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| Wednesday, November 11, 2009 |
  Twitter Coverage Notes | 
Posted - 11/11/2009 1:57:37 PM | Quick note on twitter conference/event coverage that'll take me a bit more than 140 characters to explain 
In the past, we've always prefaced coverage of a session by tweeting something like "Mary Margaret Walker. How to get a job in the games industry" to introduce the speaker and the topic they will be covering. Subsequent tweets would just focus on interesting tidbits from that talk.
The problem with this approach, however, is two-fold - for one, someone coming late to the tweet stream will have to search back and find this tweet to help gain some perspective and for another, if we have more than one person tweeting more than one session... well things can get confusing fast.
The solution is simple - we will now be replying to ourselves, or more specifically to the speaker introduction tweet. So after announcing Mary Margaret, a later tweet on her talk would read "@gdevnet networking benefits us long term in ways we don't expect. approach by asking advice of them. #IGCW" This will then let people click on the "in reply to" link attached to the tweet to see what speaker/topic this tweet belongs to.
Of course, this takes our character count down by 9 (not counting the conference hash tag) and will ultimately be dropped if we need those extra characters, but it'll at least offer up some additional perspective on the meaning of various tweets popping up during the course of a conference/event.
And for those of you followers (if you're still following) who are annoyed by the stream of tweets, we really do wish twitter could let you filter out certain hash tags from your tweet stream. Hopefully that's a forthcoming feature (or available in some clients perhaps?). It appears tho that we seem to gain a decent number of followers during these tweeting events, so for now we're sticking with it.
Follow us on @gdevnet!
EDIT (11/12)
Aaannnd this whole post was just rendered moot upon my noticing the fact that twitter seems to have removed the ability to link back to earlier tweets via a Reply. Seriously?? WTF twitter? Hopefully it returns - I know they're changing things around (still haven't been able to try the new RT feature)
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| Wednesday, October 28, 2009 |
| Weekly Sitrep - Oh Hai, I'm Back | 
Posted - 10/28/2009 6:07:20 PM |  GameX/Industry Summit - AWESOME!So the consumer expo and industry summit that was held outside of Philly this past weekend, which was majorly sponsored by GameDev.net, turned out to be a pretty big success, if initial reports are to be believed. For some of the reaction, check out the #GXIS and #GameX twitter streams.
Besides being a major sponsor of the event, I personally was also one of the event founders and steering committee members, so from a strictly personal perspective I had a lot of stake in this event, and was actually spending half my time helping out with things onsite rather than being able to cover the entire thing. But that's okay, because everyone on the event team pulled together great in order to overcome any obstacles that hit us over the course of the weekend. This would be unlike VGeXpo, which wasn't very good at solving its problems during the course of the conference the last two years.
I also got to moderate a panel (image), which was my first conference speaking gig. And not just any panel either! Industry vet Rusel DeMaria, Mythic's Matt Shaw, former MS Veep Ed Fries, Alan Gershenfield and former IGDA Director Jason Della Rocca all sat at that table and the session fielded great questions from the audience. I didn't have to do a thing but introduce the panelists and then make sure everyone in the room got a chance to ask a question. It went great and both I and the panelists were told it was a great session.
Oh and I got to judge Rock Band 2 competitions all three days, which was awesome because at the end of each performance the three of us got to actually give our feedback, American Idol/Got Talent - style. I was totally Simon Cowell/Pierce Morgan.
Lissa and I were in attendance all weekend and had a blast hanging out with everyone who came out for the event. I'll be posting a full write-up hopefully by the end of this week. Click the image to access the full GameX gallery on Facebook
Engine-based articlesSo we got some pretty good feedback from readers on the particle effects article that showed you how to create an explosion. The key here though is that, while the article explains the technique using a specific engine (in this case the Vicious 2 engine), the technique itself is actually widely applicable to any engine with a particle editor. I mean, that's simply how a particle explosion is created - not all engines will have the same parameters and emitters, but the basic technique is there.
I found this really cool, and we're working on capitalizing on it right now with more content for you all that explains various techniques using a certain engine/middleware technology for example, but also leaving it open for application with pretty much anything. It's a great win/win for readers, who get the knowledge, and product developers, who get to pimp their software.
So can't say who we're working with right now but stay tuned for some AI, more visual arts, and even some DirectX 11!
