Asian Game Developers Summit 2005, Day Two
by Er Lern Loh

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I learn from mistakes. This time, I am at the hallway/lounge area by 9:30 AM with an extremely empty stomach. Nice pastries and some kind of noodles (fried). The crowd seemed smaller too. What I heard was that many of the participants were still in bed. Late nights would do that to you.

As it reached 10 AM though, a whole throng of people started trickling into the main conference room (which could hold a maximum of 70 seated and 20 standing). It was packed. The reason? Simply one name: Chris Avellone.

Talk 1: How to Find a Good Designer
Chris Avellone, Chief Creative Officer of Obsidian Entertainment

Chris was THE main person everyone seemed to be waiting for. The session started with an impressive resume of his previous involvement, mainly as a lead designer from Interplay's Black Isle and the current success launch of Star Wars KOTOR II: The Sith Lords. He is currently the senior designer on Neverwinter Nights 2. Obsidian Entertainment started out with only 5 people, and out of those 5, there was only one designer: Chris. That was a suicide situation as RPGs need lots of designers. Thus the need for them to hire more designers.

General Things on Game Designers
The main things that Chris wanted us to remember about Game Designers were:

• They had the role making things fun.
• They set the vision and tone of the project.
• In other words, they have lots of power in their hands.
• Good designers are hard to find.
• Even with training programs and education courses, it is not easy to get them.
• However, there are certain common traits that are shared with all designers.
• The session is to enable developers and managers to understand those traits and be able to identify them in their recruitment process.

The common things in game designers are easily seen in the general designers. Chief of all is that they are the odd ones. Chris prefers to use the word "odd" and NOT "weird." But the main thing is not to be sidetracked by the external appearances of the person but to be able to see the internal parts. The "oddness" must not only be physical/external in nature.

According to Chris, game designers must be well experienced in every facet of gaming. This should not be confined to only a specific game, or console, or even genre. They must have an all encompassing passion for gaming that would be reflected in the way things are done. This involves spending hours and hours on gaming, initiative in creating mods, a like for designing games regardless of the output quality and much more.

Creativity in these designers is shown in their ability to combine ideas that may not necessarily be unique, and they must have the right attitude (not only focused but is selfless). They should be proactive in thoroughly understanding the subject matter through research, and by involving themselves in discussions with a myriad of gaming stakeholders.

Finally, Chris emphasized the importance for the designer to know when enough is enough. He should know how to let go of a particular project even though ideas are still flooding in. Production must eventually start, and designers often are the ones who would hold it back. It is also important that the designer should not be "married" (the slide showed a vivid picture of a character talking over dinner with his idea about not seeing each other!) to any one idea and thereby doom the project with a myopic viewpoint.

Game Designers in the Industry
The points in the previous session are the common traits of any general designers in any industry. However, the traits that companies would like to see for their industry would also cover the following two main characteristics:

• Professionalism – know how to communicate with others and to convey their thinking through a variety of means (paper, phone & face to face)
• Team player – how well the designer interacts, bounces off ideas and even plays games with his/her other team members.

Testing
Finally, Chris covered practical things that a company may implement in their recruitment processes. Obsidian Entertainment relies heavily on their recruitment methodology and each process is created in such a way to address every point that was explained in the earlier part of the session.

Conclusion
Chris' advice is to find game designers who love their jobs no matter what and are willing to work hard, efficiently, able to critique comprehensively, professional, team players and who play myriad of games for fun.

There were about 80+ attendees for the first talk. The question and answers were fairly short as Chris Avellone covered the whole topic comprehensively. One thing for sure, he knows nothing about Fallout 3's fate!

Talk 2 – Breakout Session: Outsourcing Game Development to Southeast Asia
Gabby Dizon, President of Flipside Games

Gabby's session was interesting, not so much in terms of its contents but more for the lively aftermath discussion that ensued. He started by putting forth the notion that Southeast Asian (SEA) companies should look at outsourcing as a viable long-term career. Although the outsourcing concept is not new, we seem to forget that SEA companies are able to do as well as what the First World countries are capable of and that they are definitely cheaper in most production areas.

However, the main outsourcing leaders in Asia are China and India. They pretty much dominate every part of this industry. Besides these two heavyweights are the game developers from Eastern Europe (particularly from Russia and the former Soviet states) and Australia.

The main benefits of outsourcing are clearly cost savings and also better overhead management as operations are the usual functions that are outsourced, freeing up management time in this area. It is also a viable option when a developer does not have a particular set of specialized skills (e.g. 3D animation). The other issue outsourcing addresses is the problem with hiring and layoffs in a traditionally structured studio, where it is not only hard to find people, but it is hard to fire people when a project is completed and no immediate income seem to be coming into the studio.

