In this coverage..

Page 1: Online Games Under Construction: Run Your Beta Right

Online game betas are about more than just testing your product and are often a missed opportunity for developers. Though it takes planning, betas can be an effective part of your marketing and community building efforts and in many can help grow your potential audience more than traditional marketing alone. This lecture will discuss the best practices and tactics on how to get the most out of your beta.

Page 2: Pirates of the Burning Sea: A Post-Partum

Well, it took five years, but Flying Lab Software has finally launched its Age of Sail MMO! Come hear the ups and downs of the project and all the things the team learned along the way. All of the successes and failures encountered while building a new MMO with a new team are presented.

Page 3: Special Ops: The Writer of the Future

SPEC OPS – THE WRITER YOU WILL NEED TO BE: The future writer will need to be fast and versatile to survive in a constantly changing and adapting mediasphere. They will have to be adept at boldly assault mediums that don't use writers and work with clients don't know they need writers –ex: social networks, virtual worlds and casual games will find unexpected need for writers. They will have to survive both on the assigned project and the spec project and must know how to budget time, effort and resources to balance their attack. This talk will also cover the skills, tools and attitudes the future writer will need. Flint Dille is an Austin Speaker Vet and writer/designer of over 50 games. Currently, he’s also designing for virtual worlds and social networks. His new book, The Ultimate Guide to Videogame Writing and Design, co-written with John Zuur Platten, was released last month.

Page 4: Wake Up and Smell the Metrics! A Rant on Metrics-Driven Development in Online Games

We live in Darwinian times as the traditions of the old boxed goods industry shift online, investigating entirely new ways of reaching and retaining customers. But in many ways we have retained the old mentalities of guessing and hacking our way to success or failure. Running an online game is a service, and we have unprecedented access to customer and operational data. This session presents a business case on applying metrics to lower recurring costs and make games stickier based on measured data, not risky guesses. Some basic implementation plans are given to jumpstart your game into the world of metrics-driven development.

Page 5: It’s Who You Get to Know

"It’s not who you know – it’s who you get to know.” In this session, you’ll learn where to meet people in the game industry, how to impress them, and what to say when you don’t know what to say, starting with your fellow Career Seminar attendees. Will they become future competitors in the job market, or will they become a supportive network of industry insiders? Darius Kazemi will teach you how to make sure the latter is the case.

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