Intel's Visualize This! webcastI was invited at AGDC by Intel to appear on their weekly webcast for game dev-related topics, and last week I finally got my time on the show. While there was supposed to be video, Intel had some trouble on their end - which was a shame considering I had worked to get my PS3 Eye camera up and running with my laptop (but that in itself is cool). So it was just audio. Still, I had received the questions ahead of time so I was able to prep my answers and only really got tripped up once mid-way through the interview. It was fun. If you'd like to check it out and hear my insights on game development trends and tech, you'll find the webcast here.
Downloads for the GDNet book collectionSo it was brought to our attention that people were having trouble finding the companion site to the GDNet Collection books, and when we looked into it we found there really wasn't one - but the publisher did have the downloads on the individual book product pages. We'll be working on a fix to the Books resources page that'll solve this issue and hopefully make the downloads more accessible to people looking for them.
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| Wednesday, October 7, 2009 |
| Weekly Sitrep - Cool Logo Edition | |
Posted - 10/7/2009 2:36:00 PM |
This logo has been buried away in the Admin interface for the forums for some time now, and I figured it could use a bit of sunshine. I can't recall the history of this logo - maybe someone can step in via the comments and provide a history lesson. But I've liked it a lot and hardly anyone gets to see it but me these days. Poor lonely logo 
WIN FREE STUFF!!!
And yes, we're going to move straight from sad to screaming at the top of my lungs. Why? because currently the odds are very, very good that you could be walking away with $1400 worth of prizes with hardly any effort on your behalf. C'mon, we've made this as easy as possible for people to enter, so if you haven't done so, check out the contest rules once more and then spread the word!
It's so easy I wish I could enter to win.
Oh and thanks to everyone who left me feedback on the conference tweeting!
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| Thursday, October 1, 2009 |
| Weekly Sitrep - NY Games Conference / GameX Contes | |
Posted - 10/1/2009 3:51:22 AM |  NY Games ConferenceThe full operations team was present at the NY Games Conference on Wed - Melissa "FrizzleFry" Astle, Richard "Superpig" Fine, (pictured, right) and myself. We rarely get combined face time so we took full advantage of it by knocking heads together to continue to spec out V5 of the website, which is about to enter its final design phase. W00t!
But enough of that teasing. I promised I would be good. Click on the image to see the full gallery of shots from the conference on our Facebook page, and you can check our twitter page for tweets from the event. You can also look up the #nygames hash for other tweets as well.
Twitter feedback needed!!!
@evolutionalgd and @AiGameDev have already expressed concerns about the conference tweeting - what's your take? I want to know! We've been adding followers pretty steadily since Austin GDC, over 100 new followers have flocked to us in the past two weeks alone, which is a huge increase. So you could infer that the conference tweeting has made us popular - I haven't heard any other complaints but if there are concerns, get them out in the open so we can deal with them before they become a problem!
GameX Contest - tons of cool prizes!GameX Industry Summit threw together a pretty decent set of prizes for our GameX contest, and we sweetened the deal thanks to our buddies from GarageGames throwing in a Torque3D license (mega!!) and Cengage donating some books and a full GDNet Collection library. This is no joke - the grand prize package is valued at $1,400!
The full contest details can be found here. It's exactly like the LevelUp contest we ran a few months back, so spread the word and let me know!
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| Wednesday, September 23, 2009 |
| Weekly Sitrep: AGDC Postmortem | |
Posted - 9/23/2009 10:28:26 PM |  I've done conference postmortems for the main GDC, but not really for other conferences. I should really start making it a habit of PM'ing all the conferences I go to, because it really does help me to prepare for when I return next year. So here we go with the PM for this year's AGDC.
Oh yea, the conference coverage is online as well.
The GoodOnce again, twitter was a great success. I was tweeting up a storm over at @gdevnet and we picked up over 50 new followers during the conference, and probably only lost about 3-5. We're still nowhere near the 2.5k+ followers that Gamasutra has though, although we do have over 3k Facebook fans now. I have some new ideas on how to work twitter coverage into V5 and event coverage in general.
I made every meeting and every session I planned on attending. Booyah!! Although there was a close call on Friday morning where I had to rush out of bed, check out and back in to the hotel (to extend my stay one day since I couldn't get a flight out Fri night) and then grab a cab to the convention center to get there just 10mins before the first session I had scheduled. Other than that though I was on time all the time.
I walked almost everywhere, and didn't die. Not only was I walking/standing around the convention center, but I walked to and from the hotel to the convention center (cept that one time mentioned above), which is a mile each way. Then there was walking to all the parties and restaurants... It was great exercise and I came home without any cramped leg muscles. Win!
