an interest in extreme polar environments and plan to carry out related research and photography from orbit.
The mission, known as “Fram2” in honor of a Norwegian ship used to explore both the Arctic and Antarctic regions, will last three to five days and fly at altitudes between about 265 and 280 miles.
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“This looks like a cool & well thought out mission. I wish the @framonauts the best on this epic exploration adventure!” tweeted Jared Isaacman, the billionaire philanthropist who charted the first private SpaceX mission — Inspiration4 — and who plans to blast off on a second flight — Polaris Dawn — later this month.
The flights “showcase what commercial missions can achieve thanks to @SpaceX’s reusability and NASA’s vision with the commercial crew program,” Isaacman said. “All just small steps towards unlocking the last great frontier.”
Like the Inspiration4 mission before them, Wang and his crewmates will fly in a Crew Dragon equipped with a transparent cupola giving them a picture-window view of Earth below and deep space beyond.
No astronauts or cosmonauts have ever viewed Earth from the vantage point of a polar orbit, one tilted, or inclined, 90 degrees to the equator. Such orbits are favored by spy satellites, weather stations and commercial photo-reconnaissance satellites because they fly over the entire planet as it rotates beneath them.
The high-inclination record for piloted flight was set in the early 1960s by Soviet Vostok spacecraft launched into orbits inclined 65 degrees. The U.S. record was set by a space shuttle mission launched in 1990 that carried out a classified military mission in an orbit tilted 62 degrees with respect to the equator.
The International Space Station never flies beyond 51.6 degrees north and south latitude. NASA planned to launch a space shuttle on a classified military mission around the poles in 1986, but the flight was canceled in the wake of the Challenger disaster.
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“The North and South Poles are invisible to astronauts on the International Space Station, as well as to all previous human spaceflight missions except for the Apollo lunar missions but only from far away,” the Fram2 website says. “This new flight trajectory will unlock new possibilities for human spaceflight.”
SpaceX has launched 13 piloted missions carrying 50 astronauts, cosmonauts and private citizens to orbit in nine NASA flights to the space station, three commercial visits to the lab and the Inspiration4 mission chartered by Isaacman.
Isaacman and three crewmates plan to blast off Aug. 26 on another fully commercial flight, this one featuring the first civilian spacewalks. NASA plans to launch its next Crew Dragon flight to the space station around Sept. 24.
Bill Harwood has been covering the U.S. space program full-time since 1984, first as Cape Canaveral bureau chief for United Press International and now as a consultant for CBS News.
Today we’re launching a totally new, totally different app. Meet Orion.
Orion is a small, fun app that helps you use your iPad as an external HDMI display for any camera, video game console, or even VHS. Just plug in one of the bajillion inexpensive adapters, and Orion handles the rest.
But wait — we’re a camera company. Why an HDMI monitor?
We built this to scratch a few itches. First, in professional cinematography, it’s common to connect an external screen to your camera to get a better view of the action. Orion not only gives you a bigger screen, but you can even share screenshots with your crew with a couple of taps.
We also built this for… pure fun. When traveling with a Nintendo Switch, it’s a delight to play games on a bigger screen, especially alongside friends.
Orion goes a step beyond display. By default, inputs could look fuzzy on an iPad’s retina display. (Why? The Switch runs a modest 1080p resolution, and even if it ran at a higher resolution, most adapters on the market can only run 60 frames per second at 1080P.)
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Orion sharpens those low resolution inputs with an AI powered upscaler!
Another perk is control over the brightness of the image beyond the iPad’s screen brightness. If you’re trying to view video in daylight, crank up brightness to HDR range for extra help. If you’re on a late-night flight and don’t want to bother anyone around you, make things darker than the iPad’s darkest.
OK, I hear you ask, but how much does all of this cost? A camera monitor is hundreds of dollars. Well, Orion is free. Yep, free.
If you want to support the app, get Orion Pro: It packs AI upscaling, CRT emulation for retro games, and image adjustments (and whatever else we cook up). It’s a one-time upgrade for $5. It unlocks everything. No subscriptions.
