Lunch
The room was by then (12:10 PM) packed with participants from the other breakout session by Mike Ooi on Micro Transaction-based Business Models. We proceeded with lunch provided by Cititel. The spread was lovely and there was, as usual, much mixing around and exchanging of business cards.

Since the break was for an hour and a half, I took the time to do some quick window shopping at the Megamall (Cititel takes up on small section of the mall), and then it was straight back to the conference.

Talk 3 – Breakout Session: Embracing Innovation in Production
Chris Natsuume, Creative Director of BoomZAP Entertainment

After such a big meal and great discussion in the previous talk, I was totally unprepared for what Chris had in mind. He basically covered 45 slides, which were packed with heavy information, within 1 full hour! We knew we were in for a mind-numbing experience when the speaker said "I know the other speakers gave you their introduction and background, but I won't be doing that because we just have too much to cover!"

The main things that were covered in this section were the practical things that game developers can do in order to improve their production processes. This can only be done if your production design is innovative and productive in the first place. From the outset, he explained the purpose of developers to spend less money and sell more games. He was passionate about the need to view games as products and not art. If it is not viewed as a product, then it is merely a hobby.

Most components within the production process and the revenue model are controllable by the company except for price. The unfortunate part is that we are not innovative enough, as true innovation is seen in changes to the mechanics, distribution, control and genre of the game production. Fortunately, we do not need to be wholly innovative as there are iterative innovations (constant improvements in story, graphics, sound & etc.)  that are constantly seen in profitable products like World of Warcraft, Age of Empires and your other favorite successful games.

Chris encouraged the attendees to really understand their customers inside out. This is extremely important as the game product is made for the customer. It is wise to actually flesh out your customer to your developers, instead of just treating them as a generic customer type.

Competing Features vs. Winning Features
He brought up the concept of distinguishing Competing Features from Winning Features. The majority of features fall into the former, where developers refuse to innovate unless it is absolutely necessary. They usually have a "good enough is good enough" attitude and can actually rely on ripping off features from other companies. Documentation is usually done by references to other sources.

However, this is in contrast to the winning features where nothing is good enough, no matter what efforts have already been made. Innovation is usually from all angles and developers will refuse to copy unless necessary. Documentation is done by prototyping and diagram.

Work Teams
"Use them" he says. Chris believes in empowering his teams. This creates a better attitude in them when compared with micromanagement style of work. The other thing which he highlighted was the need to know how much your people cost and to factor the costs constantly into your work decisions.

Japanese Terms
He used plenty of Japanese terms throughout his presentation. Some of the main ones used were "Kaizen," "Pokayoke" and "Heijunka". The first talked about the need for constant improvements to the production processes. The main purpose of this was to eliminate waste as these would hurt developers much in the long run.

The second term meant "idiot proofing." Here Chris showed his general attitude towards workers, which is akin to Murphy's Law: always expect the worse things that can ever happen from your employee to happen! Management need to be careful to ensure that mistakes/dummy accidents are not possible for your critical processes. Automation is a very good tactic to achieve this.

The last concept refers to production smoothing, where he believes in not working off batches, although logic would encourage this type of assembly line thinking. In assembly line thinking, batching reduces costs. However, Chris argues, this does not take into consideration the costs of back tracking within your production processes. This is a very important point that many developers in the session later admitted as an oversight in the way they do things.

Before closing the session, which was non-stop lecture ALL the way, Chris encouraged everyone to concentrate on getting their basic critical operations corrected first before any real improvements are achievable.

No one asked any questions for the session. Probably, it was because our cerebrums were still aching from the one full hour information overload!

Talk 4 – Breakout Session: Developing on the Source Engine using Visual Studio
Robert Crouch, Team Dystopia

I did not manage to take many notes as my head was really still reeling from the previous session. However, the speaker was a lad from Brisbane who co-produced Dystopia, a total conversion of Half-Life 2.

Some salient points from the session are as follows:

• Dystopia is based on Valve's Source engine.
• It has a cyberpunk theme where gameplay takes place in both the real world and cyberspace.
• It basically pits punk mercenaries against corporate security forces.

They selected Valve's Source engine because:

• Of the powerful graphics engine;
• Solid, proven multiplayer network code;
• Excellent SDK support; and
• Valve's track record of supporting mods.

They selected Visual Studio because:

• Simple debugging tools;
• Ease of collaborative coding;
• Intellisense class browser; and
• Fantastic syntax checking on compile.

Their goals were to create a fun action FPS game and to gain real experience in game development.

Development Process:

• Draw up high level aims
• Continuously evolving design documents
• List, prioritise and assign tasks
• Iterative development cycle: design > prototyping > test > polish
• Communication

There were numerous challenges faced, basically in:

• The limited time
• Zero budget
• Developers were geographically diverse
• Changing Codebase
• Fluctuating team numbers

Robert recounted his experience of going to Valve's studio in America and of seeing how they actually work. They were grilled on the concept of their game and were given much feedback. Most of them were on the complexity of the game, which Valve would never be willing to undertake. It was only after the 2^nd playtest before they were given a chance to actually explain to the Valve employees anything about the game.

Some crucial advice he learnt was to not be afraid to take things out of the gameplay. The only way to know whether that component is needed is if its absence significantly changes the "feel" of the game.

Valve values simplicity of the learning curve within a game. They want that to be maintained in all their products. A good measurement for them is within a 10 minute time period.

Robert provided the audience with a demo reel of Dystopia's gameplay.

Talk 5 – Breakout Session: Approaching Game Publishers
Josh Galloway, President of Dragonback Media Interactive

This session was basically drawn up to educate game developers on how to make their pitch to game publishers and what the usual processes in approaching this matter are. Josh told the reality that out of 2,500 proposals given to him, in his previous company, only 15 were green lit.

He advocated the need to form a strong core development team before even thinking about pitching work. He strongly advised developers to prepare, at the very least, a proof of concept and prototype if they want to stand even a minute chance of being accepted. This is, unfortunately, the way it works, especially for new studios or new work teams.

The session was relatively quick, lasting only around 45 minutes. But the main part of the talk was in the sample pitching documents which Josh brought with him. We spent the remaining time looking through these documents and asking him finer technical questions on how to produce the documents.

The End?

My head was practically about to burst, at 5 PM. I had to cancel my initial intention to attend the last breakout session then, and proceeded home. The Asian Game Developers Summit has been a thorough success with so many good speakers on board to provide advice, lectures and to share their knowledge with our local developers. This is definitely the turning point for game developers in this region.

Photos

Chris Avellone giving a talk on "How to Find a Good Designer". The slide pictured is illustrating the need for designers to be able to critique a game in detail.

The main lounge / hallway of the summit. The trio on the far left are Chris Natsuume of Boomzap Entertainment, Brett Bibby of GameBrains (back towards us) and Allan Simonsen of Boomzap Entertainment.

The demo of Dystopia, a full mod based on the Source Engine from Half Life 2, shown during one of the breakout sessions.