I partied hard again. Earlier this year at GDC I started spending more time out at parties and rediscovered the benefit of networking in those environments. The trick is to get to a party late enough that people are there, but early enough that it's not so crowded and loud you can't breathe or talk to people without losing your voice in 5 minutes. Generally this window is between 30-60 minutes after the start of a party. I was out until 3-4am both Wed and Thurs, and awake as late as 6am doing work. Yet as I said I still managed to hit all my sessions/meetings and never nodded off in any either.
I went to a castle. A fucking castle. And not only that, but John Romero stopped by as well with Brenda Brathwaite. And not only that, but I got to play a game of Family Business with both of them and Steve Meretzky, Dustin Clingman and Joe Ludwig. Of all those, Dustin's the one I hang out with most so it was great to spend time with the rest. Awesomesauce.
I never had trouble snagging wifi, both during the conference and out around the city (except in the Hilton hotels). This was the best conference wifi experience I've had ever, which is what contributed to the aforementioned success of twittering.
The weather was great all week.
The GDNet crew in attendance all got together for dinner, which was awesome. It was myself, Mittens, InnocuousFox, JohnHattan and FrizzleFry. I found out the next day that NSMadsen was also in town, so he'll have to come along next year!
I managed to stay on top of a lot of non-conference stuff like Google Reader feeds, general email, forums, etc. I even remembered to do a sitrep, albeit a rather short one.
The BadThere was no food or soda (just coffee, blech) in the press lounge, which left me at odds for breakfast every day.
I had to spend time at the Intel booth talking to developers, which was actually awesome and they paid me for it but in one case it was... painful. I'll just leave it at that. Even the Intel booth staff felt sorry for me. I still wish that guy luck in the industry but... wow.
I missed some meetings that were simply never scheduled because I didn't return any phone calls during the conference. I kinda feel bad about this but at the same time I was too concerned with sticking to my schedule, and that paid off in the long run so I can't complain too much. Being more flexible is something I'd like to work on though.
I forgot at the end of the week to post a Weekend Reading entry. My brain just shut down Fri afternoon and stayed switched off all weekend. I didn't realize I had forgotten till I saw the red ToDo item in Outlook on Monday.
The UglyAfter I got home, I transferred files from my laptop to my desktop, but I completely forgot about all my hi-res photos, because I had already uploaded copies of them to the Facebook album. Funny how being prompt and timely with my photo uploads has cursed me in the long run. The reason this is ugly is because before I realized this, I reformatted my laptop to install Windows 7 RC I picked up at the conference.
Even uglier is that a guy from the Unity booth gave me a contact to email photos of their booth for them and maybe even get a commission off of it. I could really use some extra dough right now. DAMMIT 
What I Did RightSchedule was bang-on all week. I left myself plenty of time in between meetings to cruise the Expo, and I even managed to clear the entire day of Thursday just for Expo/meetings, which worked great. The fact that the conference put a 30 minutes break between sessions helped a lot too.
I dressed appropriately. Last year, I packed shorts and sandals because it was Texas. Uhm, stupid, you're going to be inside all day in freezing lecture rooms. Well, not so this year! Actually that's not true. While I was wearing long pants and sneakers, I did have only a tee on some days and it was still too chilly in those damn rooms. Pack a hoodie or just wear my dress shirt more next time.
What I Did WrongFor some reason I waited until the week before the conference to book my airfare. I have no idea what scared me off that long but it resulted in having to go through Charlotte, NC both ways and Sat I was traveling all day to get home, with a 3 hour layover. Note to future self - book early you idiot.
I also waited till the week before to piece together my conference schedule and slot in appointments. All in all, this didn't turn out to be so bad, but I should probably not cut it so close in the future.
I almost ran out of business cards! I thought I had brought more than I did. I usually pack the whole box but didn't think to for some reason this time. Ooops.
What I Want To Do Next YearFirst thing is schedule to stay the weekend after. Last year I flew out Sunday and so Saturday I was able to go kayaking and explore Barton Springs. That was great. This year I flew out Sat morning and a lot of the indie guys were out rock climbing somewhere in the area. I would have loved to do that. So def staying the weekend next year if I can.
I might drive down to the conference, hook up with Brenda Brathwaite and her BMW Z4 along the way. We had rough plans for that this year but it didn't work out.
What I'm Looking Forward To Next YearAustin GDC will be in early October, which hopefully will not conflict with a maybe-recurring GameX Industry Summit, which is late Oct this year but who knows about next year? The weather will be a bit nicer, tho a higher chance of rain. Either way I'm looking forward to a slight change.
