The Keynote

Recently, some big news spread around the Israeli game developers community, Sam Glassenberg who started his career as a graphics intern at Lucasarts, later led Microsoft's DirectX development team is the new CEO of Funtactix – One of the promising leaders in Israeli game development.

Sam gave a truly inspirational speech about the reasons he moved to Israel. Sam talked about the lack of recognition Israel currently has as a significant player in the game industry. Sam mentioned that part of his role in Microsoft he would meet with developers all around, and in each company, he will meet an Israeli. Up until recently, Israelis who wanted to work on games would have to relocate and leave Israel to work at a place where a job in games is available. Sam explained that it is changing, and continued to talk about where he sees the Israeli game industry in 10 years. Sam envisions GameIS 2018 as one of the worlds leading conferences for game development, where the most respected speakers will travel around the globe to attend. He envisions the Israeli game industry to be as large as important as Israel's high tech industry, where companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM and Intel all develop major parts of their products, and he sees Israel as one of the largest places for game development and a hub where every large game company must open a branch in.

Rising Eagle – The First Israeli “AAA” title

Following the heart warming and inspirational keynote, it was time to start hearing about the real stuff. Yaron Dotan from Invasion Interactive talked about “The Willing Suspension of Disbelief”. He wasn't talking about the game's story, plot lines, reliable characters, or environments, or even about the suspension of disbelief in his game! He was talking about the suspension of disbelief you must have about your project's potential failure as an independent game develop.

Yaron and his team created a multi player game called Rising Eagle, which is a first person shooter game set in a military futuristic earth. Yaron showed screen shots of fights near a half-ruined Eifel tower and other scenes and team “fragging” videos from the game that were made by players.

Yaron enumerated the various stages of a game's development life cycles, and elaborated on the various difficulties, decisions and mistakes they made while creating Rising Eagle.

He started by talking about the early stages of the Idea and its basic development, moving on to basic game design. He talked about common mistakes that game designers make (and that they made as well), for example going too wild, or thinking to simple. He mentioned the importance of thinking big, but scaling back and toning down your huge ideas after each step, to be able to create something feasible.

As for R&D – Yaron believes that Research always comes before development. Research is the time when you re-evaluate your game design. When you decide if further decrease in the game's production is required. It's the time when you fully translate your game design into software design documents. During this stage you have to be aware not to fall into your “Tech addiction” where you have to carefully balance and decide between being cutting edge and being conservative. Yaron says : “Aim high, but dont' go over the top”.

He discussed the options of buying a game engine vs creating your own, his conclusion was that the best method was to combine the two – Don't buy a full expensive engine, but instead but parts, integrate them, and combine existing solutions with parts of your own.

The most important lesson Yaron learned from his experience is that the phrase “It's the journey that counts, not the destination” isn't true, and for a game to succeed you have to be mindful of where you're going and not how to get there.

Coffee break

One of the most important parts of any conference are the breaks.

This is the time and place people talk. Network. Interact. Exchange business cards. Add each other to Facebook and LinkedIN. What I love doing best during networking events, is to constantly introduce people to each other. It's something I've seen Jessica Tams from the CGA do at her Casual Connect events. She'd go around the room, look for people and say “Hey Oded, Have you met Ted?”

That's what I did in the coffee break of my conference.

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