Next Generation consoles are hugely expensive to produce (exceeding the $20 million budget set by Valve for Half-Life 2), and this is the chief reason publishers are taking a more risk-adverse stance in their business making (going for sequels and franchises instead of taking risks in innovative new titles). Outsourcing can help ameliorate this problem by ensuring that the content creator retains their intellectual property (IP) while greatly reducing development cost (from $20 million to probably $1 million per title). This would mean a lower break-even point for royalties, and less risk would translate into more room for experimental/innovative games.

Co-opetition
Gabby speculates that the real solution to counter the current monopoly held by the big two nations is by massing up SEA companies to create critical mass by working together as a single entity. He termed it "Katamarization" (which we all know what it means!), and this is done in sharing 3 main things:-

• Knowledge
• Contacts
• Projects

His motto was for SEA companies to create a bigger pie for them which will eventually lead to internal "healthy" competition for the share of the pie. AGDS 2005 is a first step towards this vision, but what is the next step? At this point of the talk, I could actually hear some mumblings and snorts.

Challenges
He explained the main challenges that we will face in this.

• Lack of AAA experience
• No experience translates to no AAA projects
• But no AAA projects would mean no experience gained.

This vicious cycle has de-motivated most SEA companies and has made us stunted in our position within the outsourcing food chain. We are still stuck at the lowest portion of the food chain, which deals with the localization of foreign products. We have yet to fully progress up to the next level of providing engine programming and level design for foreign developers. Ideally, the best outsourcing level would be full game development and IP creation. We need to definitely change the AAA companies' perception on SEA quality.

Solution
The following are proposed by Gabby:

• Partnering with established companies
• Knowledge transfer
• Train/study abroad
• Band together for international events (maybe an Asian E3?)
• SEA game development body needed (active forum)
• Focus on quality and not on cost as a benefit

Our advantages as SEA developers are numerous:

• We have deep gaming history (with which I whole-heartedly agree) with many of us being there when the first Commodore Vic 20 was released.
• Good understanding of gameplay.
• Natural English speaking ability. (I agree with him to a certain point, as the majority of SEA are still not speaking English to an acceptable level. It might not be a problem in Philippines, but I know it is a bigger problem in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.)
• Can converse with IP creators using their creative language (especially when compared with China and India).

Success Stories under our SEA belt?

• Anino Entertainment
• GameBrains
• Zaro Corporation

Discussion
Immediately after Gabby opened up for Q&A, a participant went to his mike to propose that SEA companies come together to tackle an AAA title of their own without the intervention of foreign publishers. He strongly believes that we have the potential to do an AAA without having to rely on foreign help.

James Chong pointed out that it is a viable step, as MDV is already in the midst of getting an AAA game developer to set up shop in Malaysia. This solves two things, namely getting an AAA project and secondly, training local people by knowledge transfer.

However, many voiced out their disagreement that we (SEA companies) have a big enough market in SEA to make a triple-A success.  At this point, Chris Natsuume spoke up from behind the room, and the crowd went quiet. Basically, Chris "ranted" (his choice of description) about not focusing on SEA market but to publish it to any market that is available to us. His basic contention with SEA companies is that we do not believe in our own abilities and therefore we have already set up a "fixed mindset" that hinders us at very beginning. He puts the blame on the lack of risk-taking within the game development community. He went on to cite references to the case of Far Cry where the demo was made by brothers who took their family's money to finance it. They were successful in roping in a publisher (Ubisoft) on the strength of that piece of demo. And it is exactly that lack of "putting your own skin on the line" that is hindering the real progress in SEA.

Sarah Fay Krom brought up the issue of the role of government to help take at least a portion of the risk faced by most SEA companies. Someone else brought to fore the fact that government should build the confidence of the local developers, which education killed.

The second part of Chris' rant followed immediately, as he pointed out that the American government never provided game developers (for mainstream titles) any government grants. Yet, game development thrives there. The problem with the use of government support is the over-dependency on them by local developers to the point where nothing is put on the line. This translates into a lax attitude in development which is the cause of inefficiencies (especially in cost management) and poor project management. They still have to learn to take risks for themselves.

Sarah clarified by explaining that the US government does give out grants but they are usually for Serious Game Developers and it is on that model that she is addressing the possibility of similar role taking in SEA.

One of the last points raised was the fact that in SEA there is a huge lack of support from parents and people in general for game development, and this is a big obstacle for us to face. Contrary to popular belief, it is the same everywhere, as Chris Natsuume points out his parents' reaction then and now, which has not changed. He finds that there are not many cultural differences between the people except on one point: failure in Asia is not acceptable. Asian developers are just not able to accept failure and move on; instead they will just give up on everything. This, he proposed, is the main cultural issue which must be tackled.

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