As for those adapters, we found plenty available for under $20. Now it’s easy to get confused and accidentally buy, say, a USB-C hub with video output, which can’t capture anything. (Ask me how I know.) That’s why we personally tested the top ten adapters on Amazon and made a helpful buying guide with our recommendations and some other accessories, too.
The Story of Orion
This summer, Apple announced a set of awesome new features coming to iOS 17, and one of them was external-webcam support on iPad. After digging into the feature for our flagship app, Halide, we weren’t satisfied with the results in a camera app.
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However, we did discover that a ton of companies sell tiny, inexpensive adapters that convert HDMI signals into webcams. “What if you could use an iPad as a portable screen?” Hmm! Intriguing. We had an idea, and we got to work.
We wrote the first line of code on August 6th, we’re shipping September 20th — 45 days later.
We’re launching at the start of new iPhone season, so we’re already super busy and shifting our focus to our flagship iPhone photography app, Halide. Orion won’t distract us from that, because we’re calling it a b-side.
B-sides are small fun, small, and focused projects. Apps like Halide needs major work every year to keep up with new hardware, but we expect Orion will be “done” after a release or two. We’ll keep maintaining it so it doesn’t break, but we won’t revolve our lives around it. It’s a fun utility, and that’s why we’re only asking for a few bucks.
Beyond being fun to build and design, apps like Orion let us experiment with new developer tools earlier than in our flagship apps. In a mature app used by lots of people, it’s a good idea to wait a year or two before adopting a cutting edge technology; while Apple launched SwiftUI in 2019, but we waited until 2021 to add it to Halide. SwiftUI has been a huge win for certain types of problems— and we couldn’t have built Orion so quickly without it— but by waiting two years before adding SwiftUI it to Halide, we had to play a lot of catchup in 2021.
So apps like Orion allow us to scratch our own itch, which is how we got into building apps in the first place, and also help us keep up with where iOS is heading.
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The Orion Video System Design
You might notice something about the styling of Orion — it’s very stylized in a… retro sort of way.
When we set off to design the app, we really wanted it to be fun. Starting with the basic idea—a portable screen—we thought of the era where televisions and video were still exciting, fresh technology. The techno-utopia of the early 1980s came to mind. We find this a delightful aesthetic.
Pastels, purples and pinks. Detailed technical illustrations and bright colors. Futuristic logos. Type that tracked far too tightly thanks to the invention of the photo-typesetter. And of course, the invention of bitmap typefaces and on-screen user interfaces and icons.
We didn’t want to just lean into the clichés—there are enough vaporwave sunsets with Deloreans out there that try to seem ’80s’— so went and developed a visual language that is based on the electronics brochures and VCR interfaces of bygone days that conveys ‘modern’ in a way only the 1980s visual vernacular can.
In Halide, we did everything we could to make the app feel as tactile as a real camera. Great cameras are wonderfully tactile — every knob and switch has a weighted, deliberate feel and click to it.
In Orion, we wanted to give you the joy of your own ‘video system’. That meant starting from the beginning: you open the box to unpack it. Because, well, why not.
Instructions follow, so you can get started quickly.
And when not actively in use, you return to a glowing, slightly distorted nostalgic place of on-screen menus, where our custom-made pixel font called Radiant steals the show.
If it wasn’t obvious, we had a lot of fun doing this. And that’s what really mattered to us: if anything, Orion was a project to collaborate with friends on something fun and different.
Thank you
We want to build things with craft, fun and delight. To showcase that apps are an art form, and have no business being boring. We hope you enjoy the result — we know that we loved building it for you. Thanks to you, we get to do what we love.
Orion was a collaboration with friends. Some of the incredible design and typography on display (and our two custom typefaces) are the work of Jelmar Geertsma. Orion was co-engineered with Anton Heestand. The opening music (yes, opening music) is by Cabel Sasser. Extra thanks go to Louie Mantia for bézier wrangling and our families — especially Margo — for supporting us in doing what we love. If you are still reading here, please consider leaving us a review on our apps — it goes a very long way.
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