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| Wednesday, September 16, 2009 |
| Weekly Sitrep | |
Posted - 9/16/2009 3:07:58 PM | Reporting from Austin GDC
Austin GDC is in full swing as of today. Be sure to follow us on twitter for lots of useful tidbits from the various sessions. Also, we'll have pictures up on Facebook.
You can also read more on Austin via twitter using the #agdc hashtag.
If you're here in Austin as well, be sure to try and hunt down either me, Lissa or John!
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| Thursday, September 10, 2009 |
| Somewhat Weekly Sitrep | |
Posted - 9/10/2009 10:06:17 PM | Why hello there. The week prior to a major conference always slams me hard, but I'm so looking forward to Austin GDC next week! And speaking of conferences...
Why I want to see you at GameX Industry Summit
If you live anywhere near Philadelphia, you simply have no excuse not to be at the GameX Industry Summit next month. None.
First off, the price of entry is absurdly low. $55 will get you into the full 2-day conference, the parties, events and the main expo hall. Conferences, on average, generally cost hundreds of dollars. All you college kids, this is your chance to get out and meet people in the industry.
And I'm not talking just other college kids interested in game development, I'm talking actual industry veterans. Just check out the speaker list if you don't believe me. You're getting way more than you pay for, so I would jump on it while it lasts!
I can't even begin to tell you how beneficial these kind of events are for one's career. The majority of game developers don't attend conferences to learn things, they do so to meet people. Attending sessions and sharing ideas is just the backdrop to the main event of networking with your industry peers.
I'm dead serious. If any newbie would come up to me and ask me what is the single most important thing to do in order to get into the industry I would say get out and network. Meet people. Doing it IRL only strengthens the connection you can then solidify later online.
I really hope to see a lot of GDNet members there! I look forward to introducing you guys to everyone I can!!
LinkedIn group recruiters?
Ever since founding the LinkedIn group and accepting new members, I've been turning away anyone who lists being a recruiter or human resources person. So far I've only denied a small handful of these types of people. My goal for this group is primarily for people to network among themselves for services, advice, etc - you'll notice this group doesn't have discussion forums enabled because GDNet has it's own boards to use. This is primarily a way to make connections to other developers.
However the decision to keep out recruiters has been nagging me, so I'm wondering what you all think. Head on over to the main page and participate in the poll on the right side. All I need is a simple yes or no - right now it's almost split down the middle.
Unless there's a HUGE margin for Yes, recruiters and human resources will stay out of this group.
Updated Cellular Textures article
FYI, Carsten Przyluczky send me a small addendum to his article Cellular Textures, the light speed approach, which I added at the end. It covers possible flaws with the algorithm, so if you haven't checked since reading it the first time, have another look.
Spotlight Interviews
In case you hadn't noticed (not everyone visits the main page), we've started a new feature headed up by evolutional called Spotlight Interviews that talks with high-profile industry and community members. A new interview will be published every Wednesday. If you think you have a good reason to be Spotlighted, send us an email!
Call for article submissions
You might notice, checking the schedule up above, that we're running a bit short on Featured Articles to publish. We have a lot moving through the queue, but many authors are finding it difficult to finish up their work so we can get it online. If you have an idea and can do a quick turnaround, you could be published on the site within a month! That's pretty good. If you know any friends interested in writing, let them know too! You can find out more information here.
New Articles
- SDL Collision Events - Using the previous tutorial as a basis, we'll look out how to respond appropriately to collisions and how to trigger events when collisions take place.
New Events
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| Wednesday, August 26, 2009 |
| Weekly Sitrep | |
Posted - 8/26/2009 4:10:14 PM | Blog Features in News
We were approached by the fine folks at GarageGames to see if there were a way we could feature their Torque development blogs for T3D and T2D. Given that our current journal system doesn't support RSS, they would have to create their own account with journal privileges to post. That seemed a bit roundabout, so I decided to simply feature the developer blogs in the News section. They are, after all, news about new engine technologies.
If anyone has other dev blog ideas to feature in the News section, let me know.
VGO IGC East videos all online
Last week I talked about the Video Games Orchestra videos that were made available to me (and through me to you). Now anyone and everyone can see them all (almost) over at their YouTube channel. For some reason though the God of War: The End Begins string quartet is missing. That was pretty cool. Anyways - enjoy!
New Articles
My buddy Charlie Cleveland over at Unknown Worlds (Natural Selection 2 developers) dropped me an email the other day pointing to a blog post of his that looked back at their experiences with motion capturing. He shares some lessons learned.
